In the age of Big Data, the problem facing many organisations today is not the lack of storage but having the data stored and managed properly so it can be called on quickly when needed.
Automated storage tiering now enables data to be automatically moved from a slower storage device (such as hard drives) to faster ones (such as solid state drives), when the data gets called up often.
In January, virtualisation and data management vendor Veeam started extending its tiered storage for backups to popular cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
This means backups made on Veeam can be migrated to the cloud-based services easily. They can also be moved to on-premise storage, if needed.
The update brings both cost and scalability benefits to customers, said Raymond Goh, head of systems engineering for Asia and Japan at Veeam Software.
For Asia-Pacific, where cloud maturity is still in its “early stages”, the new features are something that many organisations will be looking to, he told Techgoondu, in this month’s Q&A.
NOTE: Responses have been edited for brevity and house style.
Q: In terms of data protection and management, how big of a mess are companies in after amassing that information in multiple places over the years?
A: Companies are aware that data is their key asset and have a protection plan to prevent data sprawling into multiple locations.
The key challenge is to maintain or improve the availability aspect of their data wherever they are protected. With a robust data management plan, companies will be able to meet the demands of uninterrupted data access.
Going beyond the traditional policy-based backup, Veeam has five stages of intelligent data management which has the goal of creating a smarter, behavior-based and proactive data protection methodology.
Q: How much of an improvement will Veeam’s new cloud tiering feature have over traditional archiving?
A: Veeam’s new industry-leading cloud tier solution enables organisations to experience huge improvements over traditional archiving in two key aspects – cost and scalability.
Customers can enjoy up to 10x savings on long-term data retention costs with object storage integration and scale infinitely with native object storage.
Veeam’s new cloud tiering feature avoids vendor lock-in associated with secondary storage appliances as customers are now able to store data in the cloud without double charges.
Q: Would recovery speed be a compromise to consider when moving from on-premise storage?
A: Recovery speed will always be a consideration and we should not look upon this as a compromise. We should always think and plan about Recovery SLA. For example, tiering of backup data based on performance and capacity tier.
The objective of the performance tier is to meet fast recovery SLA and possibly on-premise performance storage will be the preferred media whereas capacity tier is to meet high capacity usage for longer term archiving with less stringent recovery SLA.
It is vital to have balance on different data builds depending on purposes and needs.
Q: What sectors would you think would embrace cloud tiers first?
A: Many years back, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and startups were predicted to be the first to embrace cloud and even have their data centres born in the cloud.
The situation now has changed – we see all industries in all sectors looking into a multi-cloud and cloud-first strategy. Even security scrutineers like banking and government have some form of deployment and data asset stored in the cloud.
This provides immense opportunity for us at Veeam. According to a 2018 report by IDC, more than 58 per cent of businesses in Asia-Pacific are still in the early stages of cloud maturity, creating a heightened demand for externally sourced outsourcing and managed services.
Organisations are looking to manage data in a way that unlocks its use and drives business transformation but doesn’t lock their data into one vendor or increase their risk exposure.
