Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F

Transcription

1 Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F DRAFT W H I T E P A P E R A M o r e H o l i s t i c A p p r o a c h t o P r o t e c t i n g, M a n a g i n g, a n d A c c e s s i n g C r i t i c a l A p p l i c a t i o n D a t a Sponsored by: CommVault Robert Amatruda September 2013 E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y Today, enterprise IT organizations face explosive data growth and must simultaneously manage and safeguard more business-critical applications while using fewer resources. Infrastructure leaders must protect a variety of information types associated with critical tier 1 enterprise business applications such as: Microsoft Exchange and messaging Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases SharePoint and content Because these applications are central to the operation of many large organizations, there can be no interruptions or outages. IT organizations must provide faster access to and more consistent recovery of business-critical application data without interruption. This is in addition to their efforts to manage their infrastructure more efficiently and at less cost, not just for a single site but also for remote offices, which increases the complexity of management. Compounding the challenge for IT organizations is the next wave of datacenter consolidation: Where enterprise applications once ran on physical infrastructure, they are now becoming highly virtualized and complex to manage and protect. The increasingly virtualized, complex, and geo-dispersed nature of IT operations requires: Integrated data protection that eliminates extensive implementation and customization efforts, enabling managers to meet business and budget objectives for enterprise application protection and recovery A singular data protection, recovery, and access architecture that incorporates the largest number of business-critical application data protection features into a single package, enabling IT organizations to achieve their protection and recovery objectives with fewer resources and less complexity This IDC White Paper evaluates the key customer requirements for protecting, managing, and accessing enterprise application data and shows how the CommVault Simpana software platform addresses these challenges by providing a comprehensive range of enterprise application data protection and recovery features in a single package.

2 S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W Despite many advances in storage and IT infrastructure such as virtualization, storage efficiency, and scale-out architectures considerable complexity still exists in protecting, managing, and accessing enterprise application data. Foremost is the unrelenting increase in the amount of data being captured by enterprise applications, with user needs for distributed and mobile access driving exponential growth. A large database can now reach into the petabyte scale, not only challenging backup windows but also requiring longer full database restore times. Compounding the data growth challenge are shorter recovery times and smaller recovery point objectives (RPOs). Critical to structured and relational data protection and recovery is the assurance that the application can be recovered in what is referred to as an application-consistent manner. This means that, upon recovery, the application and its data appear as they did just prior to the failure. More firms are also considering active/active datacenter implementations to avoid downtime and optimize load balance resources. Cloud computing and agile development require operations teams to maintain and update infrastructure running enterprise applications more frequently while ensuring no downtime. These conditions place significant pressure on IT organizations to ensure enterprise application data protection, recovery, and access. A p p l i c a t i o n - C o n s i s t e n t R e c o v e r a b i l i t y I s E s s e n t i a l Recovering an application to a consistent state is a fundamental requirement of successful disaster recovery and business continuance. If application data is improperly captured, then immediate recovery can't be ensured, and the continuance of business operations will be delayed and adversely impacted while the application data is resynchronized. If data is lost at any point, as a result of insufficient, inconsistent, or missed backups, application recovery may take an extended amount of time, leading to higher costs and lost business opportunity. Consistent enterprise application data protection requires coordinated procedures to ensure that no application is in a transitory, uncommitted, or unverified state while the backup operation is underway. A p p l i c a t i o n - C o n s i s t e n t R e c o v e r y C h a l l e n g e s Application-consistent recovery generates a number of significant challenges, including: Fast recovery. The ultimate disaster recovery goal is a zero or near-zero RPO in order to ensure the fastest recovery time objective (RTO) possible. Point-in-time (PIT) granularity. PIT recovery granularity ensures that it's possible to identify the specific backup or snapshot version that contains the desired revision of the data to be recovered. 2 # IDC

