When it comes to data protection and recovery, many IT professionals often rely too heavily on backup software as their primary safeguard. While backup solutions are essential for long-term data retention and recovering from user errors, they shouldn’t be the first line of defense. Instead, infrastructure software—including hypervisors, storage systems, and networking—should take the leading role in ensuring data resiliency and availability.
The Growing Complexity of IT Environments
The growing complexity of IT environments, from on-premises data centers to cloud-based infrastructures, has introduced a range of vulnerabilities. Hardware failures, service disruptions, and unexpected downtime can lead to critical data loss if not properly managed. While backup systems can help recover lost data, relying solely on them is inefficient and can result in extended downtime. This is why infrastructure software, with the right capabilities, should be the foundation of a strong data protection strategy.
The Role of Infrastructure Software in Data Protection
Ensuring Uptime and Resiliency
Infrastructure software plays a direct role in maintaining uptime, which is critical for keeping businesses running smoothly. This layer should be designed to protect against hardware failures, ensuring that workloads remain online even when physical components like drives or servers fail. Modern infrastructure solutions can offer features such as advanced snapshot technology and built-in redundancy, which are essential for preventing data loss and keeping systems operational in the face of hardware problems.
Handling Soft-Error Recoveries with Snapshot Technology
If it has reliable and scalable snapshot technology, infrastructure software can also play a role in soft error recoveries. The problem is most infrastructure software solutions have severe snapshot limitations.
A robust snapshot methodology allows IT teams to create an unlimited number of independent copies of virtual machines at specific points in time without consuming capacity. Then, these snapshots can be used to quickly restore operations without relying on full backups. When handled by infrastructure software, advanced snapshot technology provides a fast and efficient way to recover from failures or roll back to a previous state after an error.
The speed at which these recoveries can happen is significantly faster than pulling data from a backup solution, especially when the infrastructure software can manage snapshots in real-time with minimal performance overhead. I recently wrote VergeIO’s hands-on lab for their snapshot technology. It even lets you use a VMs snapshots for single-file recovery. You can check out the lab here.
Supporting Redundancy and High Availability
In addition to handling hardware failures, infrastructure software should be built to support redundancy and high availability (HA). When an infrastructure system is designed with HA in mind, it can automatically failover to secondary systems or replicate workloads across multiple nodes, ensuring that there’s no single point of failure. This ability to keep workloads running during hardware or service failures allows IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks, instead of scrambling to restore systems from backups during an emergency.
Backup Software: A Reactive Solution
While backup software is essential for long-term data retention and protection against user errors like accidental deletions, it shouldn’t be viewed as the sole point of recovery. Backup systems are inherently reactive—they restore data after something has gone wrong. In contrast, infrastructure software is proactive—it works to prevent failures from impacting operations in the first place. This proactive stance allows infrastructure software to play a leading role in both data protection and recovery, keeping systems online and preventing downtime, while backup systems provide a safety net for errors that slip through the cracks.
Avoiding the Trap of Over-Reliance on Backup Software
Many organizations fall into the trap of thinking that investing in a robust backup system is enough to protect their data. But without strong infrastructure software at the core of their IT environment, they’re putting themselves at risk for unnecessary downtime and extended recovery windows. By focusing on the capabilities of their infrastructure software—such as real-time snapshots, failover support, and high availability—organizations can ensure their data is continuously protected and quickly recoverable.
Conclusion: Infrastructure Software as the Foundation of Data Protection
In the end, effective data protection isn’t just about having backups in place—it’s about having infrastructure systems that prevent failures and allow for quick recovery without having to rely on time-consuming data restoration. By prioritizing infrastructure capabilities, organizations can take a proactive approach to safeguarding their data and maintaining uptime, minimizing the need to rely on backup solutions as a first line of defense.
To explore more about how infrastructure software should lead data protection strategies and the role of backup systems, check out this deeper dive into the shared responsibility model of data protection here.
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If you’d like to explore how infrastructure and backup software can work together for complete data protection, don’t miss this upcoming webinar with VergeIO on October 3rd at 11:00 a.m. ET. It will dive into the shared responsibility model and demonstrate how solutions like VergeIO and Storware integrate seamlessly. Register here to secure your spot!
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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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