Are people really using flash for backup? You may think that sounds crazy, but we have a lot of customers who are using it, and loving it! With the growing challenges, and opportunities, of data, here’s how you can modernize your data protection environment with flash and cloud.
Wait, Flash for Backup?
But, why do they love flash? Are they using it to turbo charge their backup servers? No. These customers are using flash for data that they don’t want to (or can’t) backup – mission critical data that needs to be backed up frequently without impacting the performance of the primary application using that data. They’re doing this with high performance snapshots that can be done in seconds as opposed to the minutes it would take to snapshot using disk or the hours it would take to complete a traditional backup operation.
With flash (especially NVMe™ flash), snapshots can be performed in seconds with little or no impact to the performance of the application using that data. As an added bonus, these snapshot copies of data can be repurposed for other uses such as disaster recovery, testing, development, and analytics.
Isn’t Flash Too Expensive for Data Protection?
Wait one second! Isn’t flash too expensive to be wasted on data protection? In the past that may have been true, but the price of flash has come down, and technologies such as inline deduplication and compression are being used to minimize the flash capacity needed. As a result, organizations can greatly reduce TCO, making flash an affordable and powerful data protection tool for the most critical workloads that require aggressive RTOs.
What About the Data that Keeps Growing?
But, what about all the rest of the data — the terabytes and petabytes of data that just keep growing and growing? For that, more and more of the most advanced IT organizations in the world are turning to cloud object storage. Cloud object storage is a relatively cost-effective disk-based backup and archive solution that leverages extreme high capacity HDDs and erasure coding techniques for data reliability. It’s what powers at-scale cloud providers and many customers are leveraging these efficiencies by adopting object-based storage in their on-premises data center.
Although most cloud object storage systems are still not as cheap as tape, the ever increasing disk capacities and densities make it close enough that the dramatic improvements it will have on your data protection environment more than justifies the slight cost difference.
Cloud object storage provides rapid restores of data from high speed disk, very efficient and cost-effective storage for long-term retention, and most importantly, it is easier to manage than tape. Having historic data accessible for analytics and mining is critical for businesses moving forward and features such as metadata play a key role in being able to extract new value from old data.
Say, “Hello!” to Flash and Cloud
As our world becomes more data-centric, the landscape of data protection is changing rapidly. Data can’t be held back at any tier or for any workload, and recovery times are becoming shorter and critical.
Now is the time to get rid of those antiquated notions that using flash and cloud for data protection is crazy. Flash and cloud are playing a transformative role in shaping data infrastructure and architecture. The time is right to leverage both the power of flash and cloud to modernize your data protection environment.
Modernize Data Protection – Step By Step
We invite you to join us for a webinar on Wednesday, August 28 where we’ll dive into how to modernize your data protection with flash and cloud. During the webinar, we’ll explore how:
- Modernizing your backup and recovery operations for virtual and physical infrastructure can transform your business
- NVMe unlocks the true potential of solid-state flash technology
- Flash and cloud object storage systems from Western Digital integrate with Veeam and Rubrik stacks to accelerate your storage and data protection services