Disaster Recovery Journal

IT organizations can drive up the cost of storage unnecessarily by treating all data the same and storing it all on the same media. Let’s face the fact: my resume is not as important as the payroll database or even the email database. So, why are you using the same storage policy for both?

Stop using one policy to rule all of your data. It might be simple, but it is killing your bottom line. When looking for a data protection solution, find one that allows you to use policies to treat data differently.

When keeping pace with growing data, a major concern for IT organizations, in terms of both storage and data protection is how the data protection solution will handle the growth.

If your business has grown its capacity by 40-60 percent in each of the past three years, and it now supports billions of data objects, you need a solution that grows with you. This growing of capacity may be outpacing your data protection solution and you may need to find a way to scale your protection.

Do you have different products to protect different types of data or different systems? If so, you need to start thinking about standardizing on a single product.  Think of all the time, training and resources you would save.

Can two of the same things have two different prices? Heck yes! Not only can they have different prices, but they can also be dramatically different. 

In the last few years, data protection solution providers have started to offer something besides “core-” or “server-” based. When buying software you need to consider all the options. One of the new options is capacity. 

It is not all about data deduplication! Many data protection products and providers talk about data deduplication as if it will save the world. In fact, data deduplication is only a small part of the solution. What we need to be talking about is across the board data reduction.

Data reduction technologies are the first line of defense against rapidly expanding data volumes and costs. STORServer provides built-in data reduction technologies, such as progressive-incremental backup, data deduplication and data compression, enabling organizations to reduce backup storage capacity by as much as 95 percent.  STORServer also provides advanced tape management and efficient tape utilization capabilities, which can further reduce data storage capacity requirements.

Before considering cloud-based data protection, it is important to first understand the basics of cloud, which can sometimes be foggy (at best). With trade magazines and publications defining the "cloud" in a number of different ways, IT managers and executives are often confused about the true meaning of the term; however the recent maturation of cloud-based services has helped the definition become more focused.

 In a nutshell, there are two main types of cloud-based data protection services: public and private. The public cloud is where data is on a shared infrastructure. In a private cloud, data is on dedicated infrastructure and the owners of that data share no part of it with others. There are variations of the public and private cloud, including combinations of the two that result in a "semi-private cloud," but for the sake of clarity, we will stay away from that topic.

So you have planned.  You have a strategy.  You are ready.

Are you really?