As any good wife would do, my wife has been dragging me to yoga classes over the last year and a half. Of course, she is doing this because she is concerned about my health and well-being like any good wife would be. At first I was okay with this. I mean, how bad it could it be?
Boy was I surprised. The type of yoga my wife had me doing involved a room heated to 105 degrees with 40% humidity. Yes, we’re talking the kind of heat that makes data center administrators faint—and not from heat stroke. So, why subject your body to such heat. One answer. Flexibility. When your body is warm, it is more flexible, which allows you to reach, as they say in yoga speak, “the full expression of the postures.” Of course, there are secondary benefits of this type of environment, but we’ll leave that discussion to another post on another day.
What does this all have to do with backup? A lot, as it turns out. Today, backup administrators are faced with all types of data – structured, unstructured, big data, small data, and everything in-between – and this necessitates a flexible approach to backup. The days of “one-backup-approach-for-all” are long gone, or should be. Take capacity optimization solutions like deduplication. There are client-side (where backup data is deduped on the client system before the backup data is sent across the wire to disk) and target-based (where backup data is sent to a target appliance first and then deduped) options. While both are great solutions in their own right, they each have specific strength in certain use cases.
For example, for very large databases with high change rates, the target-based approach is probably best, but for virtual desktops or larger quantity of smaller-sized application servers client-side deduplication may be better suited. A flexible backup approach allows organizations to leverage both as needed, depending on application, data and business requirements.
So, I’m guessing you may be thinking that two deduplication approaches means double the training, administration and management. But it doesn’t. Flexible (there’s that word again!) solutions exist that, through integration, allow you to leverage features and functionality (such as dedupe) in one simple, streamlined process. Implementation is simple and from a policy management perspective the choice on how deduplication is applied to data sets is determined with a simple checkbox from a single user Interface.
You’ve asked for backups solutions that are “flexible and make it easy and simple to incorporate in your environment and streamline your backup management,” and we’ve heard you. We’ve been working hard, and the response has been terrific. See you at the yoga studio?
