Tag Archives: sap

Have a strategy for archiving? If not.. get one!

You need a plan for archiving

You have static data that needs to be archived in a secure way. This has to happen because the data volumes are exploding. EMC has a way to make this happen, within one offering, with one plan.
Not having a plan costs you real money, real customer satisfaction and stops your future development in its tracks!

Challenges ahead

Today, data protection is so much more than just backup. Customer demands drive ever tighter protection needs, all the way through continuous availability. This says that we cannot keep all the data at that level, it’s just not financially viable. It’s not getting any easier, EMC and IDC in cooperation just announced the 7th Digital Universe study, the findings give cause for thought. We will double the size of all data every 24 months, Protection needs but there is reason to believe that there will never be double the amount of IT professionals. Also, hands up everyone who thinks their IT budget in two years is twice what it is today.

This calls for a strategy!

Static data just has to move out of the way and stay protected without having to get copied away over and over again. Backup certainly isn’t the answer here..       bu_archive

In order to strategize, we need information, tactics and visibility.

Information

What Informationis getting stored, what is it worth,
who needs to have access to it,
how long should we keep it for?

Tacticstactics

How do we extract the data, where do we put it, how will it be accessed, how will it get protected?

Visibility

Is the data compliant with rules, regulations and laws?vivibility How do we search for it? How to track it, retain it, discard it?

Let’s plan!

You will need three components to make the strategy a reality:

Protection storage

Put the archived content somewhere where it can stay for as long as it needs to, in a pool of storage that reduces costs, heals itself, and guarantees the integrity.

Application integration

No matter where your content comes from, it needs to be analysed, tiered and moved. All the while making sure it is as seemless as possible for your end users.

Data Management

Offer the services out, make sure they are easily consumed and user driven, no matter what the compliance and economic demands are. Easily add value by offering discovery, search and hold to the data that is now in one central archive.

Components of the solution

EMC offers a wide range of systems that can assist in being the persistant and central storage for your archive. More and more, we see customers converging archive and backup storage on to DataDomain systems because of a few reasons:

  • Deduplication because frequently many copies exist, even in an archive, content is also often redundant within different documents and files. Deduplication allows more content to be stored within a smaller footprint, more economically and with less administration.
  • Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture assures the data is safe from the initial write, then over time by checking the integrity after reduction, write and periodically after that. Finally content is verified again at the retrieval request.
  • Data Domain has been designed to support both backup and archive workloads. These multiple use cases are vastly different, but DataDomain can support 100’s of millions of small files, protect them and replicate them. Other demands for archival protection is retention enforcement and possibly encryption, all ticked off by an impressive list of archive application integration, to date over 20 different, a likewise impressive of software options that handle these demands.

The EMC Data Protection Suite for Archive will support your needs for file, email and SharePoint archiving. You can easily add in functions for supervision and discovery as needed. The foundation here is EMC SourceOne which scales from small, single server deployments for teams and small business needs, all the way through vast enterprises with hundreds of thousands of mailboxes, petabyte scale file storage and ginormous Sharepoint farms, EMC SourceOne provides you with the application integration and the visibility required.

archiveflow

Let’s go!

The time to strike is now, data growth isn’t waiting, you need to get situational awareness sooner rather than later. Reach out to an EMC partner of choice or your EMC representative, get an assessment of your situation. There are readily available tools to look in to your email, file servers and Sharepoint data that assesses volumes, age, utilization. This builds a picture for you to build and start executing on a strategy.

keep-calm-and-hey-ho-let-s-go-14

Announcing EMC DataDomain DD Boost for Enterprise Applications

EMC has announced availability of DD Boost for Enterprise Applications.

choice

 

What is this then?

New ways of protecting data?

Something new to learn, again?

DD Boost for Enterprise Applications consists of two parts:

  • Modules for using EMC DataDomain DD Boost together with native data protection functionality from:
    • SAP HANA
    • SAP with Oracle (BR*Tools)
    • Oracle (RMAN)
    • Microsoft SQL
    • IBM DB2
  • EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA) for monitoring and reporting on the various sources.

