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Data protection is fast becoming the most critical part of IT strategies today. And it’s no wonder. Year-over-year exponential data growth, and recently imposed requirements for data
retention and availability are now juxtaposed against a marked increase in the num-ber and type of threats to the enterprise. Today’s IT environments are demanding a more comprehensive strat-egy for data protection, secu-rity and high availability than ever before. As a result, how to best go about protecting enterprise data is currently one of the most hotly
debated topics in the IT arena.
Curiously, the single least reliable technology in the IT industry (tape) is currently the most broadly deployed for enterprise backup and recovery. Gartner Group estimates that 10% of all recovery attempts from tape fail, but for years tape was the only economically viable media for storage of backup data sets. Tape cartridges were also portable, which seemed to make sense for disaster recovery applications, in spite of inherent handling risks. Disk, while reliable, was historically too expensive a proposition for backup data—which often can require 10 times or more the capacity of primary storage. Until now …
Next generation data protection solutions are quickly gaining momentum as they deal with the growing amount of valuable data that needs to be backed up. A new technique, called data deduplication, has gained a tremendous amount of attention in the disk backup and recovery market. Deduplication of data significantly changes the economics of storage, dramatically reducing both backup recovery times and making wide area backup an operational reality. Its core value proposition is massive reduction of data volume by storing only unique occurrences of data. As a result, IT managers gain faster, more reliable recoveries, reduced backup windows and centralized administration of multi-site backup processes. Data protection levels are elevated and costs are reduced.
This paper chronicles the implementations and results of three enterprises that addressed their data protection issues using Data Domain enterprise protection storage systems. Representing a diverse set of industries (Financial, Legal and Technology), the IT managers responsible for protecting company data had the foresight to recognize the growing gap between their business continuity requirements and the ability of tape-based backup systems to meet those requirements.
Working together with Data Domain, each manager applied best practices with a strong eye for return on investment to achieve their data protection goals.
Troutman Sanders LLP, a multinational legal firm with over 600 attorneys, Thomas Weisel Partners , a prominent investment banking services firm and Synopsys, Inc., a leading provider of electronic design automation software and services, share the ROI and total savings they enjoy as a result of implementing data protection strategies using Data Domain solutions. Their case studies follow.
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