Native Data Protection with SimpliVity. Solution Brief

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1 Native Data Protection with SimpliVity Solution Brief SimpliVity is the market-leading hyperconverged infrastructure that delivers native data protection. A fundamental requirement of hyperconvergence, SimpliVity s native data protection eliminates the need for third-party backup and replication software and hardware making SimpliVity the only true hyperconverged infrastructure solution. Data protection is the process of making a secondary copy of data on-premises and off-premises so that business operations may continue if the primary copy of data is lost. Data protection is a topic of major significance in IT organizations today: Key Benefits: Minimal impact fast restores File-level & object-level restore Longer retention Storage & resource efficiency WAN optimization Simplified ROBO management Operational efficiency Lower TCO Guarantee IT continuity: Ensure the ability to return systems, applications, and data to their most recent and consistent state before an interruption Limit risk: Prevent business disruption and financial loss Meet service level agreements and objectives (SLAs, SLOs): Restore business operations within pre-established timeframe, including recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), as negotiated with line of business (LOB) application owners According to a survey conducted by Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), improving data backup and recovery was listed as the number one IT priority over the next twelve months 1. Additionally, an ESG survey revealed that hardware costs and data protection are the top two challenges faced in storage environments, respectively 2. As IT organizations continue to virtualize more of their missioncritical applications, the data protection strategy once associated with those applications, and the archaic underlying data structures of the legacy stack (LUNs, volumes, etc.) must be transformed to align with virtual machines. 1 ESG Research Report, 2014 IT Spending Intentions Survey. February ESG Research Report, 2013 Top 10 Challenges Faced in Storage Environments Today.

2 Data protection modernization is a top initiative for many IT organizations that have virtualized or are planning to virtualize their datacenters. Virtualization is a change event which creates opportunities for next-generation data protection. Before Virtualization Array-based snapshots: a. LUN on a SAN array held data from a single server b. Snapshot per workload c. Can get application-consistent backup d. Can get fine-grained recovery of items After Virtualization Difficult to efficiently capture array-based snapshots: a. Multiple VMs data pooled together in a single datastore on a LUN on a SAN array b. Snapshot includes a mix of workloads c. Difficult to get application-consistent backup In the typical data center, many disparate products software applications and appliances are required in order to address the data protection challenge: There are several factors to consider for an effective data protection strategy: How the copy is made? Where is the copy stored? How long it is retained? How frequently are copies made? How much has to be copied? How much time does it take to make the copy? What impact will production applications face? How are backup windows met? How are RPO and RTOs met? How are fast and successful restores ensured? How is cost limited? How to manage multiple vendors? How to ensure interoperability? 2

3 Common Challenges with Data Protection 1. Data growth: a. Difficult or impossible to complete backup within available windows b. Unable to meet defined RPO and RTO service level agreements c. Difficult to retain data for more than 30 days is difficult, even with purpose built appliances 2. Remote sites: a. Often outdated infrastructure or limited IT expertise b. Difficult or impossible to manage centrally c. Prohibitively expensive WAN bandwidth 3. Virtualization breaks traditional processes: a. Traditional infrastructure was built for the LUN or Volume, not the VM b. The legacy stack often includes many products, from deduplication target appliances to multiple backup applications across tiers or sites 4. Resource constraints: a. Application-based data protection technologies rob CPU and memory resources from production VMs b. It is a tradeoff: either backup the data and starve the applications from needed CPU / memory; or reserve the resource for the applications but put the data at risk. 5. Restores: a. Restore times, both local and remote, are huge issues with all existing data protection solutions. Even if the organization is leveraging source-side deduplication, it would take potentially days to complete a restore in the event of a remote site outage. 6. Tape: a. As much as the industry has proclaimed, tape is dead, it is still out there and in use by many customers. b. The time to restore data from tape poses significant risk to business continuity, especially if the tape is at a remote location c. Tape increases both capital expenses (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX) d. Keeping track of unsuccessful backups from multiple machines makes management difficult 7. Cost: a. Today s multitude of data protection applications and appliances are expensive. Customers often have multiple appliances and even separate applications: potentially one for tier 1, one for tier 2, one for the remote sites and one for the virtual environment. b. Support renewals alone can often cost in the tens of thousands of dollars per year or more. The SimpliVity Solution Hyperconvergence SimpliVity s solution is the revolutionary hyperconverged platform a scalable, modular 2U building block of x86 resources that offers all the functionality of traditional IT infrastructure in one device. SimpliVity s solution is an all-in-one, IT infrastructure platform that includes storage, compute, networking, hypervisor, real-time deduplication, compression, and optimization, along with powerful global unified management, data protection, and disaster recovery capabilities. SimpliVity s hyperconverged infrastructure delivers the best of both worlds: x86 cloud economics with critical enterprise capabilities. It uniquely includes native data protection, including both local and remote backup and disaster recovery. According to a survey of 3,300 IT decision makers, businesses using three or more vendors to supple data protection solutions lost three times as much data as those who unified their data 3

