What really matters when comparing software during your hardware refresh?

These days, every company has a data protection solution in place and will need to explore numerous software options each hardware refresh cycle. To help make your refresh decisions go more smoothly, we have some points to consider.

These basic features should be relatively equal across the industry leaders:

  • The efficacy of data protection
  • The ability to backup files and applications
  • The ability to restore files and applications

Today’s customers will quickly move beyond the basic options of meeting the needs for simple data backup, deduplication, and DR replication.

While comparing new solutions, what is the key differentiator?

Cutting edge technology will provide today’s IT admin with the tools to make life easier. For a higher quality solution, look closely at the advanced features:

one Ability to reuse backup data by hosting VMs, VMware or Hyper-V, on the converged data protection appliance itself. This has many use cases including test/dev and patch management.
two A global single file search across all hypervisor hosts, regardless of VMware or Hyper-V, with wildcard enabled features.
three Advanced RBAC, Role-Based Access Controls, to give other IT staff limited permissions to access their data, add new servers to backup schedules, and even perform restores if appropriate.

These benefits take simple everyday tasks and move them onto the converged data protection appliance, and off of the high-cost production servers, while responsibly reducing the most basic requests of the backup admin.  Discover more IBM Storage Protect Plus benefits here.

You can provide an immediate overall boost to productivity.

Full VMs hosted on the appliance appear in vCenter and can be “migrated” via vMotion to any host in the environment.  Rolling out multiple new systems is a simple point and click to clone process.

With advanced RBAC, roll-based access controls, IT staff are granted limited access to their specific VMs, databases, and/or schedules without having to undergo extensive training, or needing to contact the backup admin.

STORServer offers our customers much more than the basic data backup repository of the past.  See the complete features of the STORServer converged appliance, and learn how you can get the most out of your data.

Written by Jeff Pearring, a technical sales engineer at STORServer. When not designing awesome data protection solutions for enterprise clients, you can find Jeff playing saxophone in local NYC music venues or recording his next original jazz album.