Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

In fact, in the field of data protection, this form of all-in-one has long existed, such as the most common backup all-in-one. Including EMC, Symantec, Quentin and other foreign manufacturers and Aisu, Mars Tech and other domestic manufacturers have launched a backup all-in-one machine.

IDC pointed out that although China's backup all-in-one market is still in the early stages of development, there are already a wide range of backup all-in-one products for different types of enterprises. In the process of exploring better backup and recovery management solutions, the advantages of backup all-in-one machine in saving operating costs, simplifying management and improving efficiency are gradually emerging.

Respond to data center change

In an era dominated by tape backup, there was a clear distinction between tape library hardware and backup software. With the emergence of disk backup and the gradual improvement of users' requirements for backup and recovery performance, the design idea of backup all-in-one machine, which is the integration of software and hardware, has been gradually accepted by users.

The emergence of backup all-in-one machine, a new product form, is closely related to the background of data center reform. At present, the data center has shown a decentralized trend, and the business-driven distributed computing model has been widely recognized. In the future, the cloud of the data center is an inevitable trend, and the infrastructure of the new generation of data centers will become the carrier to achieve the goal of IT as a service. In the process of data center infrastructure evolution, cost control, protection benefits and faster response have become the overall requirements of users for IT, and data protection is no exception. This naturally leads to a topic: whether the traditional data protection methods can meet the requirements of the new generation of data centers.

Aisu conducted a survey of domestic enterprises, and 80% of the respondents said that the current data protection methods can no longer meet their application needs. With the gradual popularity of virtualization and cloud computing, the traditional data protection methods only for physical devices seem to be stretched, and the solutions that can provide unified data protection for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments will be popular. In response to the question of whether data protection technologies need to be changed after production application virtualization, 24.6% of SME users surveyed said yes, while the proportion was even higher among enterprise users, reaching 47.1%.

So what are the problems with traditional data protection methods, including backup and recovery? The survey of Aishu gives the answer. The common problems faced by both small and medium-sized enterprises and large enterprises in the process of data backup include the following aspects: the amount of backup data is growing too fast; the backup process is complex; physical and virtual environments are backed up separately, which increases the complexity; only for critical business data backup, remote sites and branch offices are difficult to achieve backup; the existing backup process can not meet the needs of virtual backup. The backup task cannot be completed within the backup window.

He Hongfu, president of Aisu, said that virtualization protection, storage protection, large amount of data and efficient manageability are the main problems facing the new generation data center. To this end, Aisu put forward the concept of the next generation of data protection. He Hongfu summed up this new concept with six key words: efficiency, comprehensively improving the efficiency of application, server, storage protection and global repeated deletion; convergence, realizing the integration of data protection for physical and virtual environments; and end-to-end, provide comprehensive protection from centralized data centers to branch office endpoints Unified management, unified management of backup and recovery, physical and virtual environments, as well as applications, servers, and storage; upgrading and expansion to achieve more flexible scale-out; automation, the next generation of data protection solutions should have application awareness, automatic discovery and other capabilities.

Backup all-in-one machine becomes a climate

Nowadays, in the field of IT, all-in-one machine is a kind of product that people are familiar with. The all-in-one machine realizes a high degree of integration of software and hardware, which can simplify deployment and management, reduce the overall cost of ownership, and is easy to maintain. These characteristics have been widely recognized by industry users.

Although the core of its research and development is at the software level, its products are sold in the form of an all-in-one machine. In the past, this kind of hardware-based backup product was regarded as a low-end product, but now this concept has changed. Not only the international leading data protection manufacturers such as Symantec and EMC have recognized this product form, but also the domestic data protection manufacturers are chasing this popular trend.

At present, Aisha already has a relatively complete backup all-in-one product line: it is "super easy to prepare" for small and medium-sized enterprise users, AnyBackup backup storage cabinets for large and medium-sized enterprise users, and TxCloud cloud cabinets for large data centers and cloud service providers. Backup all-in-one machine is not only suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, but also for enterprise customers. Symantec also launched NetBackup series and Backup Exec series all-in-one products for enterprise market and SME customers respectively, and won a large number of Chinese customers in a very short time.

Integration of protection, archiving and management

Under the market trend of gradual transition from product-based sales to program-based sales, the soft-hard solution of all-in-one machine has won the favor of more customers. Based on the concept of next-generation data protection, Aishu, which is mainly based on all-in-one computers, has launched the next generation backup all-in-one products-AnyBackup 5.0and TxCloud 5.0. Aishu next-generation backup integrates data protection, archiving and management, and its main functions include backup, disaster recovery, storage snapshot management, deduplication, virtualization protection, regulatory compliance, shared backup and so on.

Where is the next generation backup all-in-one machine new? Xie Feng, product manager of Aixu Company, answered the reporter's questions.

First of all, it provides a new generation of virtualized data protection functions: virtual machines do not need the recovery process and can be mounted directly; it has the function of automatic virtual machine discovery, which further simplifies the complexity of virtual backup management, and the amount of operation and maintenance is close to zero; support virtual machine single file recovery, recovery speed is faster and more flexible; agentless mechanism can fully release resources.

Secondly, it adopts global deduplication technology, which not only deduplicates faster and has a higher deduplication ratio, but also frees up more backup storage space and improves the utilization of enterprise resources. Xie Feng, for example, said: "from version 3.5 to version 5.0 of AnyBackup, the efficiency of deduplication has more than tripled."

Thirdly, it optimizes the storage snapshot and replication management functions: tens of millions of small files can be restored faster, more flexible and more effectively; multiple storage levels are optional, which improves the flexibility of snapshot management; ensure application consistency and avoid data logic errors, which can improve the reliability of storage snapshot management; it can achieve immediate mount recovery, and even the recovery of a large amount of data can easily achieve the predetermined RTO target.

Finally, it further improves the effect of real-time backup and application disaster recovery: the granularity of CDP is shortened from minutes to seconds, and the RPO is almost zero; during the non-takeover period, the disaster recovery machine does not need to boot; volume mount makes the data available instantly, and the RTO is almost zero; the utilization of the disaster recovery machine is improved.

Xie Feng also highlighted several features of the next generation backup all-in-one machine, including fine-grained backup and recovery of the database, remote supervision, flexible expansion of backup data drift across nodes, and so on. These new technologies and functions further enhance the value of the next generation backup all-in-one machine, making it more comfortable in data centers and all kinds of cloud environments.

"in order to better protect the virtualized environment, we have also conducted technical cooperation with VMware." He Hongfu told reporters, "in order to promote the sales of all-in-one machines, we will have more in-depth cooperation with vertical industry partners." In addition to the backup all-in-one update, Aishu has a larger product upgrade plan. Aishu is fully prepared for virtualization, cloud computing and big data.

Link what is backup all-in-one

IDC definition: backup all-in-one machine is a separate disk-based storage solution, which uses software, disk array, server engine or node to back up data, and closely integrates with the backup software to form a directory, index, plan, so as to achieve data transmission. Backup all-in-one machines can be deployed as stand-alone devices or as gateways.

IDC statistics show that in 2012, in China's backup all-in-one market, the top three manufacturers in terms of turnover are EMC, Aisu and Feikang. IDC predicts that the overall market for all-in-one backup machines in China will be three times larger in 2017 than in 2012.

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