The Hybrid Approach: Rewriting the Rules for Backup Storage

There are more users accessing complex applications with a variety of new data points. These users must be enabled by their organizations to leverage critical resources from any device and any time.

So how does a business keep up? How can an organization maintain control over an ever-evolving data management process?

Exponential data growth and long-term retention requirements are putting tremendous pressure on IT professionals who are expected to accommodate huge, rapidly-expanding quantities of unstructured and structured data while simultaneously slashing their storage costs.

Of course, simply adding more high performance primary storage is very expensive and highly inefficient. Not all data is equal, and IT managers are acutely aware that the cost effectiveness of any storage solution will directly correlate with how efficiently it matches data’s performance, capacity, and connectivity needs.

Today, many IT professionals are struggling to shrink backup windows and reduce their Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets, while concurrently coping with quantities of data that are an order of magnitude greater than those seen just a few years ago. Simply put, backup performance (along with scalability and manageability) has failed to keep pace with the needs of today’s organizations, driving up IT costs and reducing efficiency while jeopardizing effective data protection.

Fortunately, there is good news.

In this whitepaper from Nexsan (Imation), we learn how innovative hybrid technology, combining the speed of SSDs with the capacity and economy of HDDs, is now bringing affordable high-performance backup storage within reach for organizations of virtually any size - even those working within tightly-constrained budgets. No longer must IT pros play catch-up when it comes to backups and restores; cost effective data protection has finally entered the fast lane.

There once was a time when SANs (block storage) were used exclusively to support transactional, structured data driven by database applications—often the core of an organization’s business; NAS (file storage) was associated with user home directories and office productivity applications. But now, even the most critical databases are being run on NAS devices. Server virtualization has further raised the profile of file storage, with applications like VMware storing and manipulating entire server instances as individual files.

Download this whitepaper today to learn how block and file data types are both driving the fundamental storage requirements of virtually every IT infrastructure. Additionally, you'll find that the ability to support SAN and NAS in a single unified hybrid backup solution pays multiple dividends:

Hybrid technology is leading a new era of backup performance, and when allied with unified storage architecture, can provide unprecedented levels of efficiency, manageability and cost-effectiveness to data protection.