eGUIDE: Simplifying Enterprise Application Recovery

Get the Most Out of Your Storage Investments Your enterprise applications drive your business. Any impact on their performance or reliability could cost your organization dearly. To protect them, you’ve invested significant IT budget to improve system availability, minimize data loss and improve recovery time. Yet, you’re likely still struggling to stay one step ahead of your data growth.

To get the most out of your storage investments, it may be time to consider the value of managed snapshots to deliver increased application protection and simplified recovery so that you can get more out of your storage investments. This eGuide will show you why.

BEFORE

AFTER

The Data Recovery Balancing Act When it comes to applications, recoverability is critical. But just how critical? The answer is likely different for each of your applications.

The more value the application has to the business, the more investment needs to be made to assure you can meet your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for that application. It’s truly a balancing act that may change dynamically with your environment. Your data protection needs to be strategically optimized to ensure that each application or database environment is…

• Protected• Accessible • Recoverable and • Managed

…to your unique application specifications while still meeting budget demands.

VALUE RTORPO

The Economics of Storage Assets To meet today’s enterprise application recovery needs, it’s always critical to assess the economic impact of your storage investments – specifically, how well they support doing more with less. Here is where the idea of converged storage often comes into play, helping to consolidate multiple workloads while minimizing resource requirements. When looking at the economics of storage resources, consider how well they:

• Consolidate Multiple Storage Workloads• Speed Time to Value of Storage Capabilities• Minimize Complexity and Management Time• Support Rapid Application Recovery

Simplifying Storage: Managed Snapshots Once you’ve assessed the economic impact of your storage assets, consider where they may be falling short. Despite the benefits of hardware array-based snapshots, their complexities still pose a number of challenges that can significantly impact your overall investment.

Some of the top complexities experienced with hardware array-based snapshots include:

• Hard to integrate with applications and virtual machines (VMs)• Data isn’t indexed or searchable• Fragmented snapshot management in multi-vendor environments• Complex recovery workflows• Tough to move block snapshots to tape

ENTER MANAGED SNAPSHOTS

To solve these challenges, organizations need an integrated approach to make it easier and more affordable to leverage the power of application-integrated, multiple vendor array-based snapshots across the complex lifecycle of snapshot management. As a result, companies can dramatically accelerate backup and recovery of applications, systems, VMs and data.

The Need for Managed SnapshotsDATA SIZE AND COMPLEXITY

As we dig deeper into the need for managed snapshots for more simplified application recovery, the first consideration is the sheer size and complexity of data. Applications are getting too large to protect and recover successfully using traditional backup methods. Traditional recoveries are an even larger problem. They are slow and have infrequent recovery points. As a result, it’s simply impossible to meet business SLAs when you are tasked with recovering a multi-terabyte application in a couple of hours or less.

• Traditional recoveries are slow• Traditional recoveries have infrequent recovery points• Traditional backups can’t meet business SLAs

VS.

The Need for Managed SnapshotsCONSTRAINED RESOURCES

The next problem is constrained system resources. When applications are sized, they are nearly always sized to meet the active application load. There’s not a lot of additional performance capacity. So when a traditional backup runs, it often doesn’t have the resources it needs because they haven’t been factored in.

• Resources are sized for active application loads• Traditional backup approaches can compound resource challenges

VS.

The Need for Managed SnapshotsTHE BURDEN OF MANUAL TASKS

Finally, manual snapshot management burdens staff. It’s difficult to coordinate between backup admins, application owners, storage owners, VM owners and so forth. This can often mean that solutions are patched together using different software tools, scripts or manual processes. But these kinds of non-standard solutions often mean non-standard results. In other words, you never know if they’re going to work as they need to work.

• Coordination of internal groups is difficult• Non-standard manual solutions mean non-standard results

VS.

Managed Snapshots Made EasyINTELLISNAP® TECHNOLOGY

Designed to solve the challenges of application integration and managing multiple vendor array-based snapshots, IntelliSnap® technology integrates the complex lifecycle of snapshot management into one seamless framework.

This lightweight, standalone solution for automating snapshot management and application-aware recovery across multiple storage arrays and physical or virtual servers, unifies hardware snapshot management through a single console. As a result, it improves efficiency and unleashes the true potential of snapshots for simplified application recovery.

10PM12PM7AM 5PM

COMMVAULT SNAPSHOT MANAGEMENT

VMsApps Files NAS

PRIMARY STORAGE

BACKUP COPIES

Disk Cloud Tape

IntelliSnap® TechnologyBUSINESS VALUE

EASY• Reduce complexity while fulfilling business SLAs• Focus on recovery, not scripting and multi-step

manual processes• Free IT staff for value adding tasks

INTEGRATED• Reduce storage costs through integrated

management• Unify business and operational recovery

environments

NECESSARY• Increase application availability and visibility• Enhance reliability• Reduce burden on existing infrastructure

and staff

10PM12PM7AM 5PM

COMMVAULT SNAPSHOT MANAGEMENT

VMsApps Files NAS

PRIMARY STORAGE

BACKUP COPIES

Disk Cloud Tape

To learn more about Commvault snapshot management, and how it can help you simplify your enterprise application recovery, please visit commvault.com/snapshots.

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