How to Achieve Flexible Data Protection Availability with All Flash Storage Solutions

Achieve Flexible Data Protection Availability with All Flash Solutions

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Updated 1/21/2018

How to Achieve Flexible flash data protection and Availability with All-Flash Storage Solutions

Interactive webinar discussion (not death by power point or Ui Gui product demo ;) pertaining flash data protection )
Tuesday January 30 2018 11AM PT / 2PM ET
Via Redmond Magazine (Free with registration)

Everything is not the same across different organizations, environments, application workloads and the data infrastructures that support them. Fast application and workloads need fast protection, restoration, and resumption as well as fast flash storage. This applies across legacy, software-defined, virtual, container, cloud, hybrid, converged and HCI among other environments.

SDDC Data Infrastructure Data Protection

Join me along with representatives from Pure Storage along with Veeam for this interactive discussion as we explore how to boost the performance, availability, capacity, and economics (PACE) of your applications along with the data infrastructures that support them.

  • How all-flash storage enables faster protection and restoration of fast applications
  • Why data protection and availability should not be an afterthought
  • Ways to leverage your data protection storage to drive business change
  • How to simplify and reduce complexity to boost productivity while lowering costs
  • Why workload aggregation consolidation should not cause aggravation

Register for the live event or catch the replay here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about data protection, SSD, flash, data infrastructure and related topics via the following links:

SDDC Data Infrastructure

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 and wrap-up

Fast applications need fast and resilient data infrastructures that include server, storage, I/O networking along with data protection. Likewise performance depends on availability along with durability, likewise, availability and accessibility depend on performance, they go hand in hand. Join me and others from Pure Storage as well as Veeam for this conversational discussion about How to Achieve Flexible Data Protection and Availability with All-Flash Storage Solutions.

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.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Preparing For World Backup Day 2017 Are You Prepared

Preparing For World Backup Day 2017 Are You Prepared

server storage I/O trends
Updated 1/17/2018

In case you have forgotten, or were not aware, this coming Friday March 31 is World Backup Day 2017 (and recovery day). The annual day is a to remember to make sure you are protecting your applications, data, information, configuration settings as well as data infrastructures. While the emphasis is on Backup, that also means recovery as well as testing to make sure everything is working properly.

What the Vendors Have To Say

Today I received the following from Kylle over at TOUCHDOWNPR on behalf of their clients providing their perspectives on what World Backup Day means, or how to be prepared. Keep in mind these are not Server StorageIO clients (granted some have been in the past, or I know them, that is a disclosure btw), and this is in no way an endorsement of what they are saying, or advocating. Instead, this is simply passing along to you what was given to me.

Not included in this list? No worries, add your perspectives (politely) to the comments, or, drop me a note, and perhaps I will do a follow-up or addition to this.

Kylle O’Sullivan
TOUCHDOWNPR
Email: Kosullivan@touchdownpr.com
Mobile: 508-826-4482
Skype: Kylle.OSullivan

"Data loss and disruption happens far too often in the enterprise. Research by Ponemon in 2016 estimates the average cost of an unplanned outage has spiralled to nearly $9,000 a minute, causing crippling downtime as well as financial and reputational damage. Legacy backups simply aren’t equipped to provide seamless operations, with zero Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) should a disaster strike. In order to guarantee the availability of applications, synchronous replication with real-time analytics needs to be simple to setup, monitor and manage for application owners and economical to the organization. That way, making zero data loss attainable suddenly becomes a reality.” – Chuck Dubuque, VP Product Marketing, Tintri

“With today’s “always-on” business environment, data loss can destroy a company’s brand and customer trust. A multiple software-based strategy with software-defined and hyperconverged storage infrastructure is the most effective route for a flexible backup plan.  With this tactic, snapshots, replication and stretched clusters can help protect data, whether in a local data center cluster, across data centers or across the cloud. IT teams rely on these software-based policies as the backbone of their disaster recovery implementations as the human element is removed. This is possible as the software-based strategy dictates that all virtual machines are accurately, automatically and consistently replicated to the DR sites. Through this automatic and transparent approach, no administrator action is required, saving employees time, money and providing peace of mind that business can carry on despite any outage.” – Patrick Brennan, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Atlantis Computing

