Solutions SnapProtect

Business Challenge: Maximizing Usage of Snapshot Technology to Meet Today’s Recovery, Cost and Data Retention Requirements

Many organizations utilize storage-array-based snapshot technology to create point-in-time copies to protect and provide online access to data. While snapshot technology provides advantages, fully leveraging these capabilities to meet today’s recovery requirements often introduces a new set of challenges to ensure that copies of data can be managed across tiers of storage and tape to meet retention, cost and recovery requirements.

Solution “bandages” often involve a combination of creating and maintaining complex scripting and having to independently manage multiple products and technologies. These technologies can include numerous application-based “Snap” management products, data movement technologies, archive and backup products that are required to ensure data can be moved from tier-to-tier, location-to-location and finally off to tape. Even then, without consistent cataloging and management across disparate storage systems and tape, recovering this data is a tedious, extremely manual and time consuming process. Today, administrators with varying expertise are often forced to recover data back across tiers of storage onto production systems and then manually ensure that the application data is in a consistent state and at its most recent recovery point.

Simpana® SnapProtect™ Technology: Industry-Leading Snapshot Integration and Application Protection

SnapProtect™ technology leverages native snapshot capabilities built into storage arrays to create and manage application-consistent, validated, point-in-time recovery copies across tiers of storage—including tape—for rapid recovery. Through a centralized management interface, customers can easily define policies to manage, protect and recover Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP data across tiers of storage, while still leveraging underlying array-based snapshot technology. Users can easily browse and view point-in-time copies of application data, independent of location or device, and then easily recover that data when needed.

And, because SnapProtect technology is hardware agnostic, users have freedom-of-choice to utilize primary and secondary storage from their vendor of choice, leveraging existing storage investments and often driving down hardware costs.

With SnapProtect technology customers now can fully leverage investments made in high speed Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks, as well as the high performance of today’s storage arrays to tackle the 24x7 uptime and accessibility challenges surrounding mission and business critical Tier 0/1 data.

CommVault’s integrated approach means that administrators no longer need to create and maintain scripts and manage numerous technologies and products independently. The management, protection and recovery of application data across tiers of storage and tape becomes fast and simple. And, backups become near instant, virtually eliminating the backup window.

The Bottom Line—Operational Benefits and Reduced Costs

SnapProtect technology dramatically drives down operational and investment costs associated with the management and protection of critical application data. SnapProtect technology delivers:

• A single view into the management and recovery of data, regardless of location or device.
• A single product resulting in less administration time to manage, protect, and recover data across tiers of storage and locations.
• Faster time-to-recovery, lowering the cost of downtime.
• Freedom-of-choice for deployment, which drives down hardware costs.
• Reduced impact on production servers with integrated off-host backup capabilities.
• Enables one-pass backup and delivers multiple levels of recovery.

The bottom line is that CommVault® Simpana® software with SnapProtect technology helps organizations spend less on storage, reduce the cost of downtime, and dramatically simplify management, leading to improved operational benefits and reduced operational costs.

Speeding Recovery with CommVault® Software and Dell Solutions

Tie your Dell EqualLogic snapshots directly into your enterprise data protection strategy seamlessly, without any scripting. The Dell™ PowerVault™ DL2100, powered by CommVault® Simpana® software, in conjunction with the Dell EqualLogic PS series of storage arrays, offers an end-to-end data protection environment. And, with Simpana SnapProtect™, easily leverage native EqualLogic snapshots to enable fast and flexible data protection and recovery – all managed centrally from a single console.

• Automatically create, age and expire snapshot-based recovery points, through policy-based operations, across tiers of storage, without manual scripting
• Automatically catalog recovery points, transforming snapshots into points in time that are easily browsed, accessed and restored transparently, from any tier of storage
• Automatically integrate with CommVault Intelligent DataAgents (iDAs) for application-aware protection of Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, Oracle and SAP on Oracle

A key to our joint solutions is automation, as we help reduce your administrative burden, streamlining array snapshot operations through a tightly integrated and complementary approach. With CommVault software and Dell EqualLogic, delivering complete data management for file and application data has never been easier.