technologies have taken storage, a once relatively boring element of data center infrastructure, and turned it into a ..
Pure Storage and Commvault: Understand and Protect FLASH STORAGE TRANSFORMATION IS WELL UNDERWAY. COMMVAULT WITH SNAPSHOT MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY IS POSITIONED TO HELP YOU MAXIMIZE THE VALUE OF PURE STORAGE ALL-FLASH ARRAYS. Driven by a rapidly changing business climate, your IT demands are in a constant state of evolution. The challenges are many: servicing a broad mix of both legacy and new applications, demands for agility to support evershortening development cycles, and the never-ending requirement to do more with less are challenging existing paradigms. Simply put, old approaches are too slow to cope, so performance is under scrutiny, becoming a core metric across all datacenter components, storage included. But there’s good news. Over the past five years, new technologies have taken storage, a once relatively boring element of data center infrastructure, and turned it into a hotbed of innovation and new possibility.
Years ago, storage was a category where innovation came down to capacity gains – disks grew, but didn’t really get faster. For years, performance/drive was essentially stuck in neutral, forcing organizations to purchase more and more drives to align with ever-evolving needs for more performance. That forced organizations to manage many disks and many arrays – with fewer and fewer key workloads per array. In short, the old approach was inefficient, costly, and complicated. But now the situation has changed.
CHANGING POSSIBILITIES Instead of being forced to install, setup, monitor, manage, and repair thousands of spinning disks across dozens of arrays, you have opportunities to multiply your storage performance by choosing the exponential gains derived from flash technologies. Flash technologies – essentially memory – offer performance/GB that’s hundreds or thousands of times faster than a spinning disk – making hard drives a thing of the past for performance applications. To make matters better, organizations that adopt flash are also enjoying reductions in CapEx and OpEx – because fewer arrays are needed to deliver necessary performance. An array can support more workloads – because performance isn’t restricted by the limits of RPM. In years past, flash costs limited its use to a single workload that demanded very high performance. Today there’s a trend, driven by reduced costs and capacity gains, toward consolidating many or all workloads onto all-flash arrays (AFA). This trend has caused customers to focus on not only performance, but also other key factors that support mixed workload consolidation like scalability, rich data services, ease of use, and integration into public and private clouds.
EXPLORING PURE STORAGE One of the all-flash array vendors leading the charge is Pure Storage – an innovator in all-flash solutions for organizations of all sizes. Pure Storage aims to rethink storage by bringing to bear innovative data storage technology that pays for itself in just over a year.2 Pure Storage is enjoying wide adoption because their FlashArray line of storage systems enables customers like you to improve storage and application performance while simultaneously reducing your storage footprint. Unlike some vendors, FlashArray combines the high throughput and low latency of flash storage with built-in deduplication and compression for capacity optimization. Pure Storage arrays are proven to provide extremely high application performance with effective density as high as 40TB per rack unit. And in another example of breaking through
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1 http://info.purestorage.com/rs/purestorage/images/Flash-Buyers-Guide-Enterprise-Storage.pdf 2 https://www.purestorage.com/resources/type-a/2014Q3-Global-TEI-Report_Request-M1.html
THE ARRAY GAME HAS CHANGED Initially, all-flash arrays lacked enterprise-class capacity and functionality; they were used to accelerate performance of niche applications or mask HDD performance bottlenecks. Today’s all-flash array capacities, physical characteristics, application, features and endurance now rival those of market-leading HDD arrays.
ENTERPRISES ARE ADOPTING ALL-FLASH ARRAYS To date well over 70% of organizations are using flash in mission-critical production environments.1 The resulting All-Flash Array (AFA) market is one of the fastest growing segments of the overall external enterprise storage market, and with a compound annual growth rate of 46.1% will swell to $3.3B in revenue by 2018.1
5 Reasons Your Storage Snapshots Aren't Working Despite the efficiency benefits of hardware arraybased snapshots, their complexities pose it with many challenges.
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old paradigms, in addition to high performance and density, FlashArray is designed to be simple to buy, deploy and manage. But flash technology comes with a basic challenge. Dozens or even hundreds of workloads can reside on one array, and as such, data protection becomes incredibly complex. Old paradigms of data protection, such as backup to tape, or even backup to disk, simply struggle to adapt to the performance of flash, can’t cope with the number of workloads, and can’t be trusted with mission-critical workloads. There’s a domino effect – the performance gains of flash break old data protection technologies. Pure Storage sees the challenge, and that’s one of the reasons why they offer integrated FlashRecover snapshots with their products. Snapshots are the right approach for protecting all-flash arrays because snapshots are very fast and are stored locally, on array capacity, in a native data format. The Pure Storage snapshot implementation is highly efficient, agile, and resilient for superior value. FLASHRECOVER CAPABILITIES INCLUDE: SNAP ANY VOLUME AT ANY TIME Snapshot any volume or group of volumes at the click of a mouse. No planning or reservations required, no need to worry about performance overhead. SNAPSHOTS HAVE FULL CAPABILITIES Snapshots in the FlashArray are volumes, virtual and independent, so mount, read, write, or snapshot your snapshot again – no limitations, full performance. ALWAYS FULL YET SPACE SAVING Forget choosing between snapshots and clones. All snapshots function like full clones, but they are thin, deduped, and compressed for maximum efficiency.
