You will hear many vendors telling you how important it is to protect your data. This will usually be achieved by a second copy on disk or even tape. Let’s assume like most companies you choose to store that second copy on disk, what disk do you use? Do you go and re purpose some older disk for your backup / archive or do you purchase a dedicated Protection Storage layer of disk?
Well the question you should ask yourself is why are you doing this, why are you creating a second copy of your data? One has to assume that like most companies your data is the life and soul of the company. Without your data your company would struggle to survive, trade or return a profit. To put it quite simply, if the data is lost, so is the company. So when it’s put like that, should you consider just using any disk to preserve your company or should you invest in dedicated Protection Storage?
EMC believes there are six areas that you should insist on when looking at Protection Storage offerings: Data Protection, Replication, High Performance, Value for Money, Scalability and Security. All of these features will ensure that data you place on this platform will be readily accessible for months and years to come.
But we know not all data is equal which is why EMC offers three distinct platforms: Scale Out NAS, Deduplicated or Object storage.
So for files that do not deduplicate well, we have Isilon NL, or perhaps you need to add a layer of security into the data or store it distributed in the cloud. For that we can use Centera or ATMOS. Finally perhaps you want the ability to combine not only your backup data but also your archive data on one platform, you can use Data Domain to achieve this. In fact many of our customers have been using Protection Storage platforms like Data Domain for years to store and replicate all their backup data, and are now finding this the perfect platform to use for archive data as well.
All of the Data Protection products from EMC have just undergone significant updates to their software. Indeed Data Domain now has the ability to store up to 1 Billion files. Making it the perfect place to store your archive data. To find out more about what’s been happening to EMC’s Data Protection products don’t miss this video where we discuss some of the new features available to our Protection Software platforms.