Towards Unified Data Management

There are indisputable business advantages to ensure that regular data
protection is completed and recovery is assured. Not to overlook issues of
business continuity, corporate governance and cost efficiency which are also
important. Companies are demanding new approaches to meet stringent recovery
time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Business continuity and data recovery are the core ingredients of any
disaster recovery system. Business continuity has a pre-requisite to access and
recall data or information so that restoring and/or recovery of various
corporate assets becomes possible. high in the priority list, most business'
agendas then, is corporate governance (typically miss-referred to as
compliance). For disaster recovery, by business recovery one ought to understand
that it really entails in ensuring retention of information for a period of time
relative to an organization's retention criteria. In both cases, corporate
governance and data recovery are the key in preservation and access to
information that resides within the data set and anywhere within the company.

Yesterday vs now

Traditionally, when management capabilities are grafted onto backup tools,
there were frequently available 'expensive extras' forcing users to manage and
monitor functions from separate screens or interfaces. Another drawback is that
the nature of older tools often limits the range of functions that can be
controlled via their primary interface.

Future dangers for the IT components concerning this area is that devoid of
the ability to apparently integrate new concepts into useful data management
frameworks, IT users will be forced to accept lower levels of data availability
and IT departments will need to adopt more complex solutions that are inherently
difficult and time consuming to recover in a disaster.

Nathan Collins, Technical Director, CommVault

On the contrary, the latest unified data management software with singular
catalog, simple 'point-and-click' reporting, is application-aware and
self-managerial. In fact, it can heal if and when required, and result in a
higher productive usage to guarantee an overall time reduction by companies on
data management activities. This is significant for a company in the face of
disaster recovery scenario, where time is of acute importance.

The primary differentiator between a replication product and a back-up
product is the catalog and support for a robust set of recovery options. This is
inclusive of support for common tape drives and libraries. Backup products tend
to offer protection for a broad range of data, from files, applications, server
images and multiple systems. Replication products have only one recovery
point-the most recent point in time. When snapshots are used, there can be
several recovery points (as many as there are snapshots), but unlike a backup
product, there is usually no unified catalog to choose different versions of the
data; however, this is changing due to the blending of backup with consistent
point in time snapshots.

Whats new in data management

The latest data management solutions distinguish themselves by providing a
robust and scalable catalogue for tracking recovery options for hundreds to
thousands of systems. They can even be extended to include the indexing of data
within backup sets and primary storage devices for fast end-user based search
and retrieval. The catalogue supports recovery from hardware vendor snapshots,
tape and disk backups. Moreover, it increasingly leads third-party replication
products and backup appliances, such as virtual tape library (VTL) and
de-duplication systems.

Considerable evolution has been observed in backup/recovery in so far as
delivery of disk-based recovery tools is concerned. This is required in both,
reducing recovery time and integration of new continuous data protection
technologies into backup architectures reducing data loss. The management of all
these capabilities has become more synchronized in order to meet the elevating
demands from organizations for a single recovery management platform instead of
letting the user become the integrator for multiple point solutions. The latter
is both costly, requires more training and is also less efficient with respect
to recovery times.

As new networked storage architectures gain broad acceptance, administrators
can leverage the innate advantages of the infrastructure to gain operational and
performance efficiencies. And they can still be assured of data integrity while
handling the exponential data growth in their environments. All this together is
a resultant solution to meet stringent RTOs and RPOs.

There then is tremendous benefit to be reaped by embracing a single, unified
approach to back-up and manage data in all of its flavors, seamlessly
integrating across distributed databases, SAN, NAS, and a mix of OS
environments. Users only need to learn a single approach, that is, one
operational methodology. Through a browser running on any machine, the unified
interface provides a complete media management system and has a total remote
control capability.

For companies to fully realize and protect the inherent value of the data
within their organization, they have to identify the need to eliminate
deployment of multiple point solutions and embrace a unified approach to data
management. If they do this they will be in a position not only to reap the
benefits in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery, but also gain
adherence to corporate governance. Crucially they will make substantial
operational savings.