3 Object restore granularity. Object restore ensures that it's possible to identify the specific backup or snapshot version that contains the exact object to be recovered. This capability is particularly important if the object has been deleted or accidently corrupted. Database consistency. Consistency ensures that any changes to values in an instance (table, database, multiple databases) are consistent with changes to other values. A consistency constraint is a precondition, postcondition, and transformation predicate for any transaction data. The database assumes that the consistency holds for each transaction in each instance. Logical corruption. Logical corruption is when a particular object, database, snapshot, or backup becomes corrupted as a result of data error, destruction, or other negative impact. The logical corruption challenge is to identify corruption before it impacts a recovery operation, and this is usually accomplished with consistency checks and validation procedures. A p p l i c a t i o n P r o t e c t i o n w i t h C o n s t a n t I n f r a s t r u c t u r e C h a n g e Agile application development processes have significantly increased the number of enterprise application software releases per year, including frequent software updates that address bugs, performance issues, or other issues. Each update requires planning by operations teams to assess the impact of the release on application and backup performance. This planning becomes much more complicated when the backup and recovery software is a combination of different products. APP R O A C H E S T O P R O T E C T, M A N A G E, A N D A C C E S S E N T E R P R I S E A P P L I C A T I O N D A T A Today, most enterprise firms utilize multiple protection, recovery, and access strategies and solutions for enterprise applications. This is due to a variety of factors, including differing SLAs, feature/function nuances of particular protection and recovery solutions, mergers and acquisitions, and business needs for fast contentdriven access to information. As the size of enterprise application instances continues to grow and recovery objectives continue to compress, using snapshots and replication for data protection and recovery has become a common practice. Many firms are also evaluating the advantages cloud computing may provide to make their offsite storage strategies more efficient and cost effective, particularly for backup and archiving. These divergent protection, recovery, and access methods result in increased cost and complexity because of investment in a wide range of different hardware and software solutions and point solutions that require separate management tools to manage, protect, and recover enterprise application data IDC #

4 A p p l i c a t i o n - S p e c i f i c B a c k u p a n d R e c o v e r y A g e n t s Purpose-driven integration agents enable unique manipulation of enterprise application database files for backup and recovery, often by integrating the core backup and recovery APIs defined by the application vendor. This is also a key requirement for achieving simplified enterprise application database restoration. S c r i p t i n g O f t e n R e q u i r e d f o r A p p l i c a t i o n I n t e g r a t i o n Some protection and recovery solutions require manual scripting to implement an application-consistent backup and recovery process. This is typically seen when advanced data protection techniques outside of traditional streaming backup are incorporated. Snapshot, replication, clustering, and failover environments require a very flexible integrated technology that many vendors cannot provide to transcend multiple data protection and recovery methodologies. This can add complexity to implementation and meeting business SLAs because scripting is: Done in arcane languages such as Perl and JScript, among others Can be difficult to support unless well documented For IT organizations trying to do more with less, these scripts must be maintained and updated as application updates are made. Additionally, broken scripts must be fixed by IT staff whose skills are needed in more strategic areas. E n t e r p r i s e A p p l i c a t i o n P r o t e c t i o n o v e r A c t i v e / A c t i v e S i t e s More firms are using two datacenters to achieve near-zero downtime, which enables mission-critical workloads to be operated over active/active stretched clusters with federated storage underneath. This approach provides continuous operation in the event that one site fails, without having to restart or recover the application or database. Multitier and multisite data protection and recovery challenges include: The need for a higher degree of coordination and timing as a result of time zone differences and availability windows The fact that most or all sites are active production sites that may have different physical and virtual server configurations, storage arrays, and software versions Scripting, as discussed previously 4 # IDC

