Modern Data Protection

Chapter 15. Modern Data Protection Solutions

The previous chapter looked at traditional data protection solutions and the target deduplication systems that were designed primarily to address the tape challenges with those solutions. (The marketing slogan for one of those products was “Tape sucks. Move on,” so I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of why target dedupe products appeared on the market.)

One major change between the products in this chapter and those in the previous chapter is that all of these backup products were designed with disk at their center. Many of them are still disk only, and others are still disk-centric but with some support added for tape. But all these products were designed with disk as their primary (and often only) backup target.

In addition to being disk-centric, all these products were designed to address some shift in the marketplace. Things happened (and continue to happen) that kept breaking the backup process, and new products were introduced to fix that. Virtualization-centric backup solutions started to appear because the market perceived that existing solutions were not adequately addressing the challenges presented by server virtualization. Hyper-converged backup solutions addressed how segmented the data protection industry had gotten, with the typical backup configuration using solutions from four to five vendors. DPaaS offerings addressed the same need, but with a SaaS approach. Finally, in the past few years, we have also seen solutions ...