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Protecting data and establishing recovery time objectives (RTO) is one of the most important requirements in data centers today. No solution does it all, but instead several storage system components are leveraged to meet the requirements of not only protecting data, but recovering it in the event of a disaster or requirement for data to be recalled. Some of the data protection solutions leveraged for this task are based on disk systems technology for fast backup and recovery; disk-to-disk backup solutions (D2D), where copies of data are replicated on like-storage systems using embedded array based copy services software or a backup application where the disk system is used as a target device. When the requirement is to store data off site for archival or compliance purposes, other data protection solutions are employed such as disk-to-disk-to-tape technology (D2D2T). Data copies are staged on disk systems where they can be copied later by a tape system.
For companies with large SAN environments with requirements to archive data to tape for off site storage, D2D2T-based solutions are best deployed. However, one of the challenges with this type of solution is the increase in size of the backup requirements and the associated cost as data sources continue to grow with business demand.
The cost component is attributed to the requirement of maintaining copies of data on tier-1 storage when array based copy services software is leveraged. This approach doubles tier-1 capacity required for production applications. While tier-1 storage performs well for high volume transactional applications, other less expensive storage may actually perform better for data streaming applications such as backup.
Incipient software provides the ability to deliver multi-vendor, cross array, point-in-time copies that reduce the cost and increase the performance of data protection solutions leveraging D2D or D2D2T-based systems.
Incipient delivers a common set of storage services software across multi-vendor storage. Incipient software operates in a SAN environment and resides within Cisco MDS 9000 SAN switches with the Cisco Storage Services Module (SSM) installed. Incipient support interoperates with all the leading storage vendors' storage systems including EMC, HDS, HP, 3PAR, IBM and Sun.
Incipient software creates local point-in-time copies or clones of Incipient network volumes. These copies can be split off and accessed independently for a variety of business uses including a staging copy for D2D2T solutions or quick backup and recovery of production data for D2D solutions. Incipient software's consistency groups assure data integrity for databases or applications that span multiple volumes.
Unlike embedded array based copy services software, Incipient allows data to be copied between dissimilar storage arrays from different vendors. This capability provides companies with a high performance backup system and the flexibility to use lower cost storage, thereby keeping solution costs down as data continues to grow.
Data copies services performed by Incipient software offer many savings that are directly attributable to its ability to support heterogeneous copies. The specific quantifiable savings comes from the following areas: