In our recent webinar, “Three Steps to Backup and Recovery Success”, we discussed service level objectives (SLOs) and how to reduce recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Snapshots can play a key role in meeting tight RPOs and RTOs, but they have weaknesses that you need to be aware of. One of the biggest needs that data centers have is effective snapshot management. This capability can help ensure that snapshots are used correctly as part of the overall data protection process.
Snapshot Management
The first challenge with counting on snapshots as part of your data protection process is how to manage them. While a few vendors have integrated snapshot management into their application, in most cases the snapshot process is managed separately from the backup software.
As a general rule, there isn’t an issue running multiple data protection processes on the same data, as long as those processes have a clearly defined purpose. It is also important that each data protection job is used for recovery and there is a clearly defined plan outlining in what situation each job is to be used.
Ideally, the backup application can integrate with your storage system so that it can manage these snapshots. While again the range of abilities can vary here, ideally the backup application should be able to schedule snapshots, invoke snapshots and back the snapshot up to the backup storage device. The application should also be able to include the data held within these snapshots as part of the backup index. It should then have the intelligence to present the data within the snapshot as the “go to first recovery” option.
While few applications have this extensive level of snapshot management capabilities, several vendors are closing the gap. As the backup application’s ability to manage snapshots continues to improve, it makes the ability to meet SLOs significantly easier for a variety of disaster situations.
To learn more about an SLO driven data protection strategy, click here to watch our on-demand webinar. In a hurry? Watch our 3 minute video that will give you a quick overview of Service Level Objectives.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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