Meeting Todayâ€™s Enterprise Data Protection Challenges with EMC

Meeting Today’s Enterprise Data Protection Challenges with EMC RecoverPoint

Best Practices Planning

Abstract

This white paper takes a close look at the data protection landscape, its challenges, and advances in new data protection strategies, and provides some guidelines for putting these to work in your enterprise.

February 2008

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Part number H2347.1

Meeting Today’s Enterprise Data Protection Challenges with EMC RecoverPoint Best Practices Planning 2

Table of Contents Executive summary ............................................................................................4 Introduction.........................................................................................................4

Audience ...................................................................................................................................... 4 Challenges in data protection............................................................................4

Regulatory pressures................................................................................................................... 5 Increasingly complex IT environments ........................................................................................ 5 Explosive data growth.................................................................................................................. 5 Shift toward a virtualized infrastructure........................................................................................ 5 Competitive pressures ................................................................................................................. 5 Shrinking IT budgets .................................................................................................................... 6

Meeting the challenge of data recovery............................................................6 Tape-based data protection......................................................................................................... 6

Lack of reliability ....................................................................................................................... 6 Slow backup and recovery ....................................................................................................... 6 Inadequate RPO....................................................................................................................... 6

Overcoming the shortcomings of tape ......................................................................................... 6 Moving from tape to disk.............................................................................................................. 7 Replication and remote data protection ....................................................................................... 7 Continuous data protection and the elimination of data loss ....................................................... 8

Best practices for developing a data protection plan......................................9 Developing application policies.................................................................................................... 9 Testing ......................................................................................................................................... 9 Minimizing WAN bandwidth consumption.................................................................................... 9

Protecting data with EMC RecoverPoint...........................................................9 Continuous remote replication ................................................................................................... 10 Continuous data protection ........................................................................................................ 10 Continuous local and remote data protection ............................................................................ 10 RecoverPoint benefits................................................................................................................ 10

Universal data protection........................................................................................................ 11 Recovery to any point in time................................................................................................. 11 Guaranteed data consistency and write-order fidelity ............................................................ 11 Intelligent use of bandwidth.................................................................................................... 11 Intelligent fabric support ......................................................................................................... 11 CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale integration ................................................................................... 12 Consistent write-order protection over long distances ........................................................... 12 Data processing on the replica volumes ................................................................................ 12 Application integration capability ............................................................................................ 12 Integration with backup and archiving systems...................................................................... 12 Reduced storage requirements.............................................................................................. 13

Conclusion ........................................................................................................13 References ........................................................................................................13


Executive summary Regional disasters such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and power failures are just some of the many drivers behind the rapid innovation in data protection technologies. Regulatory and competitive pressures, increasingly complex and distributed IT environments, explosive data growth, and shrinking IT budgets have enterprises scrambling for alternatives to inadequate tape-based data protection solutions. Fortunately, alternatives in the form of disk-based backup, replication, and continuous data protection solutions are enabling enterprises to meet demanding data protection objectives in the face of these challenges.

Introduction This white paper outlines the challenges in data protection and how you can meet the challenges of data recovery using EMC® RecoverPoint. RecoverPoint’s features are discussed and benefits described. The paper also includes a section on best practices for data recovery.

Audience This white paper is targeted to corporate management and business decision-makers, including storage and server administrators, IT managers, and application engineers, as well as storage integrators, consultants, and distributors.

Challenges in data protection As data protection challenges increase, enterprises are scrambling to find ways to protect critical data within existing budget constraints. The need for data protection has been highlighted by several recent destructive hurricane seasons, with many areas suffering devastating damage because of high winds and floods. There is no question that regional disasters, as well as site disasters like security breaches and power outages, are driving investment and innovation in data protection. However, pressure on data protection planning is coming from other sources as well, such as regulatory pressures, increasingly complex IT environments, and shrinking IT budgets. The following section will look at these threats individually.

Figure 1. Data protection challenges


Regulatory pressures In response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, government agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Security and Exchange Commission issued a mandate for data recovery that emphasized high availability, reliability, and long-distance separation—up to 300 miles—between primary and secondary data storage sites. The mandate was met with harsh resistance from industry leaders. Moving from tape-based data protection, which is still prevalent in many enterprises today, to a data protection solution that could meet these requirements would require monumental investments that many companies could not afford. In response to the outcry, the mandate was reduced to a strong recommendation to give enterprises time to improve their business continuity infrastructure at a more reasonable pace. But regulatory pressures, particularly in financial services, health care, and insurance industries, will only become more stringent in the way enterprises protect, verify, and recover data.

