Comprehensive and Flexible Data Protection Capabilities for VMware

By Richard Vining posted 10-14-2019 18:26

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Hitachi Vantara has had a long and successful partnership with VMware, with many integration points between our products and the VMware ecosystem. At the center of these integrations is the acknowledgement that VMware administrators want to manage their data and infrastructure from within the familiar VMware environment, and not have to jump between different tools and interfaces to complete their job functions.

This partnership extends to data protection and copy data management. Not all data, and therefore not all virtual machines, have the same value to your organization, so ideally you would prefer to use the right tools that meet the availability, recoverability, and cost profile appropriate to each data type.

For example, losing a user’s personal data might be painful, but nowhere on the scale of losing access to one of your business-critical databases or applications. Should you use the same tools, at the same costs, to protect them? Of course not. But most data protection solutions don’t give you a choice, so you either use what they give you, or purchase different tools for different needs.

Our approach to this problem is different. Our Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID) software is a policy-based orchestration engine that uses the right tool for each job, and makes it easy to combine these tools into more complicated workflows when the situation calls for it. For example:

To protect those critical applications and databases, HDID can trigger incremental snapshots of your VMware datastores far more frequently than traditional backup can. Remote replication can be added to the workflow to support high availability and disaster recovery requirements.
For less-critical data, HDID will interface with the VMware APIs for Data Protection (VADP) to capture incremental changes. These changes can be moved over local area network (LAN) or storage area network (SAN). HDID has also been certified to work with VMware vSAN.
Physical and virtual copies of VMs can also be created as part of the workflow, in multiple locations, to support secondary business functions such as DevOps and compliance.

But HDID provides a lot more flexibility to meet your needs in the ways that you want them met.

HDID supports the use of tagging in vCenter, such as using a ‘Platinum’ tag for critical data, or a ‘Bronze’ tag for not-so-important data. So, it is easy to automatically add data protection policies to new VMs as they are created.

Protection policies can be assigned by cluster, host, VM, template, folder, datastore, datacenter, vApp, or storage system.
HDID has highly granular role-based access controls (RBAC), allowing a central IT administrator to monitor all data protection and recovery activities, while each VMware or application administrator can have full control over their specific data and resources.

HDID has connectors that allow it to work with VMware vRealize Orchestrator to enhance automation, and VMware Site Recovery Manager to assist in DR testing and execution.
HDID includes a full REST-based API so that data protection and copy data management policies can be directly set up and run without using the HDID or vCenter interfaces. This also supports the use of HDID as part of a service portal.

Analyst organization Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has studied HDID and its integration with VMware and has recently published a Technical Validation Report describing what they found. Spoiler alert – this report is gated on our website.

We are also providing demos of HDID and its capabilities in a VMware environment at the 2019 VMworld conference in Barcelona. If you are attending this fantastic event, please stop by our booth to learn more and to score some cool SWAG.

To learn more, please visit the Data Protection > VMware solution page on our website.

Rich Vining is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Data Protection at Hitachi Vantara and has been publishing his thoughts on data storage and data management since the mid-1990s. The contents of this blog are his own.
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Tanmoy Panja

05-19-2022 13:59

Nice one !!

Data Protection