The modules allows application administrators (DBAs) to work with their own interfaces and workflows, yet still move data to protection storage in an efficient manner.

This means that instead of having to install third party backup software and giving another team the control over scheduling and workflow, the DBAs now control, when and if they protect their data.

In some applications they even stay in control of moving this data offsite, simply specifying that the DataDomain target should perform what is known as a Managed File Replication to one (or more) DataDomain system(s). Recovery of the data can take place from any of these systems.

For some of the systems, replication can be controlled by writing to different folders in the DataDomain system, if they write to one that is enabled for DataDomain mtree replication, the data is moved offsite as soon as the backup is done, write to one where it isn’t and data stays onsite.

The whole point of developing this functionality is that in many organisations, there is a rift opening up between what application owners demand and require and what the IT operations department can deliver. Eventually, you see everyone rolling their own solutions and creating the dreaded silos that breed cost, complexity and poor interoperability.

DD Boost for Enterprise Applications addresses one of these rift creating scenarios, namely the classic problem that DBA’s does not want someone else to interfere with their often very complex environments, in this case through backup and recovery via a backup application.

The “classic” way, dump and sweep or backup agents:

Classic backup with agents


EMC began addressing this with DD Boost for Oracle RMAN which allowed Oracle DBA’s to continue using their own RMAN scripts, schedulers and so on.

They could write directly to highly resilient data protection storage in an efficient manner.DD Boost for RMAN

‘The success has been great with this, thousands of EMC customers has adopted it and carved out complexity and cost while doing so.

For the rest, it was still dump and sweep or backup agents.

Now, the same opportunity comes to administrators of SAP, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2.

3 DDBEA

Nothing new to learn for the backup admins, minute long deployment and automatic monitoring for the data protection teams. That’s what this announcement means!

Backup to the future: Datadomain DDOS 5.4

In this post I will try to pick apart some of the new functionality that appeared in the latest and greatest DataDomain DDOS release.

In one of my earlier posts , I have an overview of the four new DataDomain systems and what they are, you can read that here:

Backup to the future: New DataDomain systems

DDOS is the denominator for the operating environment (OE) of EMC Datadomain systems and these have now reached version 5.4.

Functionality in DataDomain systems come in play both in the Protection Storage part as well as in the Data Source Integration parts of the overall EMC data protection architecture.

brs architecture

 

The object of DataDomain, a Purpose Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) is of course backup, but also to protect archival data, DataDomain systems are designed to take care of both use cases.

ddprotectionstg

 

A big part of the DDOS 5.4 release was supporting the expanded integration into Avamar 7, which I wrote about here:

Backup to the future: Avamar 7

We also launched support for what is now a very extensive list of Archive partners:
ddarchivepartners5_4

 

SAP HANA backup

Something we can all be sure of is that all databases will get bigger and have higher and higher demands on availability and performance.

This usually translates to database administrators will demand control over the protection of their data, if the backup teams doesn’t deliver the protection architecture, they will take matters in their own hands, this has been discussed by people much smarter than me, such as the CTO for EMC Backup & Recovery, Steve Manley.

What EMC presented today is a way to protect SAP HANA in-memory databases, all within dd5_4-SAP_hanathe database administrators control.

Backups will flow directly to the DataDomain system, without any need to stage it in between. This means significant savings on infrastructure and storage.

At the same time, the efficient replication that DataDomain systems provide will make sure that protected data is sent off-site in the shortest time possible.

Oracle Exadata Backup and DR

dd5_4_exadataAnother really exiting industry first is that EMC presented support for direct integration to Oracle Exadata environments through EMC DataDomain DDBoost.

Again, this means that administrators or Exadata systems can take direct control of their data protection and if need be, disaster recovery.

Data Domain systems are the first deduplication storage to be Oracle Backup Solutions Program validated for Exadata.

Thank you for taking your time to read my musings on this and keep an eye open for upcoming posts where I dig deeper in the subjects.