The challenge with managing backup and recovery is that it’s often hard to distinguish between really important data that someone is likely to want to recover and data that no one is ever likely to want to recover. As a result, most IT organizations wind up backing up everything in the hope that the recovery time or point objective for any particular piece of data isn’t beyond their ability to meet.
Looking to apply a little more intelligence to the backup and recovery process, Hewlett-Packard today released version 8.1 of HP Data Protector, which combines analytics with HP Autonomy search technology to make it easier for IT organizations to identify data sets that need to be prioritized and, if desired, automate the entire process based on those priorities. HP Data Protector also makes use of analytics to predict when resource utilization issues are likely to raise their ugly head and even will go so far as to make recommendations for what actions storage administrators should take to prevent that from happening.
This latest release of HP Data Protector also includes tighter integration with Microsoft Active Directory, VMware vCenter and SAP HANA software. In addition, HP has substantially improved the compression available via better integration with HP StoreOnce and HP 3Par StoreServ software.
According to Jeff Veis, vice president of marketing for HP Autonomy, rather than treating all data equally regardless of its business value, HP is on a multiphase journey to increase the level of operational intelligence that can be applied to data management. Embedding HP Autonomy software within a wide range of applications is a critical element of that strategy.
The degree to which the entire backup and recovery process can be automated based on the policies the IT organization determines based on the business value of the data remains to be seen. But the days when some administrators spent most of their time manually managing that process are clearly coming to an end.
