Your business relies on making sure all its important information is kept safe and easily recoverable if something goes wrong. When we start talking about mission critical applications, most people can’t imagine themselves not keeping that data safe. As Big Data starts to become (and has become) mission critical, there begins a growing need to protect it.
Businesses used to understand data as being structured or neatly organized in databases found within the enterprise. But then, an emergence of new data started to spread, data is now being gathered from many diverse sources. Web logs, ecommerce transactions and demographic information left behind by customer interactions with a company became a useful source of data for corporations. This rapid growth of new data sources that is characterized by high volumes of growth, generated at high velocities, and include both these structured and unstructured data sources could be analyzed and used to better the business. For instance, Chrysler uses data gathered from their manufacturing floor, which is then used to help boost operational efficiency. All fortune 100 companies are using Big Data analytics, and with rapid technology adoption, projects are maturing faster than ever. This Big Data holds great value to businesses by allowing them to better understand their customers and gain a competitive edge, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and protect.
Protecting Big Data is becoming essential, not optional if you want your business to stay competitive – and other solutions out there just aren’t meeting the requirements needed. Hadoop, an open source, java-based framework that can support the processing and storage of large data sets, is a widely used platform to analyze Big Data. Hadoop users have traditionally used replication and/or snapshots for data protection and disaster recovery. At small scales, these approaches were deemed enough. However, analytics in enterprises is quickly becoming mainstream, increasingly driving business decisions. The time has come to protect big data applications with a more robust data protection strategy. While snapshots and replication may be acceptable for smaller sets of data, they don’t provide a very robust or comprehensive data management for the long term – which is why you need to start with a true backup solution for your Hadoop data. With replication, you’re not performing a point-in-time backup, so human and software errors in your data can get replicated. Snapshots have their own limitations and can cause cascading corruptions. On top of that, recovery with snapshots is time consuming and complex. That’s why Big Data needs a real point-in-time backup to truly protect it, and one that empowers big data admins to do their own backup and recovery from the application itself. The analytical projects your business is running are critical and expensive, and using anything but a robust backup strategy is putting that hard work at risk.
Dell understands the importance of protecting Big Data, and that snapshots and replication aren’t going to be enough for your increasingly important, and expensive, analytical projects. Our Dell protection products not only provide a true full backup, but also help empower application owners to do their own backup and recovery, and Big Data applications are no exception. This model of enabling the app owners, or in this case the Hadoop admin, is becoming increasingly popular, as it puts the control directly in the hands of the data owners – rather than relying on a centralized backup team.
In a time where Big Data is now mission critical, Dell is giving companies the tools they need to empower their application owners and protect their data.
For more information on this solution, please visit the Data Protection Suite Family home page