infoTECH Feature

August 18, 2011

SEPATON Outlines Best Practices for Making Enterprise Data Protection Purchases

In a press release, SEPATON, a company that designs and implements data protection solutions specifically for large, data-intensive enterprises, outlined best practices for making enterprise data protection purchases.

Dennis Rolland, director of advanced technology, Office of the CTO, SEPATON, is of the opinion that selecting the right data protection platform can be a complex and risk-prone process. Rolland also believes that many enterprises IT professionals rely solely on Proof of Concept (POC) or side by side comparisons of systems in their own data center to make this selection, and thus recommends that POCs should be just one part of an overall evaluation process.

“A test environment must emulate as closely as possible the production environment,” said Rolland.

“A well-designed POC process ensures the optimal data protection solution is deployed, eliminates the need for costly unplanned upgrades, and optimizes investments by helping to quantitatively determine the best vendor solution for the customer’s specific environment. For large, data intensive enterprises this means testing performance and capacity based on realistic volumes and on real data that has not been scrubbed or modified,” Rolland added.

Key recommendations that IT managers should consider include: form both a testing team and an advisory team that represents the requirements of end users; conduct an initial discovery of what’s in your environment with each vendor to ensure the POC testing plan is representative of the specific infrastructure; test large volumes of data to capture an accurate assessment of how the data protection system will actually handle the high capacity and high performance requirements; compare vendors in a way that puts pressure on them to push performance to the full requirements of the enterprise and then some to ensure it will meet the inevitable growth needs; consider the ability to modularly expand the solution as storage and retention needs grow which includes throughput, FC and IP connectivity, and storage; ensure the system can accommodate storage pooling so data can be segregated, multiple backup applications can be managed on a single system and new backup technologies can be introduced without disruption to existing operations; test the system’s ability to securely erase expired data and recapture capacity automatically according to the user’s policy settings, and test the reporting and dashboard capabilities to ensure you can monitor the status and efficiency of backup, deduplication, replication, and restore operations.

Above all, IT managers are asked to make sure the vendors are able to work as an extension of your IT staff with experience, professionalism and responsiveness and use a decision matrix to evaluate how each of the systems that will be tested compares when tested against the business priorities.

Founded in 2003, SEPATON has its headquarters in Marlborough, MA and has international offices in London and Beijing. Recently, the company won the Red Herring (News - Alert) Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from North America, celebrating these startups' innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.


Meenakshi Shankar is a TMCnet contributor. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves
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