4 protection strategy around a single vendor 3. SimpliVity allows for a complete data protection strategy within one all-encompassing solution. SimpliVity s native VM-level backup, restore, and disaster recovery capabilities ensure data protection of organizations most critical data assets. Specific capabilities include: All backups and restores are full logical backups with no performance impact. When SimpliVity creates a new local backup, IOPS are not consumed since the creation of the backup is simply a metadata update. All backups are managed as logically independent objects allowing for unique policies without any sort of tie to a master or Gold Copy. A full logical backup at the speed of a traditional snapshot. All backups are deduplicated, compressed and optimization across the global federation. If a backup is sent to a remote site only unique blocks are sent, saving on WAN bandwidth, remote processing, and IOPS. Cloning operations on running VMs! are instantaneous. SimpliVity s data efficiency is once and forever. Simply right-click a VM within vcenter and press clone, and a poweredoff copy of that running VM will be created immediately, without any I/O or impact to production. Benefits of SimpliVity s Native Data Protection 1. Simplification: SimpliVity is a single vendor solution delivering hyperconvergence based on its own homegrown code and intellectual property. OmniCube is developed, delivered, and supported by SimpliVity, which streamlines acquisition, deployment, management and support. This also reduces complexity, interoperability issues, and operational expenses. 2. Operational efficiency: SimpliVity enables VM-centric management all data protection policies are set at the VM level, globally from one single interface VMware vcenter. This puts control into the hands of the VM administrator, alleviates the data protection strategy challenges that arise with virtualization, and increases operational efficiency. 3. Resource efficiency: SimpliVity s OmniStack Accelerator card, a PCIe-based card, purposebuilt by SimpliVity, provides the processing power for deduplication, compression and optimization and reserves the x86 CPU resources to run production VMs. With SimpliVity, data efficiency is processed at inception, once and forever, meaning the same data element is only ever processed once versus as many as nine times with traditional infrastructure. 4. Business Continuity of Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO): SimpliVity provides global unified management whereby administrators can centrally manage data protection and ensure business continuity for remote sites. Furthermore, SimpliVity provides native, full backup and recovery of VMs and replication backups between hyperconverged infrastructure nodes in the federation to improve RPOs and RTOs. Backup policies established at the VM level dictate the frequency of VM copies, the storage destination (local, remote site, or cloud), retention time, and preference for application consistent copies. 5. Minimal impact fast restores: SimpliVity offers high availability and the power to restore VMs with no downtime. Array-based backups that are based on snapshots are oftentimes dependent on previous snapshots. A SimpliVity backup is a fully independent point-in-time backup with no dependencies. This enables SimpliVity to ensure reliable restores with less impact on the production environment. 3 Vanson Bourne, EMC Global Data Protection Index

