Disaster Recovery Time Objective; HYDRAstor has an Edge

Data recovery is where the rubber meets the road. However I am not sure if deduplication vendors always practice what they preach because vendors almost immediately divert the focus of users off of data recovery speeds and onto how fast they do backups and what size data reduction ratios they can potentially deliver. While high data reduction ratios are good and wonderful, they may not do a company much good if it can't recover the data as fast as it needs or wants.

The biggest benefit of deduplication - high data reduction ratios - can also become its biggest drawback over time where recoveries are performed. As deduplication breaks incoming backup streams apart into smaller chunks of data, it compares these incoming chunks of data to chunks of data it already has on its storage subsystems, storing and indexing net new chunks of data while indexing duplicate chunks.

The problem that begins to emerge over time from a recovery perspective is inadequate processing power to reconstruct the files. Tens, hundreds or even thousands of files may reference the same chunks of data that are spread throughout the deduplicating appliance so it takes the system longer to reconstruct specific files. This scenario becomes especially problematic if the deduplicating appliance is called upon to reconstruct and recover multiple files for tens or hundreds of servers at the same time; such as may be required during a Disaster Recovery (DR) scenario.

NEC's HYDRAstor has a decided edge over its competitors. HYDRAstor uses a grid architecture that supports both accelerator and capacity nodes so users can scale performance and capacity independently of one another. This architecture is critical in recoveries since companies can add more accelerator nodes to meet specific application or corporate Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).

For instance, it is more likely that a company will only need to recover files from a single server at one time so less accelerator nodes may be needed since the performance overhead is not as great. However if data is moved off to tape or they need to recover files at a disaster recovery site the company may need to concurrently recover tens or hundreds of servers in a short, fixed period of time. Using HYDRAstor, they can add additional accelerator nodes to meet these specific corporate RTOs.

Data recoveries should be first and foremost on the minds of administrators when purchasing disk-based data protection. If companies cannot recover data in time to satisfy specific application or corporate DR RTOs, its value proposition becomes questionable since data protection is ultimately about data recoveries, not faster backups or data reduction. NEC's HYDRAstor remembered to deliver on that objective.