Increasingly complex IT environments Whether through mergers and acquisitions or distributed IT functions working in isolation, the typical enterprise IT infrastructure has become a patchwork of heterogeneous hardware and software that challenge the way enterprises protect and restore data. Traditionally, heterogeneous environments have created “islands” of data protection, greatly increasing the chance of failures, as the data protection schemes must be coordinated across the network of proprietary storage devices, servers, and operating platforms. As a result of this complexity, IT teams devote more than half of their storage management effort on the management of backup and recovery alone.

Explosive data growth Organizations across all industries are experiencing exponential data growth. Employees rely more and more on computers to perform business-critical tasks. Web-based applications have created vastly more data touch points, extending self-service applications out to prospects, customers, and business partners. The result is rapid data growth, which created an equally increasing need for storage and put an insurmountable burden on tape-based data backup and recovery solutions.

Shift toward a virtualized infrastructure VMware Infrastructure is the industry’s most widely deployed virtualization solution. Virtual machines deployed in the data center must be protected against failure. Extending data protection to virtual machines is thus an important function. In the virtualized environment provided by VMware Infrastructure, there are many ways to improve the convenience and reliability of data protection each with its particular advantages and challenges. EMC’s Invista® is a SAN-based storage-virtualization solution that leverages intelligent SAN-switch hardware from EMC’s Connectrix® partners. Invista enables certain key functionalities, such as the ability to move active applications to different tiers of storage nondisruptively, and the ability to leverage clones across a heterogeneous storage environment.

Competitive pressures In large part, because of the growth of the Internet, businesses today move at breakneck speed. If you cannot meet customer demands, your customers are only a mouse-click away from finding someone who can. For IT departments, that means high availability and fast recovery of critical data. In an Enterprise Strategy Group Survey of more than 400 U.S.-based storage professionals and IT managers, nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents from organizations with $100 million or more in annual revenue indicated that they will experience significant revenue loss within one hour or less of application downtime. Additionally, 58 percent of respondents say that they can only tolerate four hours of downtime. With such a premium on availability, it is no wonder that so many enterprises are actively seeking faster and more reliable data protection and recovery solutions.


Shrinking IT budgets IT departments are seemingly under continuous pressure to do more with less. Enterprises with data protection solutions that require a lot of manual intervention or frequent troubleshooting are forced to either dedicate an inordinate amount of time and resources to data protection, or let data protection become dangerously neglected. Fortunately, a new breed of technology is available that is helping enterprises meet recovery time objectives (RTO), or the maximum amount of time that can be tolerated before data is restored, and recovery point objectives (RPO), the maximum amount of data that they can afford to lose. The next section, “Meeting the challenge of data recovery,” looks at alternatives to conventional tape-based data protection solutions that are helping enterprises of all sizes meet modern data protection challenges with limited IT resources.

Meeting the challenge of data recovery

Tape-based data protection Driven mainly by economic and legacy factors, tape-based systems have been the prevalent data protection solution for years. With tape-based systems, data is backed up onto magnetic tape cartridges, ejected, and transported to an offsite location for physical storage. When data must be restored, tapes are physically retrieved from the offsite facility and manually mounted at the primary facility for data restore. While suitable for archiving data, the shortcomings of tape-based data protection are well documented, especially when trying to provide recovery from disaster scenarios. These shortcomings, which include lack of reliability, insufficient backup and restore times, and inadequate RPO, are discussed next.

Lack of reliability Even with dramatic improvements made in tape technology, robotics, and software, tape-based backups still fail at an alarming rate. The sequential nature of tape I/O, combined with physical tape failures, and the fact that tape can lose data over time are all causes of failure. But of all the many reasons tape fails, human error still tops the list. Where there is human intervention in any IT endeavor, human error is going to be an issue.

Slow backup and recovery Tape-based backup is notoriously slow. With backup windows rapidly shrinking because of an increasingly global and competitive environment where the workday has no real start and finish, finding time for intrusive tape-based backups is more and more challenging. Recovering data can be equally time consuming, since tape cartridges must be physically retrieved from an offsite location and manually loaded for a data restore.

Inadequate RPO Because of competitive pressures, as well as regulatory pressures, RPOs are becoming more stringent as the tolerance for data loss plummets. Tape-based backups are, as a rule, performed once a day after business hours when the impact they have on system resources will not affect application and network performance for end users. Consequently, when data must be recovered following data corruption, systems failure, or a site disaster, the most recent backup copy available is from the previous night. Depending on the time of day when data is restored, the result can be up to 24 hours of lost data.

