Eliminate sprawl and regain visibility and protection of your business data

Enterprise businesses everywhere are facing a common challenge: how to manage increasing volumes of critical business data efficiently and within budget, power and space limitations. With multiple servers taking up ever more space and consuming more resources than necessary, server sprawl is a major barrier to success.

One of the most common instances of server sprawl arises when businesses purchase a large number of servers in order to dedicate individual appliances to single applications. Sprawl is damaging because it wastes resources, limits storage capacity, reduces protection and hinders visibility and management of data. This shackles scalability and can damage network performance, increase security risks and incur unnecessary costs.

As the huge increase in data volume trend continues apace, it’s becoming clear that while more may sound better, it rarely improves an organisation’s ability to manage data to just throw hardware at the problem. Having multiple systems in a data protection environment not only makes it harder to manage data retention periods, it also increases the cost of adding more networking connectivity and bandwidth, as well as raising implementation and training costs. Extra physical space is required, on-going management and support costs increase, and there may also be complex issues of aggregating data from multiple systems. All of these issues make it increasingly more difficult for pressured IT managers to meet fixed or shrinking backup windows.

The speed at which enterprise backup environments are currently growing is astonishing, and large enterprises spend a great deal of time and resources on effective and efficient backup and recovery solutions. Data deduplication technology is driving the adoption of enterprise-class disk backup platforms because it allows the disk array total cost of ownership (TCO) to compete favourably with that of tape. Platforms that have the ability to emulate tape incur no additional operation changes. In fact, operational support of backup data is actually reduced by replacing tape with disk because many administrative functions are eliminated.

If IT managers want to regain control of exponential data growth and their data centres while avoiding detrimental data sprawl, then these issues must be addressed and the traditional ways of thinking must be shifted towards a more efficient solution. When selecting a platform to manage your organisation’s data, one of your primary considerations should always be the ability to scale performance and capacity independently in a comprehensive data protection platform.

Specialised backup and recovery solutions are designed specifically to cope with these excessive data volumes. Purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) backup, deduplicate, encrypt and restore data in a rapid and efficient manner without disrupting existing backup infrastructure. By implementing a single deduplication-enabled, disk-based platform, it’s possible to shrink backup windows, extend data protection capabilities and reduce recovery times for essential business applications.