VM protection and availability made easy

23 August, 2017
Douglas O'Flaherty
IBM

There is too much complexity in backup and data protection. Even the solutions that tout their simplicity can take weeks to setup and hours to recover – even if you’re a backup expert. However, there are fewer backup and storage specialists. As organizations move toward agile processes that embrace cloud and virtual machines, backup is the responsibility of the infrastructure and application administrator. Data protection and retention are vitally important to protect against human error, ransomware and failures. Ideally, VM administrators, application administrators and backup administrators can work together to respond to threats and protect the business.

Administrators need a solution that is ACTUALLY easy to use and deploy. Organizational leaders want a solution that is useable by more of their IT teams to share the workload between their backup specialists and infrastructure staff. And they deserve a solution that adds value to backup data by enabling new uses such as cloning, deployment and DevOps workflows.

IBM Spectrum Protect PlusIBM has just introduced the next generation in data protection and availability for virtual environments,  and it is a game changer. IBM Spectrum Protect™ Plus is the newest addition to the IBM Spectrum Storage family of software-defined solutions, which delivers VM data availability for businesses of all sizes. It deploys in minutes as a virtual appliance. It can help non-backup specialists create and manage backup jobs using SLA-based configuration policies. It employs role-based management of the backup and recovery process so that anyone can use it, but administrators can limit people on the actions they can take. It can create and provide a familiar searchable catalog of protected VMs and files so that recovery works the way people expect. It is available as a stand-alone solution and can integrate with IBM Spectrum Protect to allow long-term offload of backup copies for data governance and compliance requirements. And it provides an API that can be used to automatically create copies for non-backup use cases such as analytics activities and DevOps.

After sharing the latest development from IBM, Jason Buffington, Principal Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group had this to say:

“IBM has been a leader in data protection for many years, so it should come as no surprise that as production platforms and business expectations continue to evolve, so would the IBM offerings. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is aimed to address a few of the most critical data protection challenges facing IT organizations of all sizes: virtualization and recovery agility. Even today, virtualization protection and recovery is often hampered by complexity, which is addressed by IBM’s completely reimagined ease-of-use experience for virtual environments. With its SLA-centric design, organizations have a refreshingly new and compelling alternative for modern data protection and availability that many should take a good look at.”

Is it easy to manage?

Yes!  IBM Spectrum Protect Plus operates with pick, click and done simplicity. It is as easy as selecting the recovery service level that a VM requires. An administrator can either pick from one of the predefined gold, silver and bronze SLAs, or custom-create a policy to meet their needs.  Then they can apply that service level to one or more virtual machines. If any VMs are missed, the dashboard view will quickly identify the missed machines so that the administrator can easily correct and protect those VMs.

protect plus dashboard

How does search and recovery work?

Part of the secret sauce behind IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a meta-data catalog that indexes and records all backups and VMs, giving administrators a unified, Google-like search capability across the entire backup environment. They can optionally index files as well for fast file-level search and restore. It even lets you search across VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments in a single operation. This global search is a significant advancement over other solutions that only allow you search within a single virtual machine.

file restore sample screen

Is it fast and efficient?

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus uses a block-level, incremental forever backup model that results in fast, low-impact backups, whether using VMware or Hyper-V. Rather than the appliance approaches that force you into deploying new hardware, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus can allow an administrator to use any storage, from speedy all-flash to disk-based block storage or NAS. Backups are stored as immutable snapshot images that can’t ever be overwritten. This provides the kind of protection security organizations need to always return to a captured data point.

How can it unlock the value of backup data?

While data protection is the main use case for Spectrum Protect Plus, it’s more than just a backup solution. Organizations can use it to derive real business value from backup data. With Protect Plus, administrators can quickly and easily spin up virtual machines or mount VMDKs based on read-write clones. These can then be used for any situation where users need access to data. Examples of this are test-dev, reporting or analytics. Because Spectrum Protect Plus is also enabled with a RESTful API, it can even be used as part of a DevOps workflow, helping to enhance modern, automated software development processes.

I have IBM Spectrum Protect, how should I use this new solution?

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a great solution for day-to-day operational recovery, but many organizations still need to keep data for longer periods of time to meet regulatory or compliance goals. If this is the case, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus offers integration with IBM Spectrum Protect. Data is copied directly from IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to IBM Spectrum Protect, and from there it can moved to any of the numerous storage tiers supported by Spectrum Protect, including disk, a wide range of tape devices, multiple cloud data stores, and object storage, including IBM Cloud Object Storage. Recovery from any of these tiers is a single-step operation.

For IBM software-defined infrastructure, simplicity and agility aren’t buzzwords, they are engineering objectives. The proof is provided by IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. Most importantly, the proof is in the protection.

If you would like to learn more, join us for an upcoming webinar on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus by registering here.

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