For Meghan Trainor, it’s ‘All About That Bass’, but in the data center it’s all about that app. You know the one. It’s the app that is so critical to the business that you simply cannot have anything impact it. These mission critical applications are the lifeblood of the business, so they have to be protected efficiently and effectively, but doing so has always been a challenge.
When it comes to protecting mission critical applications, the impact traditional backup has on the app server, the time required to pause the app, move the data and take the app out of backup mode is simply too high.
That’s why so many have turned to snapshots or some combination of snapshots and traditional backups to protect these apps. Unfortunately just when you were trying to make things better, this can introduce new challenges. While snapshots provide low impact point in time copies, they’re not designed for retention and can eat up your precious primary storage capacity not to mention being vulnerable to cascading corruptions.
This is exactly why EMC introduced ProtectPoint last year. ProtectPoint provides faster, more efficient backup without impacting the application. As we discussed then, it’s designed to provide you with the best of both worlds of data protection. And I’m excited to announce that the best just got better with our latest release of ProtectPoint, which we announced at EMC World in May.
The biggest part of this announcement is… you guessed it… all about that app. ProtectPoint now offers native application integration some of the most popular databases and applications: Oracle, SAP and IBM DB2. This means that app owners and DBAs can now natively backup from their own utilities (for example, Oracle RMAN) via ProtectPoint. (You can check out a great demo that shows how this works with Oracle here.) This means that DBAs get full control of application consistent backups but with no backup impact on the host! Since Data Domain is the target for these backups, you get all the efficiency and reliability you’d expect from the industry’s lead protection storage platform.
But wait, there’s more! In addition to our new native application integrations, we also offer a ‘file system’ agent to backup environments where we don’t (yet) have native integration. This release expands the file system support to Windows (in addition to existing Unix and Linux support). Windows support enables you to leverage ProtectPoint to backup your Microsoft environments like SQL and Exchange with your own scripts.
Now you can have truly ‘no trouble’ backups for your mission critical applications and databases with ProtectPoint. By providing you the functionality of backups with the performance of snapshots, ProtectPoint is the only protection solution that understands that it’s all about that app.
To learn more about EMC ProtectPoint, please visit www.emc.com/protectpoint.