5 N e t w o r k - B a s e d A c t i v e / A c t i v e C o n f i g u r a t i o n s For network-based active/active configurations, data link Layer 2 networking is used to connect two datacenters to achieve near-zero downtime. This approach enables mission-critical workloads to be operated over active/active stretched clusters with federated storage underneath. This is a great solution for failover, but it will not suffice for protecting data from logical corruption. S o f t w a r e - B a s e d A c t i v e / A c t i v e C o n f i g u r a t i o n s Clusters. A cluster consists of a set of loosely connected or tightly connected servers, databases, or applications that work together so that, in many respects, they can be viewed as a single system. The cluster components are usually connected to each other through fast local area networks or wide area networks, with each node running its own instance of an operating system, application, and/or database. Clusters improve performance and availability of multitier distributed environments. Database availability group (DAG). A DAG is a set of up to 16 Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Mailbox servers that provide automatic database-level recovery from a database, server, or network failure. When a Mailbox server is added to a DAG, it works with the other servers in the DAG to provide automatic database-level recovery from database, server, or network failures. Always-on replication. Always-on replication continuously backs up information to the other active system(s) in an active/active replication group. All systems in the grouping are active and support different user transactions. Always-on replication replicates all user transactions to the other active servers where they are immediately applied to the application database to ensure that the active server databases are consistent. H a r d w a r e S n a p s h o t s f o r R a p i d R e c o v e r y Hardware snapshots are increasingly popular because of their speed and tight integration with the storage array. Other advantages of using hardware snapshots include full data snapshots, instead of pointer-based snapshots used by software-only techniques, and improved performance of application recovery. However, hardware snapshot processes and tools must be integrated with the application and, specifically, application APIs to ensure the application is placed into a consistent or frozen state. If not, scripts must then be used to ensure the process works, which adds to the complexity to achieve rapid and consistent recovery. D a t a b a s e D u m p T e c h n o l o g y A database dump contains a record of the table structure and/or the data from a database. A database dump is primarily used for database backup so that the database's contents can be restored in the event of data loss. A corrupt database can often be recovered with an analysis of the dump and restoration of the impacted data IDC #

6 L o c a l a n d R e m o t e R e p l i c a t i o n f o r B u s i n e s s C o n t i n u a n c e Data replication for backup and recovery local or remote, or both has increased for enterprise applications. Replicating application data to a remote site is the best method for ensuring a complete and uninterrupted recovery of data in the event of catastrophic disaster. Data deduplication plays a significant role in improving the efficiency of remote replication because it reduces the amount of data that has to be replicated by eliminating redundant data. Deduplication enables fast, efficient offsite copy to secondary storage, offsite disaster recovery location, or a cloud target. Replication to a remote site is typically done over a dedicated or public IP link, while local copies are made over a LAN or SAN. Depending on the replication strategy selected, virtualization of enterprise applications enables the replication of not only the data but also the entire application, which is encapsulated into a virtual machine (VM). C l o u d I m p l e m e n t a t i o n s f o r O f f s i t e o r O u t s o u r c e d P r o c e s s e s Cloud backup is increasingly popular for enterprise application backup and recovery, especially for small, remote offices that lack adequate infrastructure to do backup locally. Public or hybrid cloud backup and recovery eliminates some of the resource demands and implementation complexities associated with disaster recovery from a remote site. Remote locations can simply back up application data to the public cloud at a time suitable for their time zone and location, providing greater flexibility for the remote location. Organizations that are thinking about using a public cloud for protection and recovery of enterprise applications must give proper consideration to available bandwidth and the amount of data being sent over the network. D i s a s t e r R e c o v e r y f o r A p p l i c a t i o n s A comprehensive enterprise application backup and recovery strategy is needed to facilitate a disaster recovery plan in the event of an unforeseen disaster. Without a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, an organization cannot ensure continued enterprise application availability, which can negatively impact user satisfaction and thereby decrease key business performance metrics such as customer sales and loyalty. Enterprise application data backups should: Be frequent to ensure a minimum RPO to restore application data after data loss or corruption occurs Provide the shortest RPO to enable the fastest RTO for restoring the enterprise applications to their operational state Rigorous disaster recovery planning and the least complicated backup and recovery software implementation procedures are the best ways to provide the smallest application RPOs and RTOs and ensure optimal business continuance. 6 # IDC

