With benefits that include increased data protection, on-demand access to critical data to accelerate application development and time to market, the most attractive proposition for IT departments considering copy data virtualisation adoption is the cost savings.
“There’s server virtualisation and there’s network virtualisation. These were both concepts that once seemed outlandish but fast forward to now the benefits of both have seen them become commonplace within IT departments around the world. As a company, we believe it’s the turn of data virtualisation”, said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio.
Here are five ways copy data virtualisation could save you millions:
A reduced storage footprint
A recent IDC study revealed that enterprises have an average of 13 redundant physical copies of critical databases and file systems within their organisation, all of which take up storage space in data centres. This data then needs to be managed internally too. By virtualising this data, businesses are able to eliminate the need to have multiple physical copies, reducing the necessary amount of copies to just two - one set of production data and one “golden master copy” that can be virtually provisioned as many times as needed, at any time. With a smaller storage footprint comes a smaller storage bill.
The removal of redundant technologies
To adhere to compliance standards for data protection, IT departments adopt a number of overlapping technologies, such as software for backups, snapshots, disaster recovery, and more. Data virtualisation removes the need for all of these redundant technologies by creating virtual, on-demand data copies.
A significant reduction in downtime
According to figures from Gartner, businesses can lose an average of $5,600 per minute in an outage, adding up to over $300,000 per hour. Dated backup and DR systems are slow to recover data in the event of an outage, taking days or even weeks to recover data. When data has been virtualised, recovery times drop to minutes, while ensuring delivery of aggressive RTOs and RPOs.
Virtualisation = focus on business outcomes
As virtualised data requires less maintenance and time spent monitoring redundant systems, as well as the reduced downtime, there is no longer the necessity for a large IT team to manually manage recurring tasks of data management. Alternatively, the amount of time freed up by virtualisation adoption means the team can focus on projects that move the business forward and improve efficiencies across the organisation.
Faster time-to-market
Like the way virtualisation slashes recovery time during an outage, it also slashes provisioning time for data used during test and development. With data virtualisation, provisioning a data copy can take less than a minute and can even be self serviced. With the dev team able to focus more on application development and less on waiting for ops to produce test data for them, organisations can enjoy faster-time-to-market and business results.
