Kathy Gibson at VeeamOn Forum in Johannesburg – Data has never been more important than it is today: in fact, Veeam believes that data is hyper-critical.
Compounding the issue is the rapid growth of data, the hyper-sprawl of data, say Jason Buffington, senior director: product strategy and Michael Cade, technologist: product strategy at Veeam.
But business need hyper-availability, with data accessible all the time, regardless of where it is stored.
Importantly, users don’t care where data resides: they expect it to be available when and where they need it.
Veeam aims to be the most trusted provider of intelligent data management solutions, meeting the expectations of a world that demands hyper-availability of data, BUffington says.
This has to happen in a world that is becoming increasingly disrupted, he adds, with intelligent data management the new goal.
Data centre modernisation priorities now include the increasing use of server virtualisation, improving data backup and recovery, IT infrastructure orchestration/automation, data centre consolidation, implementing hybrid cloud management software, building a private cloud infrastructure, increasing data integration.
The impact of application downtime and lost data can be sever. Customer confidence can be lost, there is a direct loss of revenue, lost business opportunity, loss of employee confidence, damage to brand integrity, diversion of resources from long-term of business-critical projects, the possibility of legal action, revocation of industry or government accreditations, reduced stock price.
Most companies have what Veeam calls an availability gap – the difference between how fast IT can recover applications and how fast business needs those applications to be recovered; and a protection gap.
What companies need to do, in order to address these gaps, is to apply intelligent data management.
Veeam proposes five stages in this journey: backup; aggregation; visibility; orchestration; and automation.
The most basic and necessary step is backup: Cade points out that companies need to ensure they backup all workloads so they are always recoverable in the event of outages, attack, loss or theft.
The main challenges with current data protection processes and technologies are cost, a lack of protection in the virtual environment, a need to improve backup and recovery reliability, a need to reduce backup time, the fact that there are too many copies of data, a lack of disaster recovery plans or processes, the issue of managing multiple data protection systems, meeting compliance requirements, remote site backup and recovery, and the problems associated with endpoint devices.
IT leaders want to improve the speed and agility of both backup and recovery, while reducing the costs associated with hardware, software and labour.
Aggregation, the second stage, needs to ensure protection and access to data across multiple clouds to drive digital services and ensure continuous business operations.
The world has moved from mission-critical and non-mission-critical servers, Buffington says – today, most servers have to experience little or no downtime.
Stage three, visibility, improves management of data across multi-clouds with clear, unified visibility and control into usage, performance issues and operations.
The common issues around protecting the virtual server environment include the recoverability of data, validation of recovery success, inability to troubleshoot, issues with identifying problems poor understanding and a lack of visibility.
Increasingly, systems management tools are integrated with data protection tools. “Data protection is becoming part of the system management strategy,” Buffington says.
This leads into the fourth stage of orchestration, where IT has the ability to seamlessly move data to the best location across multi-clouds to ensure business continuity, compliance, security and optimal use of resources for business operations.
Automation, the last stage, is where data becomes self-managing by learning to back up, migrate to ideal locations based on business needs, secure itself during anomalous activity and recover instantaneously.
Buffington says Veeam provides a complete hyper-availability platform that enables intelligent data management.