Understanding the Evolving Landscape of Data Protection  By Sanam Mittal, GM, DXi

 

As a multi-decade executive in data storage, I have had the chance to talk to many customers and prospects over the course of my career. Talking to customers is the only way one can get a pulse on what problem we are trying to solve or anticipating. Data is often referred to as the new oil and the importance of data protection has never been more paramount.  

I recently completed a multi-country trip during which I talked to the largest financial institutions, media organizations, auto companies, retail leaders and service providers around the globe, and got insight into their priorities and concerns when it comes to data protection. What I found is that the things they are asking and looking for in a data protection solution have changed compared to a decade ago.  

In the first of a 3-part blog series, I will explore one question per blog that customers used to ask and why it has changed to other, more pressing questions and concerns.  

Legacy Question: Will I be able to complete my back up within a backup window?  
Current Question: How fast can I recover my data? 

Data protection can be incredibly challenging in that as an admin, you need to make sure you backup all data generated in a brief period as the main purpose of creating data is to do something useful with it (yes, we agree backup is boring). As such, you only get small but frequent time windows to back up newly generated data with the intent that the ‘Recovery Point Objective’ is as near as possible. Speed of data ingestion used to be the only topic of interest as recovery was never considered important. 

Fast forward to today, customers’ number one priority is recovery. With ransomware attacks growing and bad actors getting smarter, particularly with the use of machine learning and AI, most organizations today have accepted that ransomware will hit their data eventually. It’s ‘when’ and not ‘if.’  

So, with the assumption that a ransomware attack will happen, teams have put their focus on the speed of data recovery. ‘Recovery Time Objective’ (the time it takes to recover from a known recovery point) becomes crucial for the continued function of the organization. Imagine the monetary impact to a bank if their online service goes down or to a movie studio if they are locked out of the movie they created. This requirement to recover data as fast as possible also forms the premise of the concept of ‘cyber resilience.’ 

At Quantum, we are always listening to our customers and to address this need to recover quickly from a ransomware attack, we built the industry’s first all-flash backup target solution, the DXI T-Series (the ‘T’ here stands for Transformative). The DXi T-Series accomplishes data restores up to 10 times faster than any data protection solution on the market making it the de facto choice if cyber resilience is important to any organization. 

With the DXi T-Series, customers can:  

• Back up data more frequently so the recovery point is always near. 

• Restore up to 10 times faster so business functions are restored with blazing speed. 

• Instantly access large workloads directly on  DXi. We tested 200 VMs simultaneously instant-accessed on the DXi T-Series. Imagine losing your large VM infrastructure but then being able to run it directly on the backup target while the primary infrastructure is being restored. No other backup target can claim to instantly access 200 VMs. Most solutions gasp for air around 20 VMs. 

• Tier backup data sets to the cloud with DXi Cloud Share. Cloud Share seamlessly integrates DXi appliances with public and private cloud storage, optimizing usage of local DXi resources and providing cost-effective archiving of backup data sets. By tiering data to the cloud and utilizing DXi’s deduplication technology, DXi minimizes cloud storage and bandwidth costs. Included with all DXi appliances, Cloud Share triples data under management, maximizing the use of the local DXi for fast recovery of locally stored backup streams. 

• Use DXi T-Series for testing and development of cyber recovery efforts while also using it for data protection. The DXi T-Series comes prepopulated with massive amounts of RAM and SSDs so one does not need another set up to do testing and development. 

• Scan for malware using a 3^rd party or backup software provider solution. A typical malware scan reads the backed-up data, runs the scan, and then discards the data to ensure backed up data stays clean. The DXi T-Series allows for blazing fast reads which in turn dramatically speeds up the scan ensuring data on the DXi T-Series is never compromised. 

• Path-to-tape is an effective strategy for providing an air gapped solution furthering the strength of the data protection offered with the T-Series. Data, however, needs to be rehydrated (un-deduped) before its written to tape. The DXi T-Series offers superior read performance and allows that rehydration to happen that much faster giving organizations a copy of their data in a different media which is also offline. 

• Comply with data privacy regulations by being able to quickly scan backed up data for ‘Personally Identifiable Information (PII)’ or other information deemed unsafe using a 3^rd party or backup software provider solution. 

Every DXi T-Series model comes fully populated with all hardware, so any future expansions are done at the click of a button. Delivered in a 1U form factor, box to power on can be done in as little as 15 minutes.

The next article in this series will cover the evolving trend of user interfaces, as we have seen with our customers.