With data being called the “new oil” or the “lifeblood of the organisation”, protecting that data and ensuring its availability, preservation, and retention have become the most critical tasks within the data centre today.

And with the value of data set to soar, as more is generated every second, these tasks become increasingly crucial. However, while the way companies protect their data has evolved dramatically over the past three decades, the basic requirement remains the same.

Customers want to access their data instantly whenever they need it.

Unfortunately, the unprecedented growth of data from multiple sources continues to make it hard for businesses to keep up, particularly when it comes to backup. Traditional storage solutions simply can’t keep up and are battling with the costs associated with managing petabytes of data at a time.

Under pressure to do more

This is also all happening at a time when the IT department is under pressure to do more with less. They need to spend less time and resources on managing data, yet paradoxically must provide the same level of high protection and availability. Furthermore, they need to manage block and file backups, as well as a host of demands from the cloud.

Concurrently, the dynamics of the data centre have grown increasingly complex. There is a wide range of applications, databases, and file systems that generate many different types of data. Moreover, as new applications come online, IT needs to find ways to protect all the newly created data without having to create a customised backup solution every time.

This has seen multiple data protection silos with multiple products within the data centre being created, resulting in inconsistent data protection practices and skyrocketing costs, adding additional pressure on already overburdened IT teams.

Addressing complex challenges

This is where Infindat’s storage solutions come in. Companies today have extremely complex data protection environments which cannot be fully covered or satisfied by a one-backup setup alone. Today’s backup solutions need to be a mix of many elements, such as different types of disk, different types of tape as well as different backup software.

Infinidat’s InfiniBox offers full flexibility and a shared resource model that brings measurable cost savings and takes business efficiency to a whole new level. It’s important to bear in mind that the requirements for backup are only getting increasingly stringent, and new regulations are constantly being introduced.

Businesses must be able to access their data 100% of the time, and on the rare occasion they cannot, their expectations on how long it should take to recover that data are growing increasingly demanding.

Uptime, all the time

In fact, Infinidat takes “always available” to another level. While most storage vendors boast “five nines uptime” meaning that the system is totally available and fully operational 99.999% of the time, or down for less than six minutes in a year, Infinidat boasts seven nines of availability.

This means 99.99999% availability, and the equivalent of an infinitesimal less than three seconds of downtime per year, a level of reliability that no other storage vendor can even begin to compete with.

While many other solutions believe five nines is good enough, the difference between InfiniBox’s seven nines and its competing storage arrays, makes InfiniBox effectively a hundred times more reliable, and therefore the business’s data that much more accessible.

Snapshot functionality

Business leaders understand that snapshots and replication are changing the data protection game, as data continues to grow in volume and velocity. Unfortunately, the majority of the storage arrays we see today do not offer any snapshot functionality, meaning there is a capacity and performance impact that renders them not terribly useful.

Next-generation snapshots and replication technologies such as those featured in Infinidat’s InfiniBox enable organisations in every sector to protect more data than is possible with historical methods. In fact, performing operational recoveries from snapshots is becoming nothing out of the ordinary.

Highest availability, lowest cost

In short, InfiniBox promises today’s businesses the most uptime and the highest data availability with the lowest overall price tag. Infinidat, users do not need to compromise on any level. The solutions come with built-in replication that assists companies to lower the potential risk associated with local disasters and allows entities to have access to the right data in the right location, as and when they need it.

In this way, disaster recovery and business continuity are not separate investments, but rather part of every Infinidat storage investment. In fact, the company firmly believes that all of InfiniBox’s industry-leading features and capabilities should come standard as part of the overall storage platform.

There’s no question that Infinidat offers an unparalleled solution. Meeting the needs of today’s demanding businesses requires next-generation storage systems packed with features that can provide the highest available uptime with seven nines of availability, snapshotting, and replication all built into the system for one affordable price.

About Infotech
Very few companies have a successful track record spanning more than 40 years in the South African economy. Infotech is a multi-disciplinary technology company with a range of solutions, which are focused on delivering true business value to customers in real time. The company, which was founded in 1980, has consistently challenged itself on making a difference in the world through innovative technology solutions.