Overcoming the shortcomings of tape In response to the growing challenges that tape-based backup systems present, data protection vendors have created a variety of solutions that can dramatically reduce RTO and RPO. In addition to the RTO and RPO improvements, these new solutions also bring varying degrees of automation to the backup and recovery


process. These solutions are designed to reduce the impact that backups have on system resources, allowing for data backup to be performed any time throughout the day. The most common solutions include disk-based backup, replication, and continuous data protection (CDP).

Moving from tape to disk With a disk-based solution, hard disk can serve as a buffer between tape and the primary data source or replace tape altogether, serving as both an intermediate and long-term storage medium. The different implementations of disk-based backup depend largely on where the disk is placed in the process. Different implementations include disk-to-disk (D2D), disk-to-tape (D2T), and disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T). D2T implementations are prevalent in the enterprise, using disk storage systems to transport the data to tape, often involving a pause in the production data flow to move the data to tape. With D2D implementations, disk storage systems serve as both the primary and secondary storage medium, eliminating tape or pushing it back to the end of the process where it serves as a long-term storage medium only. Because disk-to-disk recovery is substantially faster than tape-to-disk recovery, D2D can provide faster data recovery than D2T. Disk-to-disk-to-tape refers to backing up data on disks first and tape (or optical disk) second. Backing up onto tape is performed less frequently than disk-to-disk, providing the ability to recover quickly from data that is captured on disk. It is common to use split mirrors to create snapshot images that can then be sent to tape. Disk-based implementations have changed the circumstances of data protection. Because of the faster I/O capacity of disk, disk-based solutions offer enterprises a faster backup and recovery alternative to tape-based systems. Disk offers a more cost-effective solution as well. Because disk space is inexpensive and abundant in most enterprises with large IT functions, unused disk space can be used for data protection, limiting the initial investment in disk-based data protection. Perhaps the strongest benefit of disk from a strict data recovery perspective is a reduction in data loss following a system’s interruption or disaster. Through point-in-time backup techniques, such as snapshots, backups can be made during normal business hours without the impact on application and network performance that can be expected with tape-based systems. With point-in-time snapshots, data can be backed up more frequently and stricter RPOs can be met. While point-in-time backup reduces exposure to data loss, it has its disadvantages. If snapshots are configured to occur once every three hours, up to three hours of data is compromised in the event of a disaster. Increasing the frequency of point-in-time backups will reduce exposure even more; however, as point-in-time backups occur more frequently, more disk space is needed to maintain all the copies. Synchronizing point-in-time snapshots also grows more complicated, especially with proprietary array-based solutions. These challenges are addressed by a revolutionary new data protection solution, known as continuous data protection, which will be covered in more detail later in this white paper.

Replication and remote data protection Replication helps organizations address the threat of regional disasters by moving data to an offsite location so that it can be recovered should the primary site go down. Replication can also facilitate storage consolidation by centralizing backup and recovery for branch offices. The two primary types of replication include synchronous replication and asynchronous replication. With synchronous replication, every single write transaction is captured and simultaneously transmitted to a secondary storage device, resulting in an RPO of zero. This level of data protection is best suited for replication within a local or campus environment because of the large bandwidth needed to facilitate the


synchronous updates. A potential drawback to synchronous replication exists when extended to longer distances, where synchronous replication can degrade application performance. With asynchronous replication, each new write transaction is captured and added to a queue of updates that is periodically transmitted to a secondary site. Asynchronous replication requires less bandwidth and is, consequently, better for replication over long distances, but has a greater RPO than synchronous replication. Asynchronous replication does, however, have its drawbacks. In the event of a regional disaster that knocks out the primary site, any data that is queued for transmission may be lost. Asynchronous replication also introduces the potential for data inconsistency. Most current solutions in the market cannot guarantee “write-order fidelity” at the secondary site, and many solutions cannot guarantee writes to the replica are delivered in the same order as they are to the production volume. Many asynchronous and synchronous replication solutions also have potential problems when there has been an instance of data corruption because once the primary copy of data is corrupted, the replica could possibly be corrupted as well. When looking at replication technologies, it is important that the solution provides point-in-time recovery capabilities with write-order consistency to ensure application recovery. Replication has resulted in better backup and recovery of data and protection against regional disasters by keeping a consistent copy of data out of harm’s way and allowing for site failover and failback in the case of an emergency. As a result, replication should have an integral place in any enterprise data protection strategy. For replication to be effective, however, there must be sufficient bandwidth that allows for replication that does not degrade application and network performance. The next section will look at continuous data protection and how it has helped enterprises meet their most stringent recovery requirements.

