Key Features to Keep in Mind When Evaluating Backup and Restore Solutions
The big challenge with backup and recovery is that not only is the amount of data that needs to be backed up starting to exceed what can be done in a 24-hour window, but meeting recovery point and time objectives has become nearly impossible.
Obviously, there’s a need for faster backup and recovery products to deal with both those issues. But Hewlett-Packard is making the case for applying analytics to the backup and recovery process in a way that will make it easier for IT organizations to prioritize what data needs to be backed up and recovered first.
HP today announced that it has developed an application based on its Autonomy software that enables IT administrators to leverage predictive analytics to optimize the allocation of their backup and recovery resources. Gagan Bhatia, product marketing manager for HP enterprise data protection, says the acquisition of Autonomy in 2011 enabled HP to develop the HP Backup Navigator predictive analytics application that makes it a lot easier for IT organizations to not only meet recovery point and time objectives, but actually prioritize what data gets backed up based on its value to the business.
In addition to applying analytics to backup and recovery, HP is throwing additional brawn at the problem in the form of release 9.0 of HP Data Protector. The latest release of HP’s backup and recovery software adds tighter integration with HP storage systems and the data deduplication capabilities provided by HP StoreOnce Backup Systems, as well as support for vSphere VMware virtual disk software to cache backups.
Finally, HP announced today that it is making it easier to integrate its backup and recovery software within the Microsoft Systems Center management platform.
One of the more nuanced challenges with backup and recovery is that within most IT organizations, it’s an entry-level job performed by administrators with little much experience. Unfortunately for them and the organizations they work for, the data protection task has never been more complex to manage. Applying predictive analytics to that challenge is one way to even the backup and recovery odds that right now are getting longer by the minute.
