An old song about the main thing: why do I need a backup and how can HPE StoreOnce help here
Why are you reading this?
The topic of data protection and backups is old and beaten, but at the moment when it comes to choosing a solution for data storage, backups are often forgotten, but in vain.
It is important to understand that all modern trends in IT are associated with explosive growth in the amount of data that needs to be stored and stored. For example, the world’s largest Walmart chain of stores generates 2 PB of data per day. If our future in autonomous cars is inevitable, then 10 million cars will generate 40,000 PB per day …
At the same time, it is obvious that with such a dependence on data, the cost of downtime of IT infrastructure for business is extremely high. IDC calculated the downtime hour for large business in the USA: over $ 760k can be lost per downtime. Obviously, in real life we are faced with numbers much smaller. Once, in jest, they told me that you can simply translate “dollars into rubles” and will be more or less correct. I will not argue or agree, everyone should understand this figure for their business or company.
The next important question is the required levels of data availability for your tasks. Modern storage can provide 99.9999% availability. What does it mean? You will receive no more than 32 seconds of downtime per year by purchasing such a system. Whether it is a lot or a little, there is no answer to this question, because there are different needs.
The parameters of RPO and RTO are striking when we begin to study various backup material. The RPO (Recovery Point Objective) parameter is the maximum allowable time at which time in the past, data and files will allow the organization to return to normal operation. The RTO (Recovery Time Objective) parameter is the maximum allowable time interval during which the system, application may not work (be turned off) after a crash. Of course, I want to reduce them to zero, but it can cost a lot of money, it is important to prioritize applications for criticality for business. For example, the sharepoint in the bank is not as important as the database, the RPO and RTO parameters there may be more.
Against the background of everything said above, it becomes obvious that there should be some ready-made scripts to protect against typical threats and troubles, as well as the requirements of regulators.
For example, snapshots on the main storage system can protect us from losing files, but we can no longer protect ourselves from virus attacks, we need to move on and stock up on special AO and software.
There is even an unwritten rule, which is some ideal model for the organization of IBS – this is the rule “3-2-1” or “3-2-1-1” as a modernized version. What does this mean? You must have 3 copies of the data, 2 of them on different media, 1 copy on another site.
Visualizing it looks like this:
To argue about the choice of ribbons or clouds does not make sense here. It all depends on the amount of data and how often you want to restore this data. As you know, it’s very cheap to write information to the cloud, and it’s already expensive to restore, a kind of camel situation in Africa.
Backup to disks
Backup to disks is a very successful way to build an IBS, it is quite universal and does not have the limitations that you may encounter if you use either only snapshots or write data from the server to tapes directly. These same factors explain the reason for creating a class of specialized disk systems for data backup and disaster recovery – HPE StoreOnce.
To begin with, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the material of my colleague at the link where he details “who is who”, as they say.
At the moment, there is already the fourth generation of such systems, which has received a lot of improvements, improvements and integration opportunities with almost any backup software at the deepest level (yes, there is now Catalyst Copy for Veeam too). In addition to the general convenience and speed of work (speaking about StoreOnce, there are guarantees not only for recording, but also for fast recovery), there is the possibility of using direct backup without using third-party software using snapshots on the main array – Recovery Manager Central technology or just RMC.
The lineup has been significantly changed: the VSA virtual machine can now expand up to 500TB, the small 3640 system can now be supplemented with as many as two disk shelves to increase capacity, and older models can be equipped with 8TB drives. 
In the last two months, a lot of good news has appeared on the topic StoreOnce, namely: Integration with HPE Simplivity, New RMC 6.2 for direct backup from primary arrays, Catalyst Copy for Veeam and much more.
February 27 at 11 am held webinar, which will be told about all the most interesting product updates. There will be a presentation, so that later this material is not lost.
Naturally, the webinar recording will not go anywhere and you can watch it at any other time, but to ask questions on time is also a good thing!
Come, it will be interesting!
