Data Protection: What are you protecting against?

If you are reading this, then corporate data protection is already important to you. Corporate data is the lifeline of a company - it is a corporate asset, encompasses intellectual property and in the wrong hands could be detrimental to any business. Most acknowledge that data protection is essential, but the specific motivations for data protection will determine the best solution for your organisation.

Typical scenarios are:

  • "I need my data available and online 24x7"
  • "My database has been corrupted and I need it restored"
  • "I want to ensure access to my data after a site failure or natural disaster"
  • "I need access to email data from two years ago. No hurry. But I need the data"
  • "I need to prove that my data has not been tampered with"

For each of these scenarios above, there are storage-based solutions, or integrated solutions with industry best-of-breed vendors.

NetApp offers a unified storage platform for all of the above requirements. The storage operating system, Data ONTAP, offers a variety of features that can be enabled or disabled. This allows for a single system to be a primary storage array, onsite backup target, off-site replication target, an archival/ compliance system, and much more.

For example:

  • The initial storage requirement could be to host VMs at the Primary/Production site
  • Following this, the organisation could look to backup those VMs with the ability to do immediate backups and restores
  • Subsequently, the Exchange team hosts Exchange datastores, which includes Exchange backup copies for the past 30 days on disk
  • Older emails get archived on SATA disk on the same physical storage array
  • Archived emails are marked as secure and compliant, so they cannot be tampered with
  • More application data, such as SAP etc. is added on the storage array
  • Secondary site is added with data replicated from Primary site to Secondary/ DR site storage array
  • Data at secondary site is used for development/testing work. In doing this the DR site is transformed into an actively used asset

A sample customer journey with NetApp can look like:

To complement data protection, NetApp storage features a range of storage efficiency technologies - which allow for elimination or non-creation of redundant data. These storage efficiency features are great when used for backup data copies, as well as for primary storage. NetApp unified storage arrays offer an agile infrastructure foundation, on which to build the rest of your IT strategies.