It’s a rapidly changing trend – businesses increasingly want the various Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) running applications and essential services to be involved in the data protection process. In fact, in the 2016 Data Protection Index, somewhere in the order of 93% of respondents said this was extremely important to their business.
It makes sense, too. Backup administrators do a great job, but they can’t be expected to know everything about every product deployed and protected within the organisation. The old way of doing things was to force the SMEs to learn how to use the interfaces of the backup tools. That doesn’t work so well. Like the backup administrators having their own sphere of focus, so too do the SMEs – they understandably want to use their tools to do their work.
What’s more, if we do find ourselves in a disaster situation, we don’t want backup administrators to become overloaded and a bottleneck to the recovery process. The more those operations are spread around, the faster the business can recover.
So in the modern data protection environment, we have to work together and enable each other.
In a distributed control model, the goal will be for the NetWorker administrator to define the protection policies needed, based on the requirements of the business. Once those policies are defined, enabled SMEs should be able to use their tools to work with those policies.
One of the best examples of that is for VMware protection in NetWorker. Using the plugins provided directly into the vSphere Web Client, the VMware administrators can attach and detach virtual machines from protection policies that have been established in NetWorker, and initiate backups and recoveries as they need.
In the video demo below, I’ll take you through the process whereby the NetWorker administrator defines a new virtual machine backup policy, then the VMware administrator attaches a virtual machine to that policy and kicks it off. It’s really quite simple, and it shows the power that you get when you enable SMEs to interact with data protection from within the comfort of their own tools and interfaces. (Don’t forget to ensure you switch to 720p/HD in order to see what’s going on within the session.)
Don’t forget – if you find the NetWorker Blog useful, you’ll be sure to enjoy Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability.