In February 2016, I posted a blog titled “Blocks and Racks and Rails, OH MY!” in which I discussed converged infrastructure offerings and how these solutions are transforming business. Ultimately that post discussed the VCE VxRail Appliance, which, at the time, was a recently announced offering from VCE, as the only fully-integrated, preconfigured, and pre-tested VMware hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA). I even touched upon the value of including data protection as part of a HCIA solution.
It appears I’m not the only one who feels this way.
In June 2016, EMC released the 2nd Global Data Protection Index, which surveyed over 2200 IT decision makers across 18 countries regarding their protection readiness in an increasingly challenging world and their confidence moving forward. The results revealed that 83% of survey respondents said data protection is a mandatory or very important criterion when selecting a converged infrastructure solution.
EMC and VCE totally get it, which is why data protection is included in EVERY VxRail appliance.
The data protection capabilities built into VxRail Appliances includes backup and recovery, and continuous data protection. It’s a lot of functionality, which addresses data protection requirements for most VxRail customers.
But what about for the user who needs (or wants) more data protection? By “more” I mean additional capabilities, such as provisioning a larger number of Virtual Machines (VMs), or comprehensive monitoring, analysis, reporting and backup file search capabilities, or the addition of industry-leading protection storage. I’m talking about an “over and above” level of protection.
Let me share a recent personal example. Every few years my family is fortunate enough to take a Caribbean vacation. The last two vacations have been cruises. However, this year we decided to go with another family to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic. Our friends had been there before and are now owners of one of the villas at the resort. When we first started talking about this vacation over a year ago our thoughts focused on endless beaches, sun, watersports, exotic food and fun.
But there was one topic that increasingly entered the conversations as we approached our departure date.
Zika.
You’ve probably heard stories about how Zika impacted preparations for the Olympic Games in Rio. It’s also widespread throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. I’m not attending the Olympics in Rio so I paid only minimal attention to associated news stories. But for my vacation, this was my family, and I had to ensure we were all protected. Ultimately we all decided to go to the resort despite the CDC warnings. We just needed to take every reasonable precaution.
We called the resort (several times) and each time they assured us they spray insecticides daily to reduce the population of Zika-carrying mosquitos. And, this is a resort on the beach….we weren’t staying in a hut deep in the jungle! But, even with daily spraying around the resort grounds my wife wasn’t comfortable. Her goal every morning would be to ensure that after an acceptable amount of sunscreen had been applied to every adult and child, that another layer of bug spray was applied prior to venturing out for the day.
I should have taken stock in a company which manufactures mosquito repellent. We brought three suitcases for the four of us: one suitcase for swimsuits, one for evening clothes, and one for bug spray. OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, but we brought a significant amount of bug spray with us.
The double spraying of sunscreen and bug spray was kind of a pain (and kind of gross). But it apparently did work in the end. No one in our party contracted Zika. We were lucky. Or was it luck? I can’t help but consider that extra layer of protection to be what optimized our ability to remain bug-bite-free.
This is precisely why protection of VMware workloads on VCE VxRail appliances can be optimized with EMC data protection. This enhanced data protection solution offers backup and recovery, continuous data protection for any point-in-time recovery, proactive monitoring and analysis, reporting and backup file search capabilities. All components are built by the same company, and are fully supported.
As IT organizations look to solutions to simplify and improve operational efficiency, VxRail HCIA remains on track to be the market leader by the end of the year. At the same time, all data needs to be protected. VCE VxRail Appliances with EMC data protection provides simple and scalable protection of all data and applications regardless of where they live, against whatever might happen, and at the right service level based on business value.
