Scale-Out Data Protection: Research and Coverage Update

By , Monday, March 19th 2018

Categories: Analyst Blogs

Tags: blog, cdm, copy data management, data protection, enterprise data management, scale-out,

They say that times flies when you’re having fun, so I must be having too much fun these days.  My first (and only) blog with Evaluator Group was months ago and it is long past time for this one.

Though it wasn’t covered in a blog as I had originally planned, hopefully you were able to read about what is driving customers to re-evaluate their data protection strategies in the Technical Insight published in January.  I’ve heard from several readers that they agree wholeheartedly with one or more of the drivers described in the report.  A few other readers have provided input on additional drivers they see having impact.

We are continuing to work on updates to our data protection research materials.  One of the top areas we are researching is scale-out data protection.  There is some variability in this scale-out space, with solutions that focus mainly on backup and others that support secondary storage workloads.  The maturity of vendors in this space vary, with some who have been at it for more than a decade to others that are young startups.  Evaluator Group is working on a number of research documents on this space, so watch for announcements in the near future.

Evaluator Group is also continuing to explore several enterprise data management topics that are gaining in popularity and relevance.  Driving this level of interest is the amount of data moving into private and public cloud environments.  As the data is copied or moved, many solutions analyze and catalog various aspects of data such as the data type, who created it, when it was created, etc.  The creation of this metadata may be the intent of some of these solutions or a byproduct. Either way, it opens interesting new opportunities to better manage and derive value from an enterprise’s information.

As described in the Technical Insight referenced above, one of the interesting areas in the enterprise data management space we have been researching is Copy Data Management (CDM).  CDM is about locating and managing all the copies of your data, wherever they are, and optimizing the storage of those copies.  As with many of today’s IT solutions, CDM vendors have different approaches to how they identify copies of data and what they do to coordinate and optimize those copies. Soon, the task will be to determine how best to share the results of that research with you all.

Stay tuned.

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