Over the past few years, I have been rather ‘cloud-shy’ despite being in marketing where some may believe we just throw around jargon whenever we can. For me, talking about Data Domain as ‘cloud-ready’ – the ideal platform for offering data protection as a service – is not something to be taken lightly. However, recent developments have changed this and I’m now comfortable saying Data Domain systems are truly cloud-ready. So I’m sure you’re dying to know, why now?
If you’re a regular Protection Continuum reader, you likely already know that this recent development is all thanks to the announcement of DD OS 5.5. As Alyson mentioned in that announcement, there are a number of exciting enhancements for Data Domain systems – especially in support of delivering data protection as a service – aka deploying Data Domain systems in a public, private or hybrid cloud. Specifically, there are two new features I wanted to dig into a bit deeper here: secure multi-tenancy and multi-user DD Boost.
Secure Multi-tenancy – Secure Logical Data Isolation and Tenant Management, Monitoring and Reporting
Secure Logical Data Isolation
Data Domain systems are the first inline deduplication storage to offer secure multi-tenancy. Designed for enterprises and service providers – secure multi-tenancy is a new DD OS feature (no optional software required) that enables you to logically separate tenant data into ‘tenant units’.
With secure multi-tenancy, tenants can login to view only their tenant units and can monitor their environment including alerts, capacity and replication status. Tenant units can be setup across multiple Data Domain systems. Each tenant unit has a number of MTrees associated, which enables each tenants’ data to be logically isolated from every other tenant. However, since isolation is logical, you still get the benefits of global deduplication across the entire Data Domain system.
Management, Monitoring and Reporting
As the provider, an enterprise or service provider leverages secure multi-tenancy to manage the multi-tenant environment – including initial and ongoing creation of tenant units and associated MTrees. In addition, it enables the provider to monitor and report on the environment on a per tenant basis, which are key to enabling chargeback and other services.
To learn more, check out this new white paper and video.
Multi-user DD Boost – Secure Data Access
As Data Domain systems continue to be deployed to protect more workloads, a single backup application is no longer the only user of that system. For example, many customers are using DD Boost for Oracle RMAN for their DBAs and NetWorker for their backup team to backup to the same system. Due to this broadening usage, one of the biggest requests I’ve heard from customers over the past couple years is the ability to support multiple DD Boost users. In the example above, this would provide a different username and password to the DBA and the backup administrators. Thanks to multi-user DD Boost in DD OS 5.5, it’s now possible to provide this secure data access in multi-user or multi-tenant DD Boost environments.
The combination of secure multi-tenancy and multi-user DD Boost are what make Data Domain systems truly ‘cloud ready’ – ideal for those of you looking to deploy Data Domain in a private/public/hybrid cloud. And you know that’s not a claim I take lightly…