“The Pure Storage FlashArray was given top spot by IDC in a recent AFA MarketScape. IDC was complimentary of Pure for its earlier market entrance, its inline data reduction, ability to perform inplace upgrades across technology generations and customer satisfaction.” INFOSTOR ALL-FLASH ARRAY BUYING GUIDE, March 2016
RECOVER ANYTHING TO ANYWHERE Instantly recover any volume from any other volume or snapshot in the array. Recoveries include an automated fail-back snapshot of the original – just in case.
THE NEXT STEP: COMMVAULT FlashRecover snapshots are flexible and efficient, but any snapshot process focused on volumes has its limits. Snapshots are limited to a single array, snapshots aren’t application aware without scripting or integration, and often require manual processes. There’s a growing need among organizations to go beyond these limits. An ideal solution would be data protection that is built for all-flash arrays, leverages native snapshots, but that integrates all the capabilities, flexibility, and maturity of traditional backup and recovery software.
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Our customers tell us that Commvault software offers the best way forward. A few years ago, Commvault introduced a new technology – snapshot management technology that integrates array-based snapshots with a broad set of applications, databases, and hypervisors for simple application-focused protection. And rather than being limited to only recovering a volume or flat file, Commvault's snapshot management technology offers fully granular recovery, down to the level of a single email or a table in a database – and snapshot integrations optimizes recovery efficiency. Our approach combines the market leading data protection capabilities of Commvault software with the efficiency and value of Pure Storage. By adding orchestration, application awareness, and functional value to FlashRecover snapshots, you can rely on Commvault technology for new levels of versatility, flexibility and enhanced resilience for your environments. WHAT CAN COMMVAULT SNAPSHOT MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY OFFER?
Commvault a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant – Again3 For six years running, Commvault has been listed by Gartner as a Leader for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances
AWARENESS • It delivers application integration, including DB2, Exchange, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL – and more. • It’s hypervisor aware, supporting VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V: plus others. • It comes with support for a wide range of operating systems, including AIX, FreeBSD, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows. • It delivers integrated off-host snapshot indexing, accelerating rapid, universal search. BACKUP AND RECOVERY • It can quickly quiesce live data, take a snapshot, and then resume live operations – in seconds. • It can snapshot workloads without disrupting a traditional backup strategy – boosting resilience. • It offers a way to leverage snapshots for full, incremental, or differential backups – with policy based retention. • Snapshots are managed directly from the backup and recovery console – a single pane of glass with two clicks to set up a new snapshot. VERSATILITY • It can manage taking a snapshot, then using that snap for collecting a backup copy, test/dev, or running reports to name a few possibilities. • It delivers end user access to data for self-service restore, diminishing IT workloads while boosting productivity. • It automates complex data refresh operations, leveraging snapshots for non-production copies. SIMPLICITY • It offers fully automated execution and workflow automation for custom tasks – without scripting. • It allows centralized management for snapshots on multiple arrays. • It includes automated VM, database and server discovery with the ability to automatically apply a protection policy when found.
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3 Gartner Inc. “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software” By Dave Russell, Robert Rhame, Pushan Rinnen. June 2016.
CLARITY • It includes comprehensive monitoring and alerts. • It delivers a full suite of reports for management and planning. • It offers ownership delegation and user tracking.
CONCLUSION The economic benefits of all-flash arrays result in a total cost of ownership (TCO) that is easily 50% to 80% lower than that of a comparably configured HDD-based system.1 These economic benefits derive from a reduced number of arrays, reduced power and cooling requirements, and lower licensing costs. But those TCO gains could be undermined by inadequate data protection. Massive data loss or the complexity of managing several unintegrated protection tools could reduce the cost benefits of flash. With Commvault integrated data protection that delivers a robust set of protection approaches, including application-aware, superior snapshot orchestration, and better monitoring/management capabilities, you can increase resilience and mitigate risk by protecting and recovering data quickly – from one console. You also have a new way to support alternate workloads, like reporting, test/dev, and analytics by creating snapshots and instantly mounting them elsewhere. To put it simply, Commvault snapshot management technology comes from the Commvault® Data Platform, which provides versatility through its application-aware snapshot management umbrella. By combining Pure FlashArray storage with Commvault software, you can optimize the value of your Pure Storage investment while simultaneously reducing risk and management overhead by eliminating manual, tedious and error-prone tasks, including creating and maintaining scripts or manually identifying data for recovery. Choosing a data protection product like Commvault’s software is the key to gaining maximum value from an all-flash array, by ensuring that all data sets are: • Automatically protected • Available for secondary tasks • Easily managed • Available for fast, granular recovery 24x7
Together, Commvault and Pure Storage offer everything you need — whether you’re working in VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or other critical application environments. For more information, visit commvault.com/purestorage.
© 2016 Commvault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Commvault, Commvault and logo, the “C hexagon” logo, Commvault Systems, Commvault OnePass, CommServe, CommCell, IntelliSnap, Commvault Edge, and Edge Drive, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Commvault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
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