Redefining Enterprise Data Protection with Commvault and NetApp

White Paper: Redefining Enterprise Data Protection with Commvault and NetApp 3 The Enterprise Data Protection Mandates While the term “enterprise” is thrown around loosely, enterprise data protection is not easy to achieve. Many, or even most, organizations struggle mightily with the onslaught of new data that drives their business. “Keeping the lights on” is hard enough, but when an organization is attempting to transform into the digital world, the complexities are massively compounded. IT is supposed to be a well-oiled machine in which compute, network, storage, and cloud layers seamlessly deliver against service levels every time—but the reality is that it’s brutally difficult to keep up with the diverse workloads making up the IT landscape of enterprises. In turn, protecting these digital assets and ensuring their availability adds another layer of complexity that requires proven and comprehensive storage and software tools to work in unison. At stake: the business, or more precisely in IT terms, the service level agreements that must be met in ever-changing business and technical circumstances. Among those key service levels are recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs), indicators that form the keystone of the data protection service level edifice. Miss one or both of these, and your ability to recover data or support availability falls apart. ESG research shows that improving SLAs, RPOs, and RTOs is the top mandate from IT leadership to the data protection teams, as can be seen in Figure 1. Maintaining these service levels is also the number one challenge organizations reported for data protection. 1 Additional priority mandates such as compliance and cost reduction should also be highlighted as they affect crucial infrastructure decisions. Against this backdrop, picking the right combination of vendors to make up this critical part of the infrastructure can look like assembling a puzzle to many IT leaders seeking to meet these difficult mandates. Figure 1. Top Data Protection Mandates Top data protection mandates from IT leadership. (Percent of respondents, N=320, three responses accepted) Improve SLAs/RPOs/RTOs for data and applications 48% Improve security/compliance 42% Reduce costs 35% Increase usage of public cloud-based data protection services 27% Consolidate data protection tools and/or vendors 25% Improve BC/DR preparedness 21% Leverage secondary copies for other business purposes Renegotiate existing data protection contracts and pricing 20% 15% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group 1 Source: ESG Master Survey Results, 2018 Data Protection Landscape Survey, October 2018. © 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. White Paper: Redefining Enterprise Data Protection with Commvault and NetApp 4 Enterprise Backup Requirements Enterprise data protection requires enterprise tools that meet all of the requirements that help IT leadership drive efficiencies and meet service levels. When attempting to meet the stringent data protection requirements of the enterprise (and avoid crafty or heavily promoted marketing buzz), proven successful technology partnerships that work as advertised right now—instead of promising perfection in the future—are most important. The stakes are simply too high to risk experimenting in a production world. In Table 1, ESG presents its perspective on key data protection requirements based on research and many years in the data protection space. Table 1. Top 10 Data Protection Enterprise Requirements Capability Why It Matters Broad enterprise application support Enterprises rely heavily on mission-critical applications to support generating revenue. They seek to achieve the lowest possible downtime (low RTO) and minimal to no data loss (low RPO). The data protection infrastructure must be deeply integrated with most, if not all, of these applications to provide a coherent and consistent service level. Advanced and broad storage snapshot support across arrays and hosts Snapshot technology, whether on the host or storage system, offers the convenience of speed and performance, enables more frequent recovery points and lower bandwidth utilization, and is a key requirement in the enterprise. The data protection solution must support a wide variety of storage systems and hosts in order to deliver consistent and complete capabilities. Advanced cloud support (storage and optimized recovery) Cloud has become critical to the data protection infrastructure of most enterprises and offers great capabilities and challenges in terms of support. To qualify as an enterprise solution, vendors need to provide advanced tiered storage capabilities, multiple recovery or failover options, and economic/cost optimization. It is critical to offer a broad array of cloud storage options and integrations. Broad OS and hypervisor support An enterprise, unless it is a very “young” organization (less than 10 years in business), will likely have multiple server platforms (physical and virtual) and technology layers in its infrastructure, including “legacy” systems. An ideal solution for enterprises covers all of these platforms or a large majority. Multiplying specialized backup and recovery solutions can lead to more complexity, operational inefficiencies, and cost. Source and target deduplication and replication Data takes up space, and space (storage) is money! For backup and recovery in the enterprise, it is critical to optimize storage consumption with deduplication. Offering multiple deduplication options is necessary (source or target) since topologies may vary. The endgame is to build proven data reduction efficiencies into the workflow and optimize costs and performance. Advanced orchestration, including AI and ML Enterprises’ stringent RPOs and RTOs require a solution that can help support or create a disaster recovery “runbook,” orchestrating the recovery workflow of multiple systems and intertwined applications in an exact sequence. In addition, enterprises now expect more “intelligence” from their data protection solutions with artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based predictive actions or recommendations to better deliver RPOs and RTOs based on a variety of infrastructure conditions and historical patterns. © 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.