Converged infrastructure…is only as good as your converged backup

By Chandra Jacobs, Senior Marketing Associate, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division

We all have been following the trends over the last ten years towards a converged infrastructure, and the many features and benefits pertaining to it. According to Wikipedia, converged infrastructure can serve as an enabling platform for private and public cloud computing services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS),Software as a Service(SaaS), and Backup as a Service (BaaS) offerings. And according to Wikibon, by 2017 2/3 of IT infrastructure will be deployed through converged offerings. Check out the below Wikibon infographic for a brief overview of converged infrastructure and the key companies involved in this market:

Via: What is the Enterprise Stack?

Capabilities such as these enable us to pool IT resources, to automate resource provisioning and to scale up and down capacity quickly to meet the needs of dynamic computing workloads. By moving towards a converged infrastructure, we empower application owners and end-users to dynamically optimize environment resources and improve performance. The benefits are clear.

But do we typically think of backup and recovery as a core part of convergence? We don’t, but we should.

Both Wikibon and Forrester define convergence as ”an integrated set of compute, storage, and networking components,” but they have not included backup and recovery, which is proving to be a critical must-have technology in this stack.

While backup can be lumped into the “server” genre, since cloud backup implies backing up to remote cloud-based backup servers, it shouldn’t be. By lumping it into a generic overarching category we trivialize and minimize its importance in the grand scheme of what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place with converged infrastructure.

What good is a converged infrastructure when an application gets corrupted and can’t be recovered? Or when hardware fails? Your converged infrastructure is only as good as your converged backup.

Consider the following statement by William “BJ” Jenkins, Former President, Backup and Recovery Systems Division, EMC:

“As enterprises transform their data centers using converged infrastructure systems, new requirements arise for advanced data protection solutions that provide high performance, tight integration and simplified management. VCE has chosen to integrate Avamar and Data Domain into its Vblock systems, enabling optimized VMware backup and recovery that provides unmatched performance, reliability and scale to meet the demands of a highly virtualized environment.”

And that’s exactly why we’re recommending setting up a Data Protection environment for your Vblock System environment right from the beginning. The strength of your converged infrastructure lies in your ability to protect it.