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As data volumes grow, backup needs analytics, says StorageCraft CEO

Backup appliance maker’s CEO says backup needs analytics so customers can prioritise restore of critical data in a world where volumes increase by 50% a year

Backup needs analytics capabilities because protected data volumes are increasing rapidly and organisations need to prioritise recovery.

That’s the view of appliance maker StorageCraft’s CEO Matt Medeiros, who spoke to ComputerWeekly.com this week.

Medeiros’s view is that the rate at which data is growing means data is increasingly likely to become less manageable.

Specifically when it comes to backup, the danger is that organisations have so much data that they may not know, or may not have prioritised, which of their datasets to recover in what order.

“There are lots of opportunities to perfect analytics in backup – most companies’ data is doubling every two years,” he said. “Then, if you ask, ‘What is your most important data?’, it’s going to be the data you want to recover. But that task is getting longer to do so.”

Medeiros’s conclusion is that not all data is equal. “The storage industry has forced us to treat it that way.”

The key is to tier data to ensure that the important data is recovered first. “As data grows, data recovery times grow, so you need to profile data and establish recall points so you can restore the most important data first,” said Medeiros.

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Medeiros is CEO of StorageCraft, which provides a range of all-flash and spinning disk backup appliances. These are the OneXafe family, which runs the company’s ShadowXafe backup software.

HDD-equipped 4412 nodes comprise up to 12 SATA or SAS hard disk drives (HDDs), while the 4417 can take up to 17, to make for maximum raw capacities of 144TB and 204TB respectively.

All-flash 5410 nodes can accommodate up to 10 2.5” solid-state drives solid-state drives for a maximum raw capacity of 38TB.

Backups data can be held on OneXafe hardware or be staged off to StorageCraft’s disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) cloud offering. 

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