How HPE GreenLake Provides Data Protection for Your Mission Critical Applications

Traditional Approaches to Data Protection

The traditional approach to data protection is to back up the changed data during off-peak hours and store it in a secondary location. However, this approach has the following limitations:

• Inconsistent recovery
• Low granularity
• Increased complexity and cost
• Poor performance

Applications in modern infrastructure are typically distributed across multiple virtual machines (VMs), with dependencies on other applications. This architecture results in inconsistent recovery of VMs, making it difficult to quickly recover to fully functioning applications. It also increases the time needed to complete a recovery, which is why RTOs are increasing for many organizations.

These traditional methods simply don’t allow organizations to backup frequently enough. This limitation means that the most recent backup could be up to 24 hours old when data needs to be recovered. In addition, any changes made since the last backup are lost. Backup as a service and Cloud backup have been helping with this challenge however, the added element of security must be considered and examined for each of these providers. So how can you simplify?

HPE GreenLake’s Data Protection

HPE understands the needs of their users and have added  cloud services that protect data for any SLA. It provides rapid data recovery, eliminates data loss and mitigates the threat of ransomware. There are two components, HPE Backup and Recovery Service and Zerto.

HPE Backup and Recovery Service is a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) that protects cloud components such as VMs, Amazon EBS volumes and EC2 instances. Snapshots provide instant recovery and leverages the cloud to enable cost-effective, long-term data retention.

Zerto is a journal-based Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology that provides backups and disaster recovery for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This technology allows organizations to recover from ransomware attacks instantly by restoring data that was changed just 5-10 seconds before the attack. Zerto provides fast restores that don’t impact operations for various scenarios, including disasters, human error and hardware failures. Zerto also simplifies application and data protection at scale through automation and policy-based container orchestration, allowing organizations to focus their IT resources on business operations.

HPE GreenLake’s new Data Protection integrates with a large number of market-leading independent software vendors (ISVs), eliminating the need for vendor lock-in. This capability allows customers to use a broad range of solutions to protect their workloads, secure data from attack and recover from operational disruptions.

Benefits of Data Protection with HPE Greenlake

Protecting and recovering Amazon EBS Volumes, EC2 instances and VMware® VMs is becoming more challenging. Factors driving this trend include unrelenting data growth, more stringent SLAs and increasingly virtualized environments. Traditional processes based on agents and proxy servers can still provide reliable backup, retention and recovery, but at the cost of application performance and operational complexity. Specific benefits that HPE Backup and Recovery Service offers over traditional data protection solutions include the following:

• Delivery of new features
• Updates
• Interoperability
• Backup infrastructure
• Protection of new workloads

Traditional solutions use a monolithic architecture that requires scheduled releases to deliver new features, with major releases typically occurring only once a year. HPE GreenLake uses a microservice architecture that delivers new features with greater frequency through regular updates. It can also make service updates automatically, whereas traditional solutions require downtime, planning and testing.

Users must manage the interoperability between backup hardware and software in traditional data protection. HPE GreenLake manages and operates Cloud Protection Store (CPS) and Integrated Local Protection Stores (ILPS) as part of its service. By comparison, traditional solutions must provision backup and media servers in addition to providing their own catalog protection.

Many organizations begin by protecting their mission-critical applications and expand later to additional applications to protect from ransomware attacks.  A hands-on Zerto demo is available to illustrate the ease of setting up virtual protection groups, so that the full system can recover in just minutes. Also, if you are interested HPE, has had analyst firm ESG look at the technical impact of this new data protection with HPE Greenlake in their Impact Validation Report, take a look.

Summary

HPE GreenLake provides a data protection service that meets backup and recovery objectives for today’s organizations with limited budgets and even more limited resources. Combining backup, data store and protection in the same place, it simplifies the complexity of your environment. The GreenLake consumption model has no capital expenditures, and customers only pay for the capacity they consume beyond their reserved amount. Billing is based on the number of VMs, or the number of AWS resources and the capacity of the CPS.

Customers can also scale their capacity on demand from a buffer that HPE GreenLake provides, and still only pay for the resources they actually use. If you haven’t looked into HPE GreenLake, now is the time to become educated about this option. Take a test drive of HPE GreenLake with the expertise of ComportSecure for a tailored solution that meets your needs.