“It’s only a matter of time before your datacenter experiences a significant outage, if it hasn’t already, due to a wide range of causes, from something as simple as human error or power failure to criminal activity like ransomware and cyberattacks, or even more catastrophic events like hurricanes. Shifting thinking to ‘when’ as opposed to ‘if’ something like this happens is crucial; crucial to building a more flexible and resilient IT infrastructure that can withstand any kind of disruption resulting in negative impact on business performance. World Backup Day reminds us of the importance of both having a backup plan in place and as well as conducting regular reviews of current and new technology to do everything possible to keep business running without interruption. Organizations today are highly aware that they are heavily dependent on data and critical applications, and that losing even just an hour of data can greatly harm revenues and brand reputation, sometimes beyond repair. Savvy businesses are taking an all-inclusive approach to this problem that incorporates cloud-based technologies into their disaster recovery plans. And with consistent testing and automation, they are ensuring that those plans are extremely simple to execute against in even the most challenging of situations, a key element of successfully avoiding damaging downtime.” Rob Strechay, VP Product, Zerto

“Data is one of the most valuable business assets and when it comes to data protection chief among its IT challenges is the ever-growing rate of data and the associated vulnerability. Backup needs to be reliable, fast and cost efficient. Organizations are on the defensive after a disaster and being able to recover critical data within minutes is crucial. Breakthroughs in disk technologies and pricing have led to very dense arrays that are power, cost and performance efficient. Backup has been revolutionized and organizations need to ensure they are safeguarding their most valuable commodity – not just now but for the long term. Secure archive platforms are complementary and create a complete recovery strategy.”  – Geoff Barrall, COO, Nexsan

Consider the DR Options that Object Storage Adds
“Data backup and disaster recovery used to be treated as separate processes, which added complexity. But with object storage as a backup target you now have multiple options to bring backup and DR together in a single flow. You can configure a hybrid cloud and tier a portion of your data to the public cloud, or you can locate object storage nodes at different locations and use replication to provide geographic separation. So, this World Backup Day, consider how object storage has increased your options for meeting this critical need." – Jon Toor, Cloudian CMO

Whats In Your Data Protection Toolbox

What tools, technologies do you have in your data protection toolbox? Do you only have a hammer and thus answer to every situation is that it looks like a nail? Or, do you have multiple tools, technologies combined with your various tradecraft experiences to applice different techniques?

storageio data protection toolbox

Where To Learn More

Following these links to additional related material about backup, restore, availability, data protection, BC, BR, DR along with associated topics, trends, tools, technologies as well as techniques.

Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?
February 2017 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter
Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends
Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O related Tradecraft Overview
Data Infrastructure Primer and Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
What’s a data infrastructure?
Ensure your data infrastructure remains available and resilient
Part III Until the focus expands to data protection – Taking action
Welcome to the Data Protection Diaries
Backup, Big data, Big Data Protection, CMG & More with Tom Becchetti Podcast
Six plus data center software defined management dashboards
Cloud Storage Concerns, Considerations and Trends
Software Defined, Cloud, Bulk and Object Storage Fundamentals (www.objectstoragecenter.com)

Data Infrastructure Overview, Its Whats Inside of Data Centers
All You Need To Know about Remote Office/Branch Office Data Protection Backup (free webinar with registration)
Software Defined, Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) resources
The SSD Place (SSD, NVM, PM, SCM, Flash, NVMe, 3D XPoint, MRAM and related topics)
The NVMe Place (NVMe related topics, trends, tools, technologies, tip resources)
Data Protection Diaries (Archive, Backup/Restore, BC, BR, DR, HA, RAID/EC/LRC, Replication, Security)
Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press 2017) including SDDC, Cloud, Container and more
Various Data Infrastructure related events, webinars and other activities

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

Backup of data is important, so to is recovery which also means testing. Testing means more than just if you can read the tape, disk, SSD, USB, cloud or other medium (or location). Go a step further and verify that not only you can read the data from the medium, also if your applications or software are able to use it. Have you protected your applications (e.g. not just the data), security keys, encryption, access, dedupe and other certificates along with metadata as well as other settings? Do you have a backup or protection copy of your protection including recovery tools? What granularity of protection and recovery do you have in place, when did you test or try it recently? In other words, what this all means is be prepared, find and fix issues, as well as in the course of testing, don’t cause a disaster.

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.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Data Protection Diaries – My data protection needs and wants

Storage I/O trends

Blog post: Data Protection Diaries – My data protection needs and wants

Update 1/10/18

Rather than talking about what others should do or consider for their data protection needs, for this post I wrote down some notes using my Livescribe about what I need and want for my environment. As part of walking the talk in future posts I’m going to expand a bit more on what I’m doing as well as considering for enhancements to my environment for data protection which consists of cloud, virtual and physical.

Why and what am I Protecting?

live scribe example
Livescribe notes that I used for creating the following content

What is my environment

Server and StorageIO (aka StorageIO) is a small business that is focused in and around data infrastructures which includes data protection as a result, have lots of data including videos, audio, images, presentations, reports, research as well, file serving as back-office applications.  Then there are websites, blog, email and related applications, some of which are cloud based that are also part of my environment that have different availability, durable, and accessibility requirements.

