Prioritize, plan, test, repeat
If you want high-quality data protection, you can't do it with backups alone. You must combine several methods — including backup, snapshots, replication to achieve low-to-no downtime and rapid time to recovery.
Setting data backup and recovery targets is tricky business. When designing a data protection strategy, consider workload priority, and how much downtime you can realistically risk. For Tier 0 workloads, like your SQL and Oracle databases and SAP HANA, expected uptime should be 99.9999%. For mission-critical workloads, you may consider 15 minutes to be your maximum recovery time objective.
Plan for outages by testing each of your systems periodically, ensuring the efficiency of your backup strategy. And keep in mind, when disasters happen, they aren’t always fires or floods. Plus, they usually happen to individual systems, rather than your entire infrastructure all at once.
Live by the 3-2-1 rule: Always keep at least three copies of your data; store two copies on different storage media, with one of them located offsite.
With NetApp StorageGRID, the premier system for object storage, if disaster strikes and you lose a single storage system or an entire data center (or two!), the object you’ve backed up exists in perpetuity. StorageGRID is also self-correcting and, in the event of an outage, automatically rebalances all objects across the remaining infrastructure to maintain protection, based on the time thresholds you define.
Although protecting your data has been a priority of ours since day one, backup and recovery is a mature industry, which is why we’ve teamed up with several leading data protection and security partners to enhance your backup and recovery at scale. Our partners include Commvault, Veeam, and Rubrik—all 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders in Backup and Recovery—whose solutions integrate seamlessly with NetApp and your data fabric.
