HPE Backup and Recovery Service: Enhancing hybrid cloud data protection

[Ashwin_Shetty]

Now incorporating new innovations and support for VMware virtual machines on any storage, HPE Backup and Recovery Service gives you the peace of mind that your data is rapidly recoverable, always secure, and continually delivering value to your business – without compromise. Learn how to protect VMs effortlessly, neutralize ransomware, and malware threats in a cost-efficient approach across the hybrid cloud.

As the value and business criticality of data increases, the challenges of backup, recovery, and management of data are tougher than ever. What’s more, there’s exploding data growth, demanding recovery SLA requirements, and an evolving threat and compliance landscape – all continuing to put pressure on costs and intensifying risk. At the same time, as you transform your IT infrastructure to take advantage of the hybrid cloud, protecting and managing apps and data across your data center, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure can prove increasingly complex. 

Over the years, organizations have more often than not cobbled together data protection infrastructure, adding features and point solutions as new needs arise. When you’re relying on older backup technology, you don’t have the tools you need to face modern threats.

Rigid siloed infrastructures aren’t agile or scalable enough to keep up with fluctuations in data protection requirements, and they are based on an equally rigid backup approach. They also require upfront CapEx, expensive software licensing, disruptive upgrades, and costly over-provisioning. The truth is yesterday’s approaches fall short when it comes to neutralizing modern threats such as ransomware and other sophisticated malwares

So then this happens: In an environment where budgets and onsite resources are particularly limited, some IT departments are postponing data protection modernization. But that plan can block your company’s progress. This situation presents both a challenge and an opportunity for your organization. It’s a challenge to simplify how you safeguard one of your most important and valuable assets. But it’s also an opportunity to:

• Protect data from ransomware attacks, while complying with data protection regulations
• Simplify backup and recovery operations to make it easier to protect data across every SLA
• Align infrastructure to actual use  to optimize use of resources and avoid costly overprovisioning

What backup as a service for hybrid cloud solves for you

Introduced in September 2021 as a part of HPE GreenLake for data protection, HPE Backup and Recovery Service is backup as a service architected for the hybrid cloud. This service simplifies how your VMware virtual machines (VMs) work across hybrid cloud, bringing with it the cloud experience and flexibility of software delivered as a service.

Policy-based orchestration and automation lets you setup the protection of your VMs in a few simple steps – in less than five minutes – to eliminate the need to initialize, configure, manage, or tune physical or virtual infrastructure. You can spin up storage capacity in minutes with just a few clicks. This service also breaks down the silos of a typical hybrid cloud deployment by removing mass fragmentation with open support for any primary storage array to protect your VMware VMs.

As the volume of VMware data continues to grow, protecting that data at scale will only become more challenging. Data protection in a VMware environment involves protecting large collections of VMs. Most of the time, these large collections of VMs needs similar protection SLAs It is a tedious job for an administrator to apply protection and monitor jobs for virtual machines individually. The HPE Backup and Recovery Service makes it easy to protect at scale by organizing virtual machines into Protection Groups. These Protection Groups enable the user to apply protection for multiple VMs or datastores in a single operation to automate the protection of VMs.

This cloud-native service eliminates complexity and frees you from the day-to-day hassles of backup infrastructure. There are no media servers, catalogue servers, gateways servers, proxy servers, backup targets, or cloud storge accounts to separately manage.

What’s new now?

When we ran a successful beta program last year, we received a lot of interest from you, our customers. Thank you for helping us with your feedback. Today we’re happy to announce that we have made significant innovations to the service based on some of the feedback your shared.

Protect VMware VMs on any storage

Currently, the HPE Backup and Recovery Service offers backup and recovery for VMware virtual machines that are deployed on HPE Alletra, HPE Primera, and HPE Nimble Storage G5 systems. This high-performance backup is enabled by integration with these storage systems with support for local snapshots.

The latest innovations extend the backup scope for the HPE Backup and Recovery Service to protect VMware virtual machines using storage from non-HPE storage such as Dell, IBM, NetApp, Pure, and other vendors. This also includes protecting virtual machines deployed storage on HPE Storage systems that are not integrated with Data Service Cloud Console (DSCC) today, including HPE MSA, HPE 3PAR, HPE Apollo, HPE EVA, and HPE XP.

This new capability is enabled by integration with VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) to allow backup and recovery operations to use CBT Change Block Tracking (CBT) and other features available through the VMware APIs for Data Protection.

For storage that is managed through the DSCC portal like HPE Alletra, HPE Primera and HPE Nimble, this service provides the flexibility to retain local snapshots for instant data restores, local on-premises backups for rapid data recovery, and utilize cloud backups for cost-effective, long -term data retention. For any other storage arrays, users can retain local copies on-premises for rapid recovery and leverage the cloud backup for long term cost-effective data retention.