My environment includes local on-site physical as well as virtual systems, mobile devices, as well as off-site resources including a dedicated private server (DPS) at a service provider. On one hand as a small business, I could easily move most if not everything into the cloud using an as a service model. However, I also have a lab and research environment for doing various things involving data infrastructure including data protection so why not leverage those for other things.

Why do I need to protect my information and data infrastructure?

  • Protect and preserve the business along with associated information as well as assets
  • Compliance (self and client based, PCI and other)
  • Security (logical and physical) and privacy to guard against theft, loss, instrusions
  • Logical (corruption, virus, accidental deletion) and physical damage to systems, devices, applications and data
  • Isolate and contain faults of hardware, software, networks, people actions from spreading to disasters
  • Guard against on-site or off-site incidents, acts of man or nature, head-line news and non head-line news
  • Address previous experience, incidents and situations, preventing future issues or problems
  • Support growth while enabling agility, flexibity
  • Walk the talk, research, learning increasing experience

My wants – What I would like to have

  • Somebody else pay for it all, or exist in world where there are no threat risks to information (yeh right ;) )
  • Cost effective and value (not necessarily the cheapest, I also want it to work)
  • High availability and durability to protect against different threat risks (including myself)
  • Automated, magically to take care of everything enabled by unicorns and pixie dust ;).

My requirements – What I need (vs. want):

  • Support mix of physical, virtual and cloud applications, systems and data
  • Different applications and data, local and some that are mobile
  • Various operating environments including Windows and Linux
  • NOT have to change my environment to meet limits of a particular solution or approach
  • Need a solution (s) that fit my needs and that can scale, evolve as well as enable change when my environment does
  • Also leverage what I have while supporting new things

Data protection topics, trends, technologies and related themes

Wrap and summary (for now)

Taking a step back to look at a high-level of what my data protection needs are involves looking at business requirements along with various threat risks, not to mention technical considerations. In a future post I will outline what I am doing as well as considering for enhancements or other changes along with different tools, technologies used in hybrid ways. Watch for more posts in this ongoing series of the data protection dairies via www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

Welcome to the Data Protection Diaries

Updated 1/10/2018

Storage I/O trends

Welcome to the Data Protection Diaries

This is a series of posts about data protection which includes security (logical and physical), backup/restore, business continuance (BC), disaster recovery (DR), business resiliency (BR) along with high availability (HA), archiving and related topic themes, technologies and trends.

Think of data protection like protect, preserve and serve information across cloud, virtual and physical environments spanning traditional servers, storage I/O networking along with mobile (ok, some IoT as well), SOHO/SMB to enterprise.

Getting started, taking a step back

Recently I have done a series of webinars and Google+ hangouts as part of the BackupU initiative brought to you by Dell Software (that’s a disclosure btw ;) ) that are vendor and technology neutral. Instead of the usual vendor product or technology focused seminars and events, these are about getting back to the roots, the fundamentals of what to protect when and why, then decide your options as well as different approaches (e.g. what tools to use when).

In addition over the past year (ok, years) I have also been doing other data protection related events, seminars, workshops, articles, tips, posts across cloud, virtual and physical from SOHO/SMB to enterprise. These are in addition to the other data infrastructure server and storage I/O stuff (e.g. SSD, object storage, software defined, big data, little data, buzzword bingo and others).

Keep in mind that in the data center or information factory everything is not the same as there are different applications, threat risk scenarios, availability and durability among other considerations. In this series like the cloud conversations among others, I’m going to be pulling various data protection themes together hopefully to make it easier for others to find, as well as where I know where to get them.

data protection diaries
Some notes for an upcoming post in this series using my Livescribe about data protection

Data protection topics, trends, technologies and related themes

Here are some more posts to checkout pertaining to data protection trends, technologies and perspectives:

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

SPAM of a Different Kind – Introducing SPAM Man V2.008

Recently a good friend who happens to be involved in the data storage and I/O connectivity marketplace turned 50. So in honor of his birthday, and being how he likes the Hormel pork based product aka the “Hawaiian Soul Food”more commonly known as SPAM, also famous from the a Monty Python Skit, what better gift than to SPAM him with SPAM.

I would like to introduce you to “SPAM Man”.
SPAM Man - Guards Your SPAM and Data
SPAM Man – Deters SPAM from your Datacenter

“SPAM Man” happens to be a couple of years younger than the magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) , he also happens to be an infrastructure specialist (IT and other) in his own right. In his new role, “SPAM Man” will join the ranks of other IT data center and infrastructure guardians including the “De-Dupe Diva” and “DCX Man”.

SPAM Man - Guards Your SPAM and Data
SPAM Man – Deters SPAM from your Datacenter and Pantry Closet

Happy Birthday Jim (I mean SPAM Man)…

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved