Storage Groups: Your Next Data Protection Bullet
OK – so you may now have an awesome data deduplication appliance in your environment. Using it gives you the peace of mind that data can be quickly backed up and recovered. But what about going further to meet the needs of each department/workgroup you deal with?
With the new release of the Quest DR Series Operating System, 4.0, you can now separate data stored on the dedupe appliance into logical “groups” with several immediate benefits:
- Logical Separation improves data security
- Separate policies to meet individual needs
- Improved, granular reporting
Storage groups are a logical way of grouping data on the appliance – containers are assigned to a default group or specific groups set up by appliance administrators. They make sense when you’re spreading the use of the deduplication appliance among multiple departments, workgroups or customers in a multi-service provider scenario. It lets you separate for example, backups from a group such as engineering, into one group and backups from applications/servers used by Product Marketing into another group.
The result? Improved security - data from one group can’t ever “bleed” or seep into another groups’ space. As an IT manager you don’t need to set up physical separation –the appliance keeps track of each storage group and manages overall capacity to meet the needs of all groups. Storage groups are simply logical partitions of all the data backed up.
You may also need to have separate compression and encryption policies for each group. For example, the HR or Finance department’s data can be encrypted while leaving data from other groups unencrypted. Because of the separation of data, deduplication also happens on each group during the normal backup process. For example, backup workstreams coming from all the servers or the applications supporting Engineering are directed to the Storage Group set up for Engineering and deduplication, compression and encryption happen during that process.
Storage groups also add another layer of reporting to your data protection arsenal. You or any other IT manager can review the statistics and deduplication performance results for each group separately. This can be a boon when sub-dividing the cost of the appliance and/or service between various workgroups/department or clients or when reviewing the deduplication results of different applications/servers for alerts, capacity utilization and other performance metrics.
Learn how deduplication appliances can improve productivity and reduce costs while delivering an unbelievable return on investment (ROI).
