Elevate secondary storage to become a first-class citizen

2nd July 2020 4 minute read

Today’s business climate is a keen reminder of the importance of maintaining business operations no matter what. Business continuity is not just about protecting against data loss in the event of a data centre outage. It’s about providing always-on access to applications and data, even in the most extreme situations.

But data protection infrastructure is often seen as a second-class citizen in the data centre. An afterthought, with backed up data kept in isolated and aging infrastructure that can be difficult to design, manage and scale while maintaining increasingly stringent requirements around backup windows, security and compliance. Combine these issues with a growing data footprint for most organisations, a recent exponential rise in ransomware attacks targeting secondary storage, and more demanding recovery time - and IT teams face some unique challenges.

Backup to meet modern requirements

While companies are modernising their data centres at an ever-increasing pace - the secondary environment often lags. This isn’t necessarily because companies don’t think it’s important. Many organisations have comprehensive backup and restore strategies - however, the architecture being used is still largely traditional 3-tier and has not kept up with production environments which have moved to cloud-like architectures. This creates complexity, which translates to higher costs and an increased likelihood of missed backup windows (at best) and data breaches (at worst.

This disparity in production and backup architectures can then drive a need for specialised teams to manage backup solutions.

Reacting to a security vulnerability, breach or outage caused by malware or ransomware is difficult at the best of times. We know that cyber security risk is increasing with many “bad actors” taking advantage of current situations where IT teams are adapting to new ways of “normal“ working. Having robust continuity (and prevention) plans in place to deal with cyberthreats must be top of mind. And if companies are investing in secure infrastructure for their production environments - their secondary environment deserves the same level of security and structure.

In addition, long term archiving and retention of data is important for many organisations, but outdated infrastructure may not be adequate. For example, healthcare organisations have regulatory requirements mandating long-term retention of data such as MRI and CAT scans, amongst others and the implications of data loss or compromise are far reaching. The Australian Signals Directorate’s “Essential 8 – Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents” has an extensive set of guidelines for backups and secondary storage environments in general. Similar regulations and policies apply across several other industries with long term data retention needs. Being able to extend archiving capability to the public cloud and/or tape for customers to maintain archives in house is an essential component of any modern backup and storage approach.

Lack of control over data and backup can lead to long and complex recovery, lost data, application unavailability, and missed service level agreements (SLAs).

Nutanix Mine with Veeam - how does it help?

Nutanix Mine with Veeam provides a comprehensive data protection and management solution with all the hardware and software components required to support any virtualised or physical legacy environment. By leveraging Nutanix market leading distributed storage fabric combined with Veeam, companies can address all the issues mentioned to meet modern data protection needs across both Nutanix and non-Nutanix legacy IT environments. Its delivered through an integrated appliance preinstalled with Veeam and can be deployed and ready to backup workloads and data in less than an hour.

This means Nutanix Mine with Veeam can be deployed as a stand-alone backup solution even for legacy 3-tier environments and workloads running on bare metal. For long term retention and archive, the solution leverages Veeam’s cloud tiering capabilities to stage to any S3 compatible storage such as Nutanix Objects or Amazon S3.

Like production Nutanix environments, Mine with Veeam allows the data protection infrastructure to scale non-disruptively as backup needs grow, without compromising performance or simplicity. You can start off with a smaller system to protect 30-50TBs of data and scale to hundreds of TB, and combined with Nutanix Objects, achieve Petabyte scale for data protection. And it’s offered under a simple “start small and pay as you grow” pricing model.

Finally, Nutanix Mine with Veeam includes the renowned support from both organisations. Through a cooperative support agreement between Nutanix and Veeam, the support process is simplified without the need for back and forth contact between two vendors.

Dicker Data with Mine and Veeam

Dicker Data is the only reseller in Australia authorised to sell Nutanix Mine and Veeam solution. Pennie Stevens, General Manager - Software from Dicker Data said “We are proud to be the only authorised distributor of both Nutanix and Veeam in Australia. Both organisations are known for simplifying IT to provide maximum customer value. Nutanix Mine with Veeam takes it a step further with a turnkey solution that streamlines the full back-up lifecycle and enables granular data recovery and availability for mission-critical applications.”

Nutanix Mine with Veeam helps modernise any secondary storage and backup environment. The team at Dicker Data can help ANZ resellers design a backup solution for clients across physical, virtual and cloud environments. We support you in helping your customers overcome their challenges.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions about or email sales@dickerdata.com.au to talk to one of our representatives.