Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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On the technology front, a fundamental piece that hadn’t yet matured in 2006 was virtualization. And virtualization makes the CDT concept come to life, along with the availability of multicore processors. But first things first. Because our focus has now shifted away from “true continuous” to “very rapid but consistent,” we need to rename the technical approach. We now define this new category of storage as vDPAS, for Virtual Data Protection and Availability Storage. The benefits of this type of storage are numerous, including:
- No backups ever
- Excellent capacity optimization
- Near instantaneous recovery of applications, not just data
- Easy to assign different service-level agreements (SLAs) to different applications
- Images can be mounted instantly, requiring no full image to be created before a volume can be mounted
- Works the same way across physical and virtual servers
- Minimal IT involvement
- Ability to make current images available to test and development groups at the press of a button
- One main source for all data protection tasks
- Applicability to cloud
Several companies, in our view, have made the vDPAS concept a reality in the last few years. Probably the best example is Actifio’s implementation. But many others have been striving toward this concept, such as Dell AppAssure and InMage. Almost certainly, legacy vendors are feverishly working toward
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this new functionality, but they have to juggle sales of current products with
introducing a product that could have a negative impact on their current revenue. Still, in the
next three years we expect the entire market to offer products in the vDPAS category. It behooves
you to take a closer look at these products and to start planning for a major overhaul of your data
protection environment. Once you see the magic of this idea you’ll say goodbye to full backups
forever. Good riddance!
BIO: Arun Taneja is founder and president at Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies.
This was first published in July 2012
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