Last month I ran a competition to celebrate 2,000,000+ blog visitors. The competition was simple: tell me an example of where Dell Technologies data protection achieved a great result for your business.
I had some great answers, but I want to share the four that I loved the most. I promised 3 prizes:
- First prize: A signed copy of “Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability”, and a signed copy of “Protecting Information Assets and IT Infrastructure in the Cloud”.
- For one runner-up: A signed copy of “Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability”.
- For the other runner-up: A signed copy of “Protecting Information Assets and IT Infrastructure in the Cloud”.
Because I’m publishing four stories, I’m adding another prize – and that’s because two of the stories were so impressive I wanted to give two first prizes!
So here we go. First, let’s see the runners-up:
First Runner Up
This is a story I hear regularly, but it’s been put so succinctly:
Running Avamar VE+DataDomain has been an easy, light and cost effective solution to protect our VMware infra.
Competition response
The virtual machine backup technology in Dell’s data protection products are stellar! I regularly see stories of businesses backing up thousands – and tens of thousands – of virtual machines easily within their backup windows, with each VM often getting a full backup in well under 5 minutes.
That’s worth celebrating.
Second Runner Up
Not all backup products are created equally, and that’s why I wasn’t surprised to get a story like this:
We switched from IBM TSM/Spectrum Protect to Avamar and saw a dramatic increase in backup and restore performance (both in virtual and physical machines). We were also able to leverage replication to create a real world DR procedure.
Competition response
Over the decades I’ve worked with a lot of companies who have shifted to products like Avamar and NetWorker, so this is the kind of success story I’ve heard regularly. The deduplication efficiencies offered by Avamar and Data Domain have just magnified those success stories!
Equal First Prize #1
Proving just how important it is to have off-platform protection, here’s a story about a dramatic rescue of a business! These days with deduplication you could probably do it all remotely, but over the years I’ve seen – and even occasionally participated in – these sorts of recoveries, though none that seemed quite this intense:
I’ve worked with Legato/EMC products since 1998, but I think the biggest win was about 2008, when a telecoms company had issues with their billing database, a 7Tb Oracle DB. This was backed up via Symmetrix BCV’s to a DR site in another European city, then backed off to LTO, while also being backed up to local tape. It became clear that the problem had replicated and been backed up, but the local tape library had failed. Our only known good backup was in another country. One return flight, one hurried handover, one dash from airport to data centre and two very long days and we managed to get the database back so the DBA’ s could do their voodoo. Networker saved our bacon!
Competition response
The data protection industry abounds with examples of “saved our bacon” – this is a fantastic example of how some failures require an off-platform copy, where the failure can’t also be duplicated!
Equal First Prize #2
Efficient source-side deduplication more often than not makes challenging backup situations easy. But sometimes you need an extra bit of “oomph” in the process, like adding storage-integrated data protection into the mix. That lets you do things like the following:
We used to backup 50TB Database more than 12hrs. With migrating Storage on All Flash DellEMC and PowerProtect or Protectpoint its taking less than an hour. Also following your blogs helps me understand manythings like implementation of DPA. Big Thank you!!
Competition response
(There’s definitely Protect Point in there – storage integrated data protection, and that could either be manually managed or managed through PowerProtect, as of PowerProtect Data Manager 19.3.)
How’s that!? Bringing a 50 TB backup that was taking more than 12 hours down to under an hour is a huge win for a business with large, mission-critical systems.
Wrapping Up
Every day, people have fantastic success stories of using Dell Technologies data protection solutions within their business. Sometimes it’s a simple story – like being able to backup all your virtual machines in the easiest possible way. But scratch the surface and you’ll hear of some amazing stories as well, like international flights to save a business-critical database, or getting those mission-critical databases backed up at over 50TB/hour.
I’ve reached out to the winners and as soon as I’m able to given all the COVID-19 situation, I’ll be getting their prizes out to them.
Happy protecting!