What Is Modern Data Protection

What is Data Protection?

Data protection is the process of safeguarding data against loss, corruption, or security threats.  From backups to recovery and data reuse, it covers all techniques an organization may use to keep data secure and highly available for its products, services, and operations. 

In this article, we’ll dive into the various technologies and techniques at a system administrator’s disposal for keeping data safe.

The Traditional Approach to Data Protection

The philosophy behind data protection in the server room or data center has long been one of redundancy. You can’t afford to have your data lost, corrupted, or compromised, so always have a backup. 

Of course, in practice, backing up your data is the bare minimum. Data protection is really an exercise in managing your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for the most critical services in your operational technology stack. 

The industry solution to high service-level expectations was the high-availability (HA) cluster. In the traditional active-passive implementation, one server handles the load while a backup server remains on standby until there’s a failure. When a server fails, its workload is passed to the failover server until it can be restored. 

Alternatively, an active-active cluster may also be deployed. In this scenario, a load balancer utilizes both servers in the cluster to handle requests, matching the performance of an active-passive cluster during a failure, while doubling the performance during normal operation. 

Beyond clustering architectures, data protection also includes disk mirroring, snapshots, and redundant networks. While the tools available to system administrators have evolved, the general approach to data protection has always been one of resilience through redundancy.

Benefits of Modern Data Protection

As the world becomes increasingly dependent on bigger and faster data, protecting all that data becomes even more critical. The biggest challenge system administrators face in data protection today is the overwhelming complexity of carrying legacy architectures into the modern era. 

So what should modern data protection look like? How do you redesign data infrastructure to make zero RTO and zero RPO possible? The answer is to go beyond resiliency and make data protection proactive. 

Here’s what proactive, modern data protection looks like: 

• Active-active clustering for maximum performance and always-on data accessibility
• The latest data storage technologies to enable high-throughput, low-latency data transfer
• Predictive analytics for catching data storage issues before they occur

The old approach to data protection was to safeguard your systems in the event something happens. Now modern data protection is about proactively preventing data storage system failures before they occur through routine upgrades, better technology, and predictive analytics.

Why Choose Pure Storage for Modern Data Protection?

Pure Storage® products are built from the bottom up to support non-disruptive upgrades while delivering native NVMe storage performance. Here’s how Pure keeps your data safe:

• Simplified backup and recovery via synchronous and asynchronous replication
• Stringent RPO and RTO performance via blazingly fast and flexible FlashBlade®
• True active-active clustering with Pure ActiveCluster™
• Built-in data replication and ransomware protection

There’s no substitute for switching to data infrastructure designed for the modern era. FlashBlade delivers Rapid Restore for production and dev/test workloads with up to 270TB/hr of data-recovery performance.