The next generation of data protection is not just about backup or replication into and out of the cloud, but about inexpensive recovery directly into a cloud in a hypervisor agnostic manner.  Recovery is the key to backup and while we spend many hours ensuring that our backups happen in a timely manner, we spend very little time testing those backups and ensuring that recovery can happen at any time for any workload, not just those that are mission critical. Next generation data protection must also be extremely simple to use, setup, and configure. Is your data protection tool a next generation tool or lost in the past somewhere?

Next Generation Data Protection

The primary goal for data protection is to provide a means to recover data either as disaster recovery or as part of business continuity. Data is protected to meet business needs. If those business needs change, so must data protection. The current crop of virtualization and cloud backup tools either make the cloud the target for backup, or provide some form of like-to-like replication between the on-premise systems (or even other cloud systems) to cloud systems. Yet the technology is like hypervisor to like hypervisor for recovery in general. While it is possible for the movement between hypervisors to occur, until now, this is not automated and usually a time consuming process. Which means, when the chips are down, that we are still not hypervisor agnostic.
That is until now. HotLink DR Express uses the HotLink transformation engine to not only transform virtual disks to work between hypervisors, but also the commands used to control the hybrid cloud all from one simple to understand interface within vCenter. Currently, the transformation engine in HotLink DR Express replicates data from VMware vSphere to AWS, but if you look at the capabilities of HotLink SuperVISOR you can see the potential for from any hypervisor to any hypervisor which means HotLink is making our hybrid clouds hypervisor agnostic and data protection independent of hypervisor integrations on the receiving end.
To be called Next generation data protection a system should meet the following requirements:

  • Focus on Recovery
  • Business Continuity, not only disaster recovery at the cost of backup
  • Business Continuity for ALL workloads not just mission critical, but those critical to any group within an organization. Continuous data protection (CDP) is a lofty goal, this requirement falls outside the realm of CDP.
  • Make use of the near infinite ready spare capacity within an elastic cloud
  • No special web interfaces or server to manage, i.e. managed from within the management tool that every one knows for a given virtual environment such as Microsoft System Center or VMware vCenter.
  • Works with my current hardware with no need to purchase more, maintain low latency networks, or hot spare locations.
  • Works with a cloud running a different hypervisor. No need for like-to-like backup or restoration.
  • Does not require the cloud target to ‘hook’ into the cloud at hypervisor levels (speak well known APIs like S3, EC2, vSphere, etc) and stay within the bounds of the cloud tenant (the cloud administrator is not involved).
  • Encrypt all traffic and storage
  • Restore into the cloud or anywhere

When you look at all the tools out there many meet some of these requirements, most do not, most require like hypervisor-to-like hypervisor restorations and as such are not hypervisor agnostic. HotLink DR Express is a Next Generation Data Protection tool meeting these requirements providing business continuity for all workloads (big, small, critical, or non-critical) using well known cloud APIs (S3 and EC2) which are completely in the control of the tenant. What are youre requirements for next generation data protection?
For many reasons HotLink is worth a look at VMworld!