I have just published a short white paper for Cohesity on how to simplify the backup process thanks to Hyperconverged Secondary Storage and I’m sharing the beginning of the paper here in this post.

Cohesity is one of the few players that is really trying to do something different about capacity-driven storage, and this is why I like their idea so much. Providing a single large repository for all secondary storage needs (including advanced data services and integrated analytics to take full advantage of it) is a really compelling idea and this is why I was excited to write these papers for them (here the other one).

How to Massively Simplify Data Protection for VMware

Backup is still today a major concern to end-users when it comes to IT operations, and the bigger the organization, the greater the issues. The underlying reasons for data protection issues, and for backup issues in particular, still lie in the backup process itself.
Most enterprise backup software was born before the virtualization era. It is complex to operate, with user interfaces and schedulers being all but user friendly. This is a consequence of the complicated software architecture built on agents, servers, media managers, and so forth. Furthermore, the backup process, when not fully integrated with the various software and hardware layers, can be intrusive and impact the
performance of the production environment during the back up.

The overall cost of these solutions is high – you need to develop and maintain operational skills, and the software licenses are rigid and expensive. With this high complexity and cost, you’d expect these solutions to provide the desired restoration SLA’s. In fact, and especially for VMware environments, it is quite unlikely to achieve instant recovery functionality for VMs or for single files stored in them. This current scenario is becoming even less attractive as most solutions cannot offer effective cloud options for additional capacity, evaulting,
archiving or disaster recovery. This limits your ability to take advantage of the continuously-shrinking price and flexibility of the cloud.
At the same time, the rest of the infrastructure is evolving drastically towards hyperconvergence.

Now, with the exponential growth of storage capacity and the number of VMs under management, infrastructure simplification is a must. Simplicity helps to scale and ease IT operations. As a consequence, IT organizations now desire to hire more general purpose system administrators than in the past, professionals who are inclined to standardize on VMware-aware infrastructure, or at least VMware-integrated to simplify their day-to-day job.
Backup, and data protection in general, must follow the same trend as the rest of the infrastructure, where compute and storage are collapsed together and become much more transparent and easy to use. Hyperconverged secondary storage has the same characteristics and benefits as hyperconverged infrastructure if implemented correctly, but instead of providing compute resources to the hypervisor, the
compute component delivers advanced backup, file services, and analytics…

If you want to continue the reading, download the full white paper here.

TU-300X250-C-AIf you want to know more about this topic, I’ll be presenting at next TECHunplugged conferences in Amsterdam (6/Oct) and Chicago (27/Oct). A one day event focused on cloud computing and IT infrastructure with an innovative formula combines a group of independent, insightful and well-recognized bloggers with disruptive technology vendors and end users who manage rich technology environments. Join us!