Here’s a tip: Gamble as much as you are willing to lose. That small pearl of wisdom could be just as valuable to you in the context of your data center as it could be at the craps tables in Las Vegas. When it comes to safeguarding your data, traditional data protection and retention may no longer be enough to hedge your bet. Now is a good time to consider your backup, recovery and archive (BURA) options.
Greater dependence on data means backup alone won’t cut it
According to research reported by ESG, about half of organizations (49%) have a 15-minutes or less tolerance level for mission-critical application downtime. Their tolerance for normal business applications (not quite mission-critical) downtime didn’t differ by much1. Furthermore, according to a Gartner survey, the average cost of network downtime cited was $330K/hour. Naturally, you’d expect to see a wide range based on the business environment, but even at a low-end range of $140K/hour, we can agree that downtime is costly2. As service level agreements (SLAs) become even more stringent, expect to see tolerance drop as costs increase.
Enterprise IT managers are faced with a great deal of complexity. Protecting your business-critical applications without impacting performance is challenging. The volume and scale of data, along with its exponential growth, and the proliferation of virtualized environments just add to the complexity. Traditional hierarchical backup approaches can’t deliver the agility, affordability, and protection you demand.
“The use of traditional backup software alone as a primary method of data protection has been fading (from 62% in early 2013 to 44% in 2014). At the same time, the use of array-based snapshots and replication – in conjunction with backup software – has increased from 34% to 51% among midsize and large enterprises.”3
A better, more comprehensive approach
When you’re looking for a comprehensive, tiered and converged data protection architecture that balances availability and protection, combining snapshots and backup gives you the best of both worlds. The combination yields the near-instant, non-intrusive availability of snapshots with the reliable recovery and cost-effective retention of backups, delivered in an application-aware, storage-integrated data protection solution.
HP’s answer is to bring primary and backup storage closer together with a single data protection architecture that offers flexible options covering a wide spectrum of recovery scenarios. HP StoreOnce is the fastest backup on the market with federated deduplication so you can get back up and running faster when you need to recover. It provides flat backup directly from 3PAR StoreServ, and with HP StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central (RMC) software, your HP 3PAR StoreServ primary storage integrates with HP StoreOnce Backup systems. The result is application-managed data protection that speeds and simplifies data protection for virtualization data on your 3PAR array—while bypassing traditional backup server-based processes.
We can help you build a comprehensive BURA strategy
American Digital, an HP Platinum partner, is well positioned to assess your current backup and recovery strategy and coach you through the best approach to ensuring your sensitive and valuable data is protected. If you’d like to learn more about how American Digital can integrate award-winning HP BURA solutions into your IT environment, give us a call.
Sources
1 ‘Multiple Data Protection Solutions’ Does Not Have to Mean ‘Multiple Vendors’, ESG Research, July 2014
2 The Cost of Downtime, Andrew Lerner, Gartner Blog Network, July 2014
3 Research conducted by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research