7 H y p e r v i s o r - B a s e d P r o t e c t i o n a n d R e c o v e r y VMware and Hyper-V have proliferated as server virtualization has been used to achieve more efficient resource use and IT cost containment. Momentum is also building for desktop virtualization as a means to gain further optimal resource use and contain costs. As virtualization use grows, data protection solutions must be able to automatically detect and provision protection for newly created virtual machines. Virtual server and desktop protection and recovery must: Be able to be controlled from virtual infrastructure (VI) management tools as well as through service catalogs and support self-service consumption of IT resources Support and integrate with multiple server virtualization hypervisors in today's heterogeneous hypervisor environment Protect and recover virtualized applications and select files or objects To optimize efficiency, operations teams should not have to perform multiple backup processes to meet these requirements. D e d u p l i c a t i o n E n a b l e s G r e a t e r E f f i c i e n c y a n d S h o r t e r B a c k u p W i n d o w s Deduplication is a critical component of every enterprise application management and data protection strategy. It ensures that storage resources are used effectively to reduce the amount of data that needs to be replicated and protected. Protection and recovery software with highly integrated and optimized inline deduplication can deliver performance and cost benefit advantages. Deduplication can occur at many places in the protection and recovery path: At the client At the backup server In a target storage array A r c h i v i n g a n d e D i s c o v e r y t o S a t i s f y L e g a l a n d R e g u l a t o r y D e m a n d s Increased regulatory requirements for data retention mandate that enterprises retain a large amount of information for extended periods of time. Archiving is now a critical component of an enterprise backup and recovery strategy because retaining vast amounts of application data on expensive, primary storage is not practical or cost effective. Most organizations now employ a multitier storage infrastructure that includes: High-performance primary storage Lower-cost intermediate storage for short-term data archiving Low-cost storage for long-term data archiving 2013 IDC #

8 Archiving increases the capability to preserve potentially relevant information for ediscovery when a lawsuit is reasonably anticipated, as well as the need to index and retain potentially critical corporate information (e.g., , documents) in anticipation of a discovery request. Archiving and ediscovery are for unstructured content and, increasingly, for structured enterprise applications data. A single integrated solution that combines data protection, management, access, deduplication, virtualization support, archiving, and ediscovery and eliminates the need for users to combine disparate standalone products for different functions is ideal for achieving stringent SLA goals. C O M M V A U L T S I M P A N A : A S I N G L E P L A T F O R M T O P R O T E C T, M A N A G E, A N D A C C E S S E N T E R P R I S E A P P L I C A T I O N D A T A CommVault Simpana enables enterprises to protect, manage, and provide access to their enterprise application data. Unlike other offerings on the market today, it is a comprehensive data management solution built on a single platform. Rather than investing in different products to meet application-consistent protection, recovery, and access requirements, IT organizations using Simpana software gain a range of capabilities: Backup Snapshot management Replication Archiving ediscovery and search Simpana functions are managed through a single console that is designed to ensure that the data in all critical enterprise applications and databases is protected, recoverable, and accessible, including integration with applications such as Outlook, RMAN, and vsphere. CommVault Simpana unifies data protection, search, replication, reporting, and archiving across all enterprise tiers, including on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployment options. Simpana addresses enterprise application data protection, management, access, and retention challenges in the following ways: Integrated software drives increased efficiency and reduced management complexity. Enterprise and application intelligence about data automates content-based retention and discovery. A virtual repository transforms data into assets and keeps data secure, deduplicated, and tiered for optimized efficiency. Self-service access boosts workforce productivity and enables IT resources to be redeployed to more strategic initiatives. 8 # IDC

9 B r e a d t h o f A p p l i c a t i o n I n t e g r a t i o n Simpana software is a single platform built on a single code base offering comprehensive data and information management for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, and Oracle. Simpana software provides: A broad range of distributed backup, recovery, archiving, and ediscovery capabilities, managed through a single console Application-aware hardware snapshots with IntelliSnap technology, indexing/search, deduplication, archiving, reporting, and replication Support for many types of clustering technologies, both inside and outside hypervisors, drastically simplifies SLA compliance Support for data recovery in both private and public clouds H y p e r v i s o r S u p p o r t : M i c r o s o f t H y p e r - V a n d V M w a r e Simpana software delivers single-platform backup and recovery for VMware and Microsoft Server 2012 Hyper-V. It protects hundreds of virtual machines in minutes with IntelliSnap technology and supports granular recovery, auto-discovery and protection, flexible deployment options, global source-side deduplication, and gridbased architecture. Simpana 10: Protects and recovers dynamic architectures and supports live migration Supports hardware snapshots for demanding RPO and RTO requirements Unifies data protection for physical cloud environments Simpana 10 also automates VM protection through VM auto-discovery rules and uses policy-based storage tiering to automatically protect and retain VMs based on their business value and need. O r a c l e S u p p o r t Simpana software provides Oracle data protection and information management with cold backup for single instance, real application clusters (RAC), or Exadata; hot backup for full RMAN or streaming backup; and integration with RMAN catalog. Simpana 10: Auto-discovers and backs up new Oracle databases without administrator involvement Eliminates redundant data at the source with global deduplication 2013 IDC #

