Happy World Backup Day! In honor of this event, I wanted to revisit some considerations on the importance of choosing a proper data protection platform. According to IDC, disk-based data protection is a $15 billion industry representing approximately 14 Exabytes (1 EB = 1 million terabytes) of data. What is even more staggering today is the amount of data that either isn’t properly protected, or isn’t being tracked appropriately.
Here are 5 questions you should be asking yourself to make sure your data is properly protected:
1) Are you backing up all of your data?
Today, over 80% of data in a traditional data center is what we consider secondary storage, or non-mission critical data. (In fact, my colleague recently discussed this topic in his blog, Is 80% of Your Data Really Secondary?) Because the data is considered non-mission critical, it is often an afterthought, and might not even be planned for recovery in the unfortunate event of a disaster. What if you lost all file shares, archives, and backups? How would this impact your business? Cohesity’s DataPlatform has you covered, all under a single, scale out file system, SpanFS.
2) Are you following at least the 3-2-1 model?
A common best practice in our industry is the 3-2-1 model. If you aren’t familiar with it, the concept is to store at least three copies of your data, two on-site and one off-site at all times. Cohesity’s automatic tiering and replication of data as well as customizable data protection policies meets this requirement.
3) Are you storing your data in a scale out platform?
A truly modern data storage platform must be built from the ground up without limitations. This starts with a scale out node architecture. The most obvious advantage to scale out is the ability to only purchase what is initially needed and grow as your needs grow. Gone are the days of purchasing over capacity in order to provide growth in the future. As your needs grow with Cohesity, simply add a node. In addition, scale out allows for the simplified management through a single control plane as well as simplified operations through non-disruptive upgrades.
4) Are you leveraging the cloud?
A modern data protection solution integrates seamlessly with all public clouds and also allows for integration on your terms with flexibility to use cloud in many different scenarios. Cohesity’s DataPlatform provides many different options to leverage cloud based on your unique requirements:
* CloudArchive: Eliminate tape by using the public cloud for long-term data archival. Choose your preferred provider with support for Google Cloud Storage Nearline, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Glacier. Maximize storage efficiency and security in the cloud with compression, dedupe, and encryption. Search through your data to rapidly recover granular application data or files.
* CloudTier: Expand the capacity of your Cohesity cluster by automatically tiering individual chunks of data to the cloud. Choose your preferred provider with support for Google Cloud Storage Nearline, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, and Glacier.
* CloudReplicate: Replicate data to a Cohesity Cloud Edition cluster running in the public cloud. CloudReplicate minimizes potential data loss by replicating data as soon as a backup is completed. Use the data in the cloud for disaster recovery, application migrations, test/dev, or analytics.
5) Are you getting maximum efficiency from your platform to reduce costs?
Lastly, but arguably most importantly: Is your data protection platform working for you? In order to be considered a modern data protection solution, storage efficiency must be considered. Does your solution offer global deduplication, compression, and flexible and configurable data storage policies to reduce the amount of data physically stored? This number is measured as an efficiency factor and is a multiplier of the logical data stored vs. the physical data required. The higher the number, the less physical storage needed, further reducing solution footprint.
In an informal poll of a subset of our customers, Cohesity customers are seeing an average data efficiency score of between 10x and 20x and many times more due to Cohesity’s unique efficiency methods. This represents a tremendous savings in both business costs and operations.
In summary, for World Backup Day, take a moment to analyze your current situation and ask yourself the above questions. If your current solution doesn’t meet this criteria, I suggest you start here with Cohesity.
