Part of the challenge when it comes to managing backup and recovery is that the tools IT organizations have in place to manage this process can best be described as arcane. That makes actually discerning what’s happening during the backup and recovery process difficult.
EMC this week says it’s moving to give customers a lot more visibility into the backup and recovery process with the release of Data Protection Advisor (DPA) 6, which now can be installed in a matter minutes to discover how backup processes are running across both EMC and rival storage platforms.
According to Thomas Giuliano, senior product marketing manager for DPA in the EMC Advanced Storage Division, version six of DPA features a revamped set of dashboard templates that make it simple to discover not only how much storage is being consumed, but also recovery time and point objectives.
Giuliano says DPA makes uses of RESTful application programming interfaces to discover the attributes of the overall backup storage environment. More often than not, Giuliano says customers discover they are over provisioning for backup simply because they have no visibility into the overall environment.
As part of that effort, Giuliano says the new release adds support for not only on-premise storage but also across external clouds.
As the amount of data that needs to be managed continues to grow exponentially, the backup and recovery process needs to be managed with greater precision. Not only is the amount of time that organizations have to run a particular backup increasing, end users expect IT organizations to be able to recover their data in a matter of minutes. But that can only happen when the IT organization can actually see what’s happening across the entire backup and recovery process regardless of where it is actually occurring.