Increased protection with backup data immutability

Ensuring your organization is protected against malware attacks is always at the top of most IT professionals’ minds. As the most recent malware attacks have shown, backup data is a target for malware as much as primary data. A key tool to protect backup data against attack is backup data immutability. That’s why we have added this capability to the Local Protection Stores, Cloud Protection Stores, and for snapshots where the storage system has that capability.

Backup data immutability will prevent a backup being deleted or modified before the configured retention date. Once the retention/immutability date has been set. it cannot be reduced and the backup is safe from attack or accidental deletion. Data immutability can be easily configured as part of the Protection Policy definition.

And then there’s ransomware driving the need for data security

For virtually every company, the question is not if, but when, a ransomware attack will occur. IT leaders urgently require a data protection solution to effectively counter this metastasizing threat.

HPE Backup and Recovery Service is efficient at protecting backup data from cyberattacks like ransomware because it keeps data hidden from attackers. Ransomware can’t infect and encrypt what it cannot access. HPE Backup and Recovery Service takes advantage of this feature, creating backup stores which are not directly accessible by the operating system. Backup images are made inaccessible to ransomware, ensuring data backup security, and enabling reliable data restores.

Finally, with built-in, configurable Protection Policies, HPE Backup and Recovery Service enables you to automatically protect VMs and helps you meet data protection governance requirements.

You can now easily protect all your virtual machines with the HPE Backup and Recovery Service, using DSCC-supported storage systems like HPE Alletra, HPE Primera, HPE Nimble G5, or using any other storage arrays, either HPE or non-HPE.

Taking the stress out of data protection – with hybrid cloud done right

Traditional backup approaches can become notoriously complex over time. On average, we’ve found that customers use several separate backup tools to manage their backup and recovery operations in the hybrid cloud. This  fragmented approach slows down overall innovation because it requires configuring, initializing, and managing separate operating systems, and establishing best practices for each.

Managed through a single cloud-native console, you can easily manage your backup and recovery operations. Built-in automation lets you protect your VMware workloads on any storage through a few simple clicks eliminating the complexities of managing a backup infrastructure.

This service provides the flexibility to meet all your RTO and RPO requirements, whether you want on-premises backups for rapid recovery or granular local snapshots on DSCC-managed storage that allow you to restore data instantly. The service can also backup data to the cloud providing a cost-effective option for long-term data retention.

Delivering unmatched storage efficiency

That fact that it’s built on proven HPE Catalyst technology (which provides highly space efficient backups and network usage) enables HPE Backup and Recovery Service to deliver unmatched storage efficiency as compared to alternate VMware backup solutions.

This service is cost efficient too. PAYG eliminates upfront CapEx expense with a predictable, transparent consumption-based billing aligned to actual usage. Finally, there are no additional charges for restoring data. Unlike other public cloud services, we don’t charge additionally for data restore, backup, search, and management of cloud storage. All are covered as a part of the service.

Interested in giving it a try? Evaluate HPE Backup and Recovery Service for free

You can try HPE Backup and Recovery Service with 90-day free trial and experience the benefits for yourself. All features of the service with HPE support are available during the trial period and after evaluation, you can easily purchase the subscription.

While of course your organization has its own set of requirements, you should always focus on cost efficiency, simplicity, performance, scalability, and future-readiness when architecting your data protection strategy. Modernizing data protection is key to keeping pace with today’s changing hybrid cloud environments and ensuring data and applications achieve always-on availability.

New technologies can improve efficiencies by reducing cost, risk, and complexity in backup environments. Protecting your data on premises and in a distributed cloud environment will set you up to deliver on future SLAs, enabling you to meet demanding RPOs and RTOs – while keeping your business moving ahead.

HPE Backup and Recovery Service gives you the peace of mind that your data is rapidly recoverable, always secure, and provides value to your business without compromise. We help you protect VMs effortlessly, neutralizing ransomware and malware threats in a cost-efficient approach across the hybrid cloud.

Want to learn more?

Check out this four-minute demo:

We also have four quicker demos you can watch:

• One-minute demo for restoring
• Two-minute video for deployment
• Two-minute video for protection groups
• Two-minute video for auto-protection

Dig deeper into HPE Backup and Recovery Services with these resources:

• Solution brief
• Infographic
• IDC Spotlight

And catch recent HPE Storage announcement news that includes the latest on HPE Backup and Recovery Services:

• HPE GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud Platform Delivers Greater Choice and Simplicity with Unified Experience, New Cloud Services, and Expanded Partner Ecosystem
• Making your data work for you: Go faster with self-service agility and cloud operations

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Ashwin Shetty
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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