HOW TO PROTECT HYBRID IT

by George Crump

Hybrid IT is the by-product of organizations that are trying to become more data driven. A data driven

organization requires operational flexibility and needs to be able to store and manipulate data in a variety of

locations, including the primary data center, distributed data centers, remote offices and the cloud. The

diversification of data locations puts new strains on data protection. It is necessary to make decisions on how

best to protect and store protected data. Many organizations start their Hybrid IT journey with the cloud as their

choice for those decisions. Those that have already gone down this road quickly learn that while the cloud has its

place it is not the complete answer that they thought it might be.

As a by-product of organizations striving to become more data driven, hybrid IT often involves a mixing of

modern applications and infrastructures with legacy architectures that continue to serve the organization.

Modern applications include environments like Cassandra, Couchbase, Spark and Splunk. New infrastructures

include hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), Docker and Kubernetes containers as well as the cloud. To some

extent, even virtualization via VMware and Hyper-V can still be considered a new infrastructure when compared

to legacy 1 application, 1 server, bare metal architectures.

Ideally, IT wants the flexibility to move both legacy and modern applications between these infrastructures as

needed. That means that either data has to move with the application or it has to connect back to the original

location. From a data protection standpoint, the data protection solution needs to be able to follow the data, to

ensure it is continuously protecting that data.

W H A T I S H Y B R I D I T ?

Hybrid IT is the by-product of organizations that are trying to become more data driven.

As the organization becomes more data driven, data becomes more critical to the organization, to the point that

users legitimately can’t function without access to it. In addition to being able to follow the data, the data

protection software needs to frequently and rapidly protect data as well as provide the ability to recover data

quickly in any of the various locations that the organization may have.

There are four key challenges that Hybrid IT places on the data protection process; Data Fragmentation, Cloud

Mobility, Data Growth and Long Term Retention. Each of these by themselves can seriously hinder an

organization’s ability to protect the environment adequately and puts the data driven organization at risk,

combined they can send the data protection process into utter disarray. It is important that IT planners

understand them and specifically address each one.

As the data center modernizes to meet the requirements of a data driven organization one of the goals is for the

IT infrastructure to become more self-service. The increasingly self-service nature of the data center means that

users can create new workloads and move those workloads without core IT involvement. The data protection

team could be totally unaware of an important or even critical data set being manipulated or moved.

THE DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES OF HYBRID IT

D A T A F R A G M E N T A T I O N

The first challenge presented by Hybrid IT is that data is everywhere. In the past the bulk of the data typically

resided in one primary data center and the only external data concerns were a few small remote offices. Now, the

data driven organization needs to contend with multiple data centers, multiple clouds, remote offices of all sizes

and a mobile workforce carrying unique data.

IT planners need a data protection solution that can support the various locations where data can now reside. In

addition the data protection solution needs to be able to efficiently move that data between locations so it creates

either a central repository or supports multiple data repositories. Given that most of the connectivity between

offices, data centers and the cloud is via the Internet, in addition to efficiency the modern data protection solution

also needs to provide security.

IT Planners should look for data protection solutions that also enable the organization to recover data from one

location to another in an easy, almost push button fashion.

C L O U D M O B I L I T Y

C L O U D M O B I L I T Y CONTINUED

IT planners need to look for data protection solutions that can identify the creation of an application and add it

and its data to a data protection job list. This detection requires the data protection solution to interface with the

various hypervisors and management platforms so they detect the creation of new workloads and data sets. The

same goes for storage systems. The data protection software needs to integrate with those systems to detect new

volumes upon their creation. In some cases the data protection solution might very well dictate which storage

solutions the organization can consider.

The data protection application also needs to detect the relocation of an application and adjust its data

protection process accordingly. For example, the data protection application may need to re-target backup jobs

to a more local back storage area either at the new premises or in the cloud with the application.

Data is growing and the rate of growth is getting more severe each year. While users are creating more and

larger files, new sources like IoT devices and other machine-generated data sets fuel the bulk of data growth.

Compounding the growth rate of data is the increase

in retention requirements to meet not only government

regulations but also an internal desire to leverage old

data on future projects, part of the data driven reality.

Most of the growth in data is incremental, so the

challenge for the data protection application is not just

backing up today’s new data but managing

yesterday’s old data. The data protection application’s

index and cataloging system handles the data

management aspect of data protection. These

capabilities enable administrators to not only find data

when recovery is needed but also to make sure that

data is retained as long as is required and only as long

as is required. The data protection application needs a

scalable meta-data engine that can meet these

requirements.

T H E D A T A G R O W T H A N D R E T E N T I O N C H A L L E N G E

HYBRID IT MEANS NEXT GENERATION CAPABILITIES

As the organization and data center continues to

modernize, IT will have new expectations for the data

protection environment. The first is a high level of

automation. IT staff is already stretched too thin and

most organizations can’t hire to keep up with growth.

To keep up IT needs to automate the mundane tasks so

it can meet the complex multi-step configuration needs

with a single click. They also need the data protection

solution to integrate into other management systems

both on-premises and in the cloud.

IT planners need to look for solutions that provide a

RESTful API to perform both the automation and

integration work. These programmatic interfaces

enable best of breed solutions to communicate with

each other enabling IT to get out of the mundane

repetitive tasks of the data center.

The latest capability that data protection solutions

should be adding is predictive analytics and root cause

analysis. IT can’t afford for a system to break before it

realizes there is a problem and it can’t spend hours

hunting down the source of the problem once it has

been identified. The next generation of data protection

solutions analyze itself alerting IT to potential problems

before they occur. It will also require that upon

identifying a potential future problem it must provide

specific root cause analysis, leading IT directly to the

source of the problem.

IT can’t afford for a system to break before it realizes there is a problem

Data protection applications create and log a tremendous amount of data and are an ideal source to feed the

analytic process. This is more than just data about the actual data it is protecting (modified date, access date,

file type, location) but also data about the process itself (transfer time, transfer size). The data protection

solution needs to leverage machine-learning type functions to provide the analytics and then use AI type

functions to help IT with root cause analysis.

STORAGESWISS TAKE

Hybrid IT is the engine that will drive the organization

to a data driven future but it creates new challenges in

terms of data protection. IT planners need to address these

challenges up front as the data driven process unfolds so that

the path to data center modernization does not interrupt

organizational progress.

ABOUT US

Storage Switzerland is an analyst firm focused on the storage, virtualization and cloud marketplaces. Our goal is to educate IT Professionals on the various technologies and techniques available to help their applications scale further, perform better and be better protected. The results of this research can be found in the articles, videos, webinars, product analysis and case studies on our website storageswiss.com

George Crump is President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. With over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one the nation’s largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.

Micro Focus Data Protection includes a range of solutions that enable an adaptable, smart backup and recovery environment, which can evolve with your business. It enables you to take action in real time, based on insights into your backup data. With an agile, adaptable backup infrastructure, you can confi-dently deal with the infrastructure complexities and uptime challenges of your business, such as 24x7 operations, hybrid IT, continued growth of data, technology disruptions, and increas-ingly demanding recovery objectives. The suite facilitates a deep, 360-degree analysis of the backup environment and its processes via insights, allowing you to adapt and tune your environment to run at optimum levels.