Yes, of course, data protection has to evolve to keep up with how production platforms are evolving, but I would offer that the presumptive ‘gold standard’ for what is the norm for those on the front lines of proactive data protection is evolving in at least three different directions at the same time.
Here is a 3-minute video on what we are seeing and what you should be thinking about as the evolutions continue.
As always, thanks for watching.
Video transcript:
Announcer: The following is an ESG video blog.
Jason: Hi. I’m Jason Buffington. I’m a Principal Analyst at ESG covering all things data protection. The gold standard for data protection has evolved over the years. It used to be, way back in the day, it was disc-to-disc-to-tape, D2D2T. Meaning, we’d first try to recover from disc for rapid restoration or we go from tape as a longer term medium. There were a few folks out there that only used tape. There were even fewer folks out there that said you only needed disc. But most of us figured out we should use both as a better-together scenario.
Fast forward a couple of years and the gold standard changed. Now we’re talking about supplementing those longer term retention tiers of backups with snapshots for even faster recovery. And replication for data survivability and agility. Again, there’s a few folks out there that will try to convince you that one might usurp the others. But most of us have figured out that it makes sense, and sense, to have all of them in complement or in supplement to each other.
Fast forward a few more years and the gold standard continues to evolve. Now what we’re seeing is that backup is actually defragmenting. Where we’re seeing different virtualization solutions than we are for database solutions than we are for a unified solution. But the problem is the unified solutions don’t typically cover SaaS. So now we’re up to four different backup products.
Do you really need four different backup products? Probably not. But based on what we’re seeing in the industry, evidently, there’s a lot of IT operations and a lot of IT decision makers out there that haven’t been able to convince their V-Admin and their DBA colleagues that unified solution might be superior. And that brings up two challenges. Workload owners tend to think about 30-day, 60-day, 90-day rollback in order to keep their platforms productive. Whereas a backup admin tends to think in 5-year, 10-year, 15-year retention windows. Corporate data has to be protected to a corporate standard regardless of how many different people are clicking the mouse.
The other thing to note is that one gold standard doesn’t replace the ones before it. We’re still using disc plus tape and we’re supplementing that with cloud. We’re still supplementing backups with snapshots and replication. And we’re continuing to fragment the virtualization and DBA and all the other ones we’ve talked about. And that’s gonna lead us to what ESG calls the Five Cs of data protection.
We’ve already covered the containers, meaning all those different media types you’re gonna store. We’ve already talked about the conduits, those data movers, the backups, and the snaps, and the replicas, etc. And if you’re gonna have that much heterogeneity, you better have a single control plane to make sure that everything is operating in sync with each other. Mitigating that over and under protection. You better have a catalogue that’s rich enough to tell you what you have, where it is, and how long you need to keep it. And you better have at least one console that can tell you what all is going on within the environment. And make sure they’re actually making this all actionable and insightful.
Those are the Five Cs. I’m Jason Buffington for ESG. Thanks for watching.
[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]