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Data Protection Diaries Fundamental Topics Tools Techniques Technologies Tips

Data Protection Fundamental Topics Tools Techniques Technologies Tips

Data Infrastructure and Data protection fundamental companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft ( CRC Press 2017)

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

By Greg Schulz – www.storageioblog.com November 26, 2017

This is Part I of a multi-part series on Data Protection fundamental tools topics techniques terms technologies trends tradecraft tips as a follow-up to my Data Protection Diaries series, as well as a companion to my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, Virtual Server Storage I/O Fundamental tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).

Software Defined Data Protection Fundamental Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

The focus of this series is around data protection fundamental topics including Data Infrastructure Services: Availability, RAS, RAID and Erasure Codes (including LRC) ( Chapter 9), Data Infrastructure Services: Availability, Recovery Point ( Chapter 10). Additional Data Protection related chapters include Storage Mediums and Component Devices ( Chapter 7), Management, Access, Tenancy, and Performance ( Chapter 8), as well as Capacity, Data Footprint Reduction ( Chapter 11), Storage Systems and Solutions Products and Cloud ( Chapter 12), Data Infrastructure and Software-Defined Management ( Chapter 13) among others.

Post in the series includes excerpts from Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) pertaining to data protection for legacy along with software defined data centers ( SDDC), data infrastructures in general along with related topics. In addition to excerpts, the posts also contain links to articles, tips, posts, videos, webinars, events and other companion material. Note that figure numbers in this series are those from the SDDI book and not in the order that they appear in the posts.

Posts in this data protection fundamental series include:

SDDC, SDI, SDDI data infrastructure
Figure 1.5 Data Infrastructures and other IT Infrastructure Layers

Data Infrastructures

Data Infrastructures exists to support business, cloud and information technology (IT) among other applications that transform data into information or services. The fundamental role of data infrastructures is to provide a platform environment for applications and data that is resilient, flexible, scalable, agile, efficient as well as cost-effective.

Put another way, data infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, process, move, secure and serve data as well as their applications for information services delivery. Technologies that make up data infrastructures include hardware, software, or managed services, servers, storage, I/O and networking along with people, processes, policies along with various tools spanning legacy, software-defined virtual, containers and cloud. Read more about data infrastructures (its what’s inside data centers) here.

Why SDDC SDDI Need Data Protection
Various Needs Demand Drivers For Data Protection Fundamentals

Why The Need For Data Protection

Data Protection encompasses many different things, from accessibility, durability, resiliency, reliability, and serviceability ( RAS) to security and data protection along with consistency. Availability includes basic, high availability ( HA), business continuance ( BC), business resiliency ( BR), disaster recovery ( DR), archiving, backup, logical and physical security, fault tolerance, isolation and containment spanning systems, applications, data, metadata, settings, and configurations.

From a data infrastructure perspective, availability of data services spans from local to remote, physical to logical and software-defined, virtual, container, and cloud, as well as mobile devices. Figure 9.2 shows various data infrastructure availability, accessibility, protection, and security points of interest. On the left side of Figure 9.2 are various data protection and security threat risks and scenarios that can impact availability, or result in a data loss event ( DLE), data loss access ( DLA), or disaster. The right side of Figure 9.2 shows various techniques, tools, technologies, and best practices to protect data infrastructures, applications, and data from threat risks.

SDDI SDDC Data Protection Fundamental Big Picture
Figure 9.2 Various threat vectors, issues, problems, and challenges that drive the need for data protection

A fundamental role of data infrastructures (and data centers) is to protect, preserve, secure and serve information when needed with consistency. This also means that the data infrastructure resources (servers, storage, I/O networks, hardware, software, external services) and the applications (and data) they combine and are defined to protect are also accessible, durable and secure.

Data Protection topics include:

  • Maintaining availability, accessibility to information services, applications and data
  • Data include software, actual data, metadata, settings, certificates and telemetry
  • Ensuring data is durable, consistent, secure and recoverable to past points in time
  • Everything is not the same across different environments, applications and data
  • Aligning techniques and technologies to meet various service level objectives ( SLO)

Data Protection Fundamental Tradecraft Skills Experience Knowledge

Tools, technologies, trends are part of Data Protection, so to are the techniques of knowing (e.g. tradecraft) what to use when, where, why and how to protect against various threats risks (challenges, issues, problems).

Part of what is covered in this series of posts as well as in the Software Defined Data Infrastructure (SDDI) Essentials book is tradecraft skills, tips, experiences, insight into what to use, as well as how to use old and new things in new ways.

This means looking outside the technology box towards what is that you need to protect and why, then knowing how to use different skills, experiences, techniques part of your tradecraft combined with data protection toolbox tools. Read more about tradecraft here.

Where To Learn More

Continue reading additional posts in this series of Data Infrastructure Data Protection fundamentals and companion to Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) book, as well as the following links covering technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Everything is not the same across environments, data centers, data infrastructures and applications.

Likewise everything is and does not have to be the same when it comes to Data Protection. Data protection fundamentals encompasses many different hardware, software, services including cloud technologies, tools, techniques, best practices, policies and tradecraft experience skills (e.g. knowing what to use when, where, why and how).

Since everything is not the same, various data protection approaches are needed to address various application performance availability capacity economic ( PACE) needs, as well as SLO and SLAs.

Get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials here at Amazon.com, at CRC Press among other locations and learn more here. Meanwhile, continue reading with the next post in this series, Part 2 Reliability, Availability, Serviceability ( RAS) Data Protection Fundamentals.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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