8CIOReview | | OCTOBER 2020By Mr. Billy Chan, Country Manager, Hong Kong & Macau, Pure Storage NYSE: PSTGIN MY OPINIONStepping into the rapid highway of Digital Transformation, there is a colossal data flow which accumulated from online and offline users across invisible national lines. As the digital divide shrinks, thanks to the easy accessibility of computers and mobile phones, the role and importance of the data backup industry has risen. Meanwhile, enterprises are progressively discovering the value of their invisible corporate asset, data, and the importance of protecting that resource.One architecture that many enterprises adopted is disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T). The first disk in this scenario runs production workloads while the second disk acts as the purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA). For further protection, enterprises often deploy offsite facilities where the same disk-based PBBAs are replicated. Older data is then stored and locked away on tape for long term retention. This is the D2D2T architecture.D2D2T works great for backing up data. It is fast when data is backed up, deduplicating data for efficient usage of storage. But there are three core problems with this architecture.The first arises when it's time to restore data. An independent consulting firm points out that customers face huge frustrations when they are trying to restore from disk. They estimated a 6TB database would take 25 days to fully restore but this is only an estimation as they killed the job after 24 hours when only 2 percent of the restore was completed! When IT misses SLAs, it puts business at risk.THE RELIABLE SHIELD FOR YOUR VALUABLE DATA: FLASH-TO-FLASH-TO-CLOUDThe second problem is that it is just a tremendous waste in this architecture. If there are multiple backup systems in the production site, then there needs to be multiple backup systems in the offsite data center as well.The third problem is that once data goes on tape, data goes dark. The data is out of reach and offers no value. If data is truly the most important asset in an enterprise, this approach goes completely counter to it.The future of backup and data protectionPure Storage shook up the storage industry almost a decade ago by bringing flash technology to enterprise data storage environments and setting new ROI and performance benchmarks for data centers. But flash was always viewed as being too expensive for backup and recovery. However, in the last few years the basic economics of flash has changed and is constantly being further challenged with new NAND technologies. Coupled with the trend of enterprisedatasets growing from terabytes to petabytes and beyond, and the need to more efficiently protect this data, these have swung the balance towards the use of flash for data protection.
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