08/20/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 08/20/2024 10:11
Times change…and priorities change. For the past 25 years, most IT orgs have been focused on how to speed up backups to fit in a backup window. Accelerators, change block tracking, and even deduplication and compression were employed to help fit in as many backup jobs as possible in a given time frame. Recovery was more about being able to recover, rather than how much data or how fast.
In yesteryear, when a disaster struck (natural, accidental, hardware failure, or even malicious), it likely meant recovering files, folders, mailboxes, or a few systems, and the recovery process could take a few hours, days, or even weeks using disk-based storage.
Fast forward to today's climate, and we see a different set of priorities and expectations. Backup is built into operating systems, applications, and storage. And because of that, it's easier to create a backup today. However, a lot of other things have also changed: Our data sets have grown; we're more dependent on data to operate; we demand our recoveries to be quicker; we need to recover a greater number of systems and data; and the ransomware pandemic has made it so that we may need to recover an entire data center rather than just a few files or VMs.
Recovering data matters more now than it ever has. In today's IT environment, when a disaster strikes, being able to recover as soon as possible is what matters most. Every second counts. Business downtime can negatively impact revenue and brand reputation and introduce other unstableness.
We need to re-examine our priorities, practices, and infrastructures to understand if our backup and recovery priorities, policies, and technologies can meet the demands of today's modern business culture.
Backup and Recovery Systems
A data protection solution or system consists of two distinct pieces: something that creates a copy and storage that keeps the backup copy until it's needed for recovery.
Backup copies can be created by third-party software, a feature in an application, a snapshot from the operating system or storage, or a variety of other means. There's no shortage of options and choices for creating backup copies.
For years, these copies were stored on magnetic tapes or spinning disks. The popularity of tape as a backup media eventually waned and disk-based solutions became mainstream. As a result, most backup copies of systems and data have been stored on spinning disk media. While disk-based storage can be economical, it doesn't come without its own risks and trade-offs, such as mechanical failures, slow read/write speeds, and higher energy consumption.
While disk is still the most popular storage media for backup and recovery, new flash-based storage solutions have entered the market. They provide new reliability, scalability, and performance considerations for customers while reducing energy consumption and cooling requirements and creating less e-waste.
Pure's flash storage offers several benefits over disk for data protection, including:
Move to Modern Data Protection
Cyberattacks are on the rise. Make sure your organization is prepared by having a modern data protection strategy and system in place. We urge you to review your backup and recovery infrastructure, policies and practices and ask the following questions:
For more information, check out our modern data protection solutions.