The state of data protection is in flux. Conventional models of backup and restore have become obsolete and are being replaced by newer dynamic paradigms that involve disk-to-disk, virtual server provisioning, sophisticated data deduplication, and appliance-based operations.

Syncsort has identified four primary business imperatives in the realm of data protection:

• Provide Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This is the traditional concern of mitigating exposure to information loss. However it has grown more complicated as “24/7”, “global economy”, and “open source” have become standard business mantras. Of paramount importance is overcoming the hurdles associated with backup window requirements, application performance, reliability and consistency, and recovery time.
• Streamline Process Management and Increase Productivity. As staff and resources become overburdened, companies are refocusing on process management. Easing critical pressure points is often the catalyst to surviving a difficult fiscal climate.
• Contain Storage and Server Costs. Controlling cost of operations has become a top priority for many organizations. With data growing at exponential rates, these costs can easily mushroom.
• Support IT Infrastructure Consolidation. Today’s data protection architecture seems to be intrinsically broken – as characterized by slow backups, complex recoveries, compromised application performance, and difficult resource administration. IT infrastructure consolidation including server virtualization magnifies the problems and elevates the rearchitecture of storage and data protection as a priority. Finding high performing, easy-to-use, scalable data protection remains a key imperative. Further, system migration of production servers and critical applications to a virtual environment are likely to be costly and painful unless an easy and minimum-impact solution to migration is built into the re-architecture. A variety of data protection products have emerged which address each of these imperatives in different ways. Yet almost all are either narrowly focused or are rooted in the outmoded, mechanical backup/restore model.

This paper describes an innovative, unified data protection model – developed by Syncsort – that not only supports each of these imperatives, but leverages them to provide actual return on your business investments.