5 6. Retention: SimpliVity allows for significantly longer data retention when compared to legacy purpose-built solutions. In many cases, SimpliVity can retain data for years while backup admins using point solutions typically struggle retaining data for just thirty days. 7. Storage efficiency: With inline deduplication, compression, and optimization, SimpliVity eliminates IOPS across the entire infrastructure stack including backup and replication and improves storage efficiency. 8. WAN optimization: SimpliVity eliminates all redundant data before sending it over the WAN. As SimpliVity reduces IOPS requirements and improves performance by writing and reading less data to and from the disk, it effectively improves overall bandwidth efficiency and solves challenges with WAN. 9. File-level restore: SimpliVity offers File-Level Restore (FLR) enabling the restore of a single file or group of files from any VM within the environment including local, remote, and cloud. With this, customers can truly leverage SimpliVity, and SimpliVity alone for their data protection needs. 10. Object / Mailbox level: SimpliVity, with its partner Kroll Ontrack, offers object-level restore for databases like SQL Server, file directory, mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange, etc. Objectlevel restore, combined with file-level restore, SimpliVity provides more granular restores for a complete data protection strategy. 11. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): SimpliVity s hyperconverged platform eliminates the need for separate backup and disaster recovery applications, which significantly reduces CAPEX, and as well as the complexity of managing infrastructure. Additionally, there are significant OPEX benefits of hyperconvergence. The smaller physical footprint and simplified operations of not only data protection but also data management in general, result in lower TCO accounting for support, maintenance, bandwidth, power and cooling, and administrative expenses. Customer Testimonials The largest energy company in the Southern Hemisphere invested in SimpliVity s hyperconverged solution for its offshore ships Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO). The customer was struggling with aging infrastructure and needed to deploy and remotely manage a solution on a ship, 200 miles offshore, with no IT personnel onboard. There was no existing offsite data protection strategy, and offsite replication was a challenge with satellite uplinks. The service level agreements namely the RPO and RTO targets were not being met by the existing legacy data protection applications and tape-based backups. This organization s arguably most important, and potentially most expensive, asset was simply not being protected, putting the company at great financial and business risk. SimpliVity introduced its hyperconverged system, offering all IT below the hypervisor, including native data protection. The OmniCubes were tested in the customer s environment with typical FPSO workloads and the customer was very impressed with SimpliVity s performance compared to their legacy vendor. After deploying OmniCubes, the customer decreased their RTOs by 10x, and improved RPOs from several hours to just a few minutes. Because of OmniCube s global unified management, a single administrator can oversee operations from within vcenter and easily deliver remote management onboard the FPSO ship. SimpliVity allowed this customer to 5

6 achieve an offsite data protection strategy and DR capabilities for a ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico without any IT personnel onboard. Top ranked national engineering and technical university, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), deployed SimpliVity s OmniCubes with data efficiency and native, policy-based data protection. Like many IT organizations, the IT staff at WPI has to be very efficient to handle all the application and infrastructure requests from over 5,000 students and faculty across campus. WPI was looking to create Infrastructure as a Service with critical requirements like always on availability, agile deployment models, and a campus-wide DR strategy. With SimpliVity, WPI benefits from global unified management from a single interface within vcenter, native, efficient, and optimized VM backup and recovery for a mix of Windows and UNIX applications, high availability, and the ability to quickly and efficiently scale-up new applications. With OmniCube, we significantly improved our application uptime, RPO, and RTO while reducing our infrastructure costs by more than half. Jon Bartelson, WPI Associate CIO To read more please view our case studies and our TechValidate results. Solution Summary SimpliVity delivers native data protection with a globally federated hyperconverged IT platform that enables VM-centric global management of all VMs, their data, and the underlying infrastructure. SimpliVity recognizes the need for business applications to be managed and protected at the VM level to ensure the highest levels of availability and to execute on strict RPOs and RTOs. SimpliVity uniquely provides all IT below the hypervisor, drastically simplifying the management and protection of VMs and increasing the operational efficiency of IT organizations while helping reduce business risk. 6