Continuous data protection and the elimination of data loss The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) CDP Special Interest Group defines continuous data protection (CDP) as “a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independently of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. CDP systems may be block, file, or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points.” CDP solutions capture all data writes, continuously backing up data and eliminating backup windows. Through a process known as journaling, where data is captured and time stamped, CDP provides rollback to any point in time, allowing enterprises to restore data to a previous state based on a specified time or application event. This time- and event-based recovery allows enterprises to resume operations before any event that may have caused corruption or data loss. This represents an enormous RPO advantage over tape and point-in-time backups, which only provide rollback to incremental data states that may be up to three to six hours apart. With point-in-time data backups, corrupted data can easily find its way into backed up data during the during synchronization process. Most CDP solutions require no cumbersome synchronization, and can roll back to a noncorrupted data state in the event of data corruption. CDP solutions can come be software, appliances, network or host-based solutions, operating either at the block or file level. The type of CDP solution an organization makes depends on its specific data protection needs and the configuration of its IT environment, since different solutions will provide different levels of recovery granularity, compatibility, scalability, and recovery speed. CDP solutions represent the most advanced form of data protection, allowing enterprises to meet the most stringent RPOs and RTOs while eliminating backup windows. Currently, CDP is generally used as a local data protection solution for mission-critical applications and for enhancing remote backup by providing snapshots for transmission through replication to a remote site. However, given the desire for more reliable, up-to-date data protection across the enterprise, CDP will likely become an increasingly integral part of the enterprise data protection stratagem.


Best practices for developing a data protection plan From tape- and disk-based data protection solutions to replication and CDP, there is a wide variety of approaches to data protection. It is likely that most enterprises will employ some combination of these solutions and approaches to meet their varying data protection needs. In this section, you will learn some basic guidelines for putting together a data protection plan for your enterprise.

Developing application policies The first step in developing a data protection strategy is to establish data protection requirements based on the applications in the data center. Application policies allow enterprises to focus data protection resources where it matters most. Evaluate the applications that are used throughout the organization and determine the tolerance level for data loss that the enterprise has for each one. Establish categories for consistent evaluation across the enterprise based on the value of the data to the organization. These categories may range from mission-critical, for applications that require the highest level of availability and have the most stringent RPOs and RTOs, to noncritical, which would contain applications for which RPOs and RTOs are more flexible. Once the policies have been established, both the configuration of the storage volumes and the data protection mechanism for each application should match the application’s established RPO and RTO. For instance, mission-critical applications will likely require some form of continuous data protection and offsite replication.

Testing Once policies are established and your data protection infrastructure is configured to meet the varying needs of your application data, there is only one way to ensure your strategy will actually work in the event of a disaster testing. Testing should be done regularly and should be as nondisruptive as possible to normal business operations. Where multiple sites are involved, include failover and failback procedures to ensure full protection against regional disasters.

Minimizing WAN bandwidth consumption From a budgetary standpoint, WAN bandwidth costs may be the most important consideration when evaluating a remote data protection solution. For most replication solutions, WAN bandwidth requirements can range anywhere from 10 Mb/s to well over 155 Mb/s (OC-3), driving operational costs to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just for the WAN bandwidth costs. When choosing a remote data protection solution, it is critical that you evaluate WAN bandwidth reduction, compression, and optimization technologies that will help stretch your bandwidth investment by reducing the amount of bandwidth required to support the DR application. Ideally, these bandwidth reduction technologies are integrated into the data protection solution. Other methods, like bandwidth throttling, will limit bandwidth to lower priority applications, so mission-critical applications get the most bandwidth.

Protecting data with EMC RecoverPoint EMC RecoverPoint is a comprehensive replication and data protection solution designed and built from scalable and highly available hardware appliances and software modules. RecoverPoint provides both continuous remote replication (CRR) and continuous data protection (CDP) support for heterogeneous storage, server, and network environments. By using a combination of modules, customers can protect and replicate their SAN-based data locally for operational recovery and/or remotely for disaster recovery with no production application impact. In the event of a local data corruption or a regional disaster, customers can, depending on the nature of the crisis, recover data either at the local or remote site.


