You wouldn’t drive a racecar without a helmet and you shouldn’t buy an all-flash array without data protection. Organizations usually want flash to accelerate workloads and to support workloads that sometimes require hundreds of thousands of IOPS with sub-millisecond latency. But most traditional backup can’t meet the performance or efficiency demands of mission-critical applications on flash. An all-flash array demands protection without compromise with the performance to meet strict SLAs – including backup windows, RPO and recovery time. Also, the efficiency of flash storage arrays and the applications stored on them should not be impacted by protection. That’s why today we’re excited to announce EMC ProtectPoint for XtremIO – a flash-optimized data protection solution – providing backup directly from EMC XtremIO all-flash arrays to EMC Data Domain protection storage systems.
ProtectPoint was designed to protect mission-critical applications and databases, like Oracle and SAP, on flash and its design fundamentally changes the traditional mechanics of data protection.
With ProtectPoint for XtremIO customers can:
- Gain up to 20x faster backup than traditional stream-based solutions, to meet stringent protection SLAs;
- Eliminate backup impact on application and database servers; and
- Reduce cost and complexity by eliminating traditional backup.
At a high level, this is how EMC ProtectPoint works to backup directly from XtremIO to Data Domain.
First… there’s a backup agent on the application server, which empowers app owners to control their own backup and recovery. To trigger a ProtectPoint backup, an application owner, like an Oracle DBA, triggers a backup at an application-consistent checkpoint. Unlike a traditional backup, the data is then never pulled back through the host – which means there is no impact on the application server.
Then, leveraging the XtremIO in-memory metadata virtual copy (XVC) architecture and EMC RecoverPoint technology, ProtectPoint tracks changes since the latest backup to send only unique data directly to Data Domain over Fiber Channel. During this process, no host resources are used, virtually eliminating performance impact on the database application.
Finally, the Data Domain system will ingest and store those blocks and use them to create an independent full backup in native format, which enables greatly simplified recovery. With ProtectPoint, customers get a full backup every time, but only send unique blocks, so the full comes at the performance of an incremental.
ProtectPoint brings together a trio of best-in-class EMC technology from our data protection and primary storage portfolio to provide storage integrated data protection including:
- Simple granular recovery via application agents, which ensures application-consistent backups and recovery via native application integration with Oracle, SAP and IBM DB2
- Minimal impact on infrastructure via efficient change block tracking and data movement engine, which ensures only unique data is sent directly from XtremIO to Data Domain without impacting the application host or all-flash array
- Reduce storage requirements by 10x to 30x and ensure reliable recovery every time with the industry-leading protection storage technology of Data Domain
Flash is the future of storage, and EMC ProtectPoint is the future of data protection, providing the performance and efficiency required for the world’s #1 all-flash array, EMC XtremIO.
Learn more about EMC Data Protection Solutions for Oracle: