Data protection is one of the most basic requirements for any operation involving data processing. Information has value and requires protection from many disastrous events that can befall stored information. Not only human or machine errors, malicious actions, and natural disasters require data protection, overriding legal issues have entered into the requirements.
With a history of a relatively straightforward process in making copies of data to tape, the approach to protecting information has changed slowly. Demands for storing information with increased capacity and no tolerance for unavailability are driving new solutions to be developed with new technologies to achieve more stringent goals.
Approaches to address data protection demands have evolved with new technology and solutions. There are a variety of approaches employed today. Backup to disk with deduplication has improved the economics and performance. Use of storage system snapshot features improve the effectiveness of protected changed blocks with incremental control. Direct Backup, using storage system snapshot and data movement over a storage network to the target device, transitions control to the application. Self- protecting storage systems have been developed to deal with the overwhelming growth of unstructured data. Integrating backup software into scale-out NAS solutions, which is opportunistically called Hyper- Converged Data Protection is a recent solution into the market. The problem of multiple copies of data, predominantly created with data protection, is being address with solutions for Copy Data Management.
Transforming a data protection practice with the evolving technologies and solutions is difficult to achieve. Multiple solutions may need to be employed that represent a change to status quo. Funding and resources for making needed changes are difficult to acquire. Nevertheless, the need for implementing new technologies and solutions is evident. Making the transformation requires coupling the change with other, higher profile (and funded) projects, achieving an integrated environment for storage, access, and protection.
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