SAN WAN SANSAN

Production Copy

Local Copy

Remote Copy

Journals

SAN WANWAN SANSAN

Production Copy

Local Copy

Remote Copy

Journals

Figure 2. EMC RecoverPoint local and remote replicaiton

Continuous remote replication The RecoverPoint Continuous Remote Replication (CRR) module is an enterprise-class data replication solution that provides point-in-time recovery across granular recovery point objectives. It offers complete protection from site disasters, allowing guaranteed recovery with no data loss. The RecoverPoint CRR module provides bidirectional replication with no distance limitation, guaranteed data consistency, and advanced bandwidth reduction technology designed to dramatically reduce IP network requirements and the associated cost. Advanced bookmarking and data journaling enable customers to support recovery time-objective service level agreements measured in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days.

Continuous data protection The RecoverPoint Continuous Data Protection module efficiently maintains journals of all data changes at a local site and enables the immediate recovery of data to any point in time, protecting critical data from physical or logical failures such as server outages, data corruption, software errors, viruses, and common user errors. Advanced data reduction technologies and point-in-time recovery make this solution superior to simple local data mirroring and snapshot techniques previously used to provide this sort of protection.

Continuous local and remote data protection Some customers need to protect their application data locally from data corruption, as well as remotely, and from a local or regional disaster. These customers would implement RecoverPoint continuous local and remote (CLR) data protection, where the features of RecoverPoint CDP and RecoverPoint CRR are combined to protect the same data both locally and remotely. Recovery and use of the local and remote copies can be performed independent of each other and without effecting the ongoing local and remote replication of the production data.

RecoverPoint benefits Customers implementing a RecoverPoint solution should see some or all of these benefits:

• Can replace multiple existing data protection, replication, and recovery solutions with a single solution and single point of management, therefore reducing cost and management complexity

• Enables quick recovery from data corruption or from a complete server or site failure, eliminating

the cost associated with lost transactions and downtime


• Guarantees fully up-to-date consistent copies of data at local and/or remote sites to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster

• Allows replication to and from any SAN-based storage array, allowing more cost-effective storage

arrays to be used at the remote site or the reuse of existing storage

• Heterogeneous storage support protects existing storage investments, enhances business continuity, and facilitates storage consolidation

• Removes the need for storage-consuming snapshots, reducing overall storage cost

• Requires no additional Fibre Channel-to-IP converters, which reduces cost

• Reduces networking infrastructure and bandwidth cost

• Enables bidirectional replication and recovery between sites regardless of distance, allowing the

use of existing data centers as DR sites, lessening infrastructure and operational cost Universal data protection RecoverPoint is an end-to-end solution for data replication that supports heterogeneous server and storage platforms, enabling a complete data protection solution for the entire enterprise. The storage systems at the primary and secondary sites do not have to be the same, offering the flexibility to deploy lower-cost storage or to leverage existing storage.

Recovery to any point in time RecoverPoint stores changed data and time together, enabling immediate recovery to any point in time for local copy volumes, and to significant points in time for remote copy volumes. RecoverPoint can recover applications quickly to a selected time or event with guaranteed write-order consistency, even when data spans multiple heterogeneous storage and servers. For local copy volumes, every change is retained in a local history journal for later recovery. For remote copy volumes RecoverPoint supports multiple transactional-consistent snapshots at the remote site, allowing reliable recovery in database environments. Frequent snapshots taken seconds apart are utilized to minimize the risk of data loss due to data corruption.

Guaranteed data consistency and write-order fidelity RecoverPoint guarantees a consistent replica of business-critical data in the event of any possible failure or disaster. Many products available today cannot guarantee consistency through rolling disasters or during resynchronization. With RecoverPoint, consistency is maintained at all times, even for data spanning multiple heterogeneous storage and servers.

Intelligent use of bandwidth RecoverPoint uses intelligent bandwidth reduction technologies that deliver unprecedented reduction in bandwidth requirements. This enables the system to provide the best possible level of protection for the available bandwidth, while dramatically reducing WAN costs, particularly over long distances. Transmission size is reduced through de-duplication and storage-aware algorithmic techniques that conserve bandwidth to the extent not possible with traditional compression technologies.

Intelligent fabric support RecoverPoint integrates with enterprise-level SAN switches from Brocade and Cisco to completely remove any replication processing from the production servers and into the SAN. For Brocade, RecoverPoint leverages the SAS API, and for Cisco, RecoverPoint utilizes the SANTap protocol. Supporting both Brocade and Cisco fabrics enables RecoverPoint to noninvasively copy changes to protected volumes for the two most common SAN infrastructures installed in customer environments.


CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale integration RecoverPoint integrates with CLARiiON® CX3 UltraScale™ arrays to completely remove any replication processing from the production servers and the SAN. For CLARiiON CX3 arrays running FLARE® 26 or later, RecoverPoint will utilize features in the CLARiiON storage processor to noninvasively copy changes to protected volumes residing on that CLARiiON array. This enables RecoverPoint to support the major host operating environments without the need for a host-based driver or intelligent fabric splitter.

Consistent write-order protection over long distances By ensuring write-order consistency for remotely replicated data and the selection of small-aperture snapshots, RecoverPoint lets the user achieve synchronous levels of protection with no application degradation and no distance limitations. This unique capability shatters today’s distance/latency limitations, and enables completely up-to-date protection from regional disasters with no impact on application performance.

Data processing on the replica volumes RecoverPoint enables direct read/write access to data on the replica volumes without the need to first make an additional copy or the requirement to halt data protection. The system supports robust failover and failback capabilities, reducing management and operational costs. Data volumes at the selected point in time are instantly available, with full read/write capability, offloading backups and allowing live application testing, on-demand recovery, data migration, and many other valuable data processing applications.

Application integration capability RecoverPoint offers a programmatical integration interface that enables business applications to facilitate application protection and recovery, dramatically reducing recovery time and eliminating potential data loss. The application integration modules work with RecoverPoint to create application-specific bookmarks that represent transaction and event boundaries. Without these bookmarks, the application would need to perform “crash-recover” on the image, which will increase the RTO, and may result is some data loss. Using these bookmarks to select the recovery image ensures that the applications can be restarted from an application-consistent point-in-time image, minimizing RTO and data loss. Additionally, in Oracle9i Database environments RecoverPoint can automatically detect and bookmark the latest relative block address (RBA) and system change number (SCN), which enables the database administrator to understand which transactions were present in the image prior to selecting it for recovery. Application-aware modules are provided for Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server. These modules utilize the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) and Virtual Device Interface (VDI) APIs to ensure the applications are in a consistent state before creating an application bookmark. Selecting a recovery image using one of these bookmarks facilitates easy recovery with minimal RTO and no data loss. Many additional applications are easily supported though scripting to the RecoverPoint command line interface.

Integration with backup and archiving systems RecoverPoint CDP is integrated with EMC NetWorker® and EMC Replication Manager for enhanced backup and recovery. Additionally, RecoverPoint supports third-party backup and archiving tools such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and Symantec’s Veritas Backup Exec, providing continuous protection from disk to tape. Continuous protection means that protection gaps are eliminated, compliance to guidelines and regulatory requirement is facilitated, and the data protection lifecycle is considerably simplified. Furthermore, backup windows are no longer needed, since with RecoverPoint archiving is performed on the local and/or remote replica volumes and their associated journals, without impact to production servers.


Reduced storage requirements The RecoverPoint module deploys patented intelligent data reduction technologies that deliver unprecedented reduction in storage requirements. The same proven technology that is used in RecoverPoint’s replication solutions to dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements is used to compress the local and/or remote journals. Using compression allows the user to maintain more historic data for quick recovery.

Conclusion With disk-based backup, replication, and continuous data protection, enterprises have the tools they need to meet the challenges of data protection. By establishing RPOs and RTOs broken out by individual applications, then using the appropriate combination of these technologies, enterprises can overcome the limitations of cumbersome tape-based systems and protect all of their data in a way that optimizes resources and data protection needs. This white paper has addressed data protection challenges and solutions without delving into specific technologies to create a blueprint for an IT department to work from. Choosing a solution will require a detailed understanding of both the enterprise’s IT environment and data protection needs, as well as a research-driven understanding of the tools that are available on the market. Budget will also be a major consideration. Ultimately, an enterprise should seek a solution that leverages the many different advances in data protection and apply these technologies in a way that makes sense for their budgets and their environments. EMC’s RecoverPoint solution does just that. It is a comprehensive data protection solution for the entire data center, addressing a complete range of data protection challenges while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of protecting business critical data.

References View EMC’s proven solutions for data replication, data lifecycle management, disaster recovery, and continuous data protection at http://www.EMC.com.


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Meeting Todayâ€™s Enterprise Data Protection Challenges with EMC

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