10 Enables high-speed recovery and secondary copies with no Oracle host impact Protects Oracle databases and Oracle on Windows in a consistent manner Simpana 10 supports snapshot-based Oracle database backup, RMAN, and RAC. It also integrates with Oracle hardware platforms such as Exadata, Sun ZFS, and STK arrays and tape units. C H A L L E N G E S Firms will continue to evaluate the most efficient and cost-effective solutions to protect, manage, and access their business-critical application data. These solutions can be deployed native to the applications or as add-on modules. Increasingly, vendors such as Microsoft and other application providers have developed native tools to allow firms to protect, manage, and recover application data without leaving the native application environment. For example, Microsoft SQL Server has native replication; Oracle has always had RMAN, and more recently, it added Oracle Secure Backup. The availability of these native tools could be viewed by some as a threat to centralized and independent protection and recovery offerings. However, the use of these standalone tools runs counter to growing datacenter trends of consolidation, standardization, and cost containment, with a reduction in the number of infrastructure products in use. While integration with application and hypervisor APIs is essential to the effective management, protection, and accessibility of enterprise application data, firms are not expected to move away from a consolidated approach to managing their enterprise application data anytime soon. C O N C L U S I O N Information is growing at an unabated rate for the foreseeable future. The Digital Universe will grow by a factor of 50 over the next decade. The sheer amount of data in today's datacenter and remote offices/branch offices (ROBOs) as well as the analytics opportunity with new unstructured data created by users, applications, and machines is an enabler for change. With its portfolio of enterprise application data protection, management, and access offerings, CommVault is helping customers take a more strategic and holistic approach to backup, recovery, archiving, and ediscovery for critical enterprise applications. CommVault Simpana software is truly a modernized data protection solution that eliminates the deficiencies of poorly integrated legacy data protection tools with a single platform to analyze, replicate, protect, archive, and search application data effectively and efficiently from any storage tier. The Simpana software platform enables enterprises to: Reduce storage and storage management costs by leveraging existing investments more efficiently; delaying costly storage and network upgrades; and enabling additional storage options such as cost-effective DAS, SAN, and NAS disk tiers as well as tape-, cloud-, and object-based storage 10 # IDC

11 Manage data protection, recovery, and placement in heterogeneous hardware and heavily virtualized environments easily through application- and storageaware snapshots and persistent, global cataloging across storage tiers Speed protection and recovery through the use of snapshots; global, embedded deduplication; and efficient cataloging Ensure data is protected and managed in the best possible way to meet corporate, regulatory, and governance requirements as a result of integrated archive, ediscovery, and data protection options in one solution that can seamlessly cover distributed client systems, ROBOs, and the central datacenter Rely on automated alerts, standard and customized search options, and security and encryption as well as easy-to-use reporting to make a dynamic environment more understandable and data and information more manageable CommVault is well positioned to expand its market share with its Simpana software solution. Simpana 10 expands CommVault's vision with over 300 new enhancements across Hyper-V and enterprise apps such as SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, and Oracle, as well as OnePass backup and archiving capability for Microsoft Exchange environments. Simpana software also adds a Web-based monitoring and reporting portal that provides improved health checks, storage analytics, and trending information along with a new graphical workflow automation engine. These capabilities expand CommVault's already significant modern enterprise protection, management, access, and archiving features with features that streamline enterprise application operations. Firms considering an enterprise application protection and recovery strategy should short list CommVault Simpana for the breadth and depth of enterprise application data protection, management, and access that it provides. C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2013 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden IDC #