Tag Archives: replication

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EMC Data Protection Advisor For As-A-Service Cloud Environments

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What can you do to ensure data protection as you move to cloud?

Services-based storage, infrastructure, and data protection trends and technologies are recurring topics in this blog. Awhile back I wrote a post about enabling data protection as-a-service discussing the need for centralized management at cloud-scale, multiple service rates based on customer data protection needs or usage, and historical data for analysis and trending. The reality is that you can only get so far with legacy products built for physical environments. At some point, management tools, like the data center environments they support, need to be remade to the requirements of the day. Effective data protection solutions are no exception.

Data protection needs are more acute for as-a-service cloud models and require new approaches. Now, with the release of EMC Data Protection Advisor 6.0, I would like to share what it means to augment a successful data protection solution and extend it with a new distributed architecture and analysis engine to cloud deployments, without losing any usability benefits (i.e. without making it complex). Continue reading →

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Enabling Data Protection As A Service

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When does data protection become a money-maker?

Data protection has long been thought of as somewhat of a necessary evil like life insurance. Throw money at the possibility that something will go wrong and pray that it never does. However, with cloud computing models and the concept of IT-as-a-service, data protection can now contribute directly to the value of the data center as well as to the bottom line.

Most organizations use numerous technologies to protect application data across primary, replica, and backup storage, as well as archive systems.  Trying to manage a mixed data storage environment without an effective data protection management strategy makes applying a uniform chargeback to these systems almost impossible. 

As IT transitions to a fully operational private cloud, effective ways to measure and meter data protection services across the environment need to be put into place. Data center managers need mechanisms to differentiate between service levels offered to the organization, and to justify and apply chargeback to business units.

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Virtualizing Applications Benefit From EMC AppSync For Protection

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What if you could take an SLA-driven approach to protecting your virtualized applications?

Well, for starters, you would be able to provide the right level of protection to your applications. Remember, disaster recovery is still about recovery time and business continuity is about ongoing availability. But, one size doesn’t fit all – the needs can vary by application in today’s virtualized data centers.

Wrapping up our coverage of EMC World (the party has to end sometime), I’d like to go deeper into another of our software announcements for IT transformation, EMC AppSync: EMC’s newest product in the data protection management space.   If you missed the news, we essentially took the best parts of EMC Replication Manager and added in monitoring and alerting concepts from EMC Data Protection Advisor to offer a simple, self-service SLA-driven approach for protecting virtualized applications in EMC VNX deployments.  Continue reading →

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Transforming IT Application Protection Services with EMC AppSync

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What if you could provide application protection with your end-user services?

Cloud computing services conversations seem to focus on providing end-users with business processes and the compute, network, and storage resources necessary to support them. But, not as much attention seems to go into the operational business continuance functions like application protection.

Maybe, it’s because throughput, response time, and capacity utilization metrics are more top-of-mind than measuring unplanned downtime. However, if your business relies on information or transactional processing like all of them do, you need to ensure the integrity and availability of your applications.

Announced today at EMC World, EMC AppSync for EMC VNX simplifies and automates application protection, and provides diagnostics on the health of your automated application business continuance plan.  It aligns multiple replication technologies with your applications and their service-level agreement (SLA) to ensure ongoing business processes. Continue reading →

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Transforming IT Is Not Complete Without Application Protection Services

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Why is it that every cloud conversation seems to revolve around turning some function into a service?

Well, the whole notion of cloud turns past concepts of IT as a back office function inside out and puts the end users at the forefront and rightfully so. It’s turned into somewhat of a mantra, but when you consider that the concept of running IT–as-a-service represents a fundamental shift in how we now think about traditional IT strategy and operations, it all makes sense. 

Run like a company in itself, the goal of the IT department now is to offer an agile set of IT services that offer an alternative to external cloud-based service providers while providing more control and trust. 

But, a key factor often missing from the discussion is application protection and how to offer it up as a service.  We can debate about who has the better snapshot, backup, or remote replication technology, but that misses the point.  The technical merits of the underlying infrastructure components aren’t all that relevant; it’s all about management.   Continue reading →