By Sherry Davenport, Senior Marketing Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
It’s time again for annual reviews, joy of joys. They generally (or at least are intended to) lead to reflections, resolutions and new beginnings. Now, this whole “looking back” thing may sound clichéd, but there’s some real value in doing it – if you’re honest.
From a business perspective and, in particular, as a backup administrator, it’s a good opportunity to consider your successes over the last year. You should take pride in your accomplishments and also take time to think about what could be done to make things even better. But with that comes the charge to determine where you have gaps. And, it’s time to propose what needs to be refreshed, updated, dispensed of, etc. in the areas of equipment, business practices, and/or software. in other words, you are developing your game plan for 2013.
If you’re like many organizations, you’re probably managing the backup of a complex environment that includes many different client systems, storage systems and protocols, applications, and SLAs. Many are mission critical so control counts. A recent study by The InfoPro/451 Group indicated that, while tape as a backup destination is shrinking in usage, it still makes up 50% of total backup used, with snapshots/disk and deduplication making up another 46%. And, the use of hypervisors, such as VMware and Hyper-V, is pervasive; therefore initiatives such as server consolidation and virtualization are still the top drivers for storage growth.
But how does this affect you? Well, as compute environments get more complex, so does the work to attempt to protect them. Having a backup management application that can help you easily manage, monitor, and catalog all of these types of workflows is key to your success. EMC products, like NetWorker, offer a centralized console that gives you that visibility. Features such as configuration wizards, pre-configured reports, event-based backups, and integral support for data deduplication all contribute to reducing management complexity.
This month marks the six month birthday for the new NetWorker 8—the timeframe that many organizations wait before considering deployment. Take a look at the additional features and support available in NetWorker 8.0 Service Pack 1 and join the conversation in the NetWorker Online Community. Feel free to leave comments here as well—we’d love to hear from you!
