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Keep the Lights On with Modern Data Protection Techniques

Jim Miller
Marketing Manager at Hitachi Vantara

March 18, 2021


To meet evolving business and market requirements a digital transformation journey is critical. Many businesses are storing and leveraging data at an unprecedented rate. This stored data is the key to insights that enhance customer experience, provide competitive advantage, and solve other complex business problems. Data is now a business’ most critical asset, and the loss of access can negatively affect the bottom line. Impacts can include direct loss of revenue, missed business opportunities, loss of customer confidence, damage to brand integrity and more.

Businesses suffer when systems are down and data is unavailable. In a survey conducted by analyst firm ESG1, 57% of organizations said they couldn’t tolerate more than an hour of downtime. And 15% say they cannot tolerate any downtime at all.

Figure 1 – Downtime Tolerance1

Extended outages have a more significant impact. According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately.

Accidental or malicious threats can affect data access and threaten the business, including data corruption, system failures, natural disasters and ransomware attacks. Addressing these scenarios as quickly and cost-effectively as possible requires multiple approaches to data protection.

Data protection approaches include backup, snapshot copies, clones, remote replication, high availability clustering and ransomware protection. The typical enterprise uses most, if not all, of these tools. And, which product is used is dependent on the criticality of the data, further complicating the situation. This multipoint product approach ends up increasing complexity, costs and risks.

Unified Data Protection with Hitachi Ops Center Protector

To unify these multiple approaches to data protection, Hitachi Vantara has created Hitachi Ops Center Protector, a Hitachi Ops Center portfolio product. Ops Center Protector automates and orchestrates the entire spectrum of Hitachi data protection solutions, making it easy to combine them to create end-to-end policy-based workflows. What used to require days to set up can now be done in 10 minutes. Ops Center Protector is also fully integrated with VMware vSphere APIs for Data Protection (VADP), including storage snapshots and replication. This integration enables VMware administrators to leverage Protector’s benefits while using the software interface they are familiar with. And Protector can deliver application-consistent data protection for Oracle database and VMware vSphere. Additional application support is forthcoming.

Extending the Value of Copy Data

Over 59% of IT professionals believe data reuse is a natural extension of data protection. To meet this need, Ops Center Protector’s agile copy services automate data repurposing to support secondary business functions, including DevOps, testing, finance and marketing.

Protector also can add backup copies to your data lake or object storage repository, in private or public clouds, and make them easily accessible for data discovery, analytics, governance and compliance operations.

Copy Data Management with Less Effort and Risk

At a time when IT organizations are adapting to the new normal in terms of on-site staffing, it is essential to have intuitive, easy-to-use copy data management tools that can cost-effectively protect and reuse data. Ops Center Protector offers a way to lower risk while reducing the burden of an IT department that’s stretched to the limit. For more information on Hitachi Vantara’s copy data management solutions, please see Data Protection or Manage Risk on hitachivantara.com.

1 ESG Master Survey Results: Real-world SLAs and Availability Requirements, Christophe Bertrand, Enterprise Storage Group, August 21, 2020

Jim Miller is a Marketing Manager at Hitachi Vantara.


Jim Miller

Jim Miller

Jim Miller is a Marketing Manager at Hitachi Vantara.