Copy data management (CDM) is a term that we hear a lot in the industry. Yet, many of us don’t have a clear idea of what it really means. In this blog, I’ll walk you through what copy data management is and what makes Rubrik a strategic tool for it.

The amount of data collected and processed by businesses has grown exponentially. Adding to this increase, a recent study performed by IDC cites the average number of copies per piece of data is 13. As you can imagine, this growth of data and copy data uses up storage space and can hinder performance. In fact, IDC estimated that 60% of storage is provisioned to store copy data – even with deduplication.

This tells us that IT organizations need a reliable and scalable approach to managing copy data. An effective copy data management solution creates space efficiency and easily unlocks copy data use cases — such as test/dev, backup and recovery, and replication — across your entire infrastructure.

So, let’s get a little closer to home.

At a recent user group event, I had the opportunity to speak to a room of IT professionals and ask them a few questions:

How many of you have DBs in your businesses?
Everyone raised their hands.

How many of you are backing up all of your data with your backup software?
All folks answered, “yes.”

How many people are taking storage clones and/or snapshots of your DBs?
Most people were taking this approach

The next question was for the only DBA in the room.
 Sir, are you making your own copies of your DBs in your environment?
“Yes! Of course.”

So, what does this tells us?

Data is SO important to the business that every team takes its own measures to ensure it is well protected. However, there is no one single platform all of these teams can access and review on their own. Until now, that is!

Rubrik is a data protection and management platform that can easily manage all these copies of data. Within a single dashboard, Rubrik addresses copy data management use cases, along with backup/recovery and data protection for hybrid workloads. This includes on-premises, off-site or remote offices, DR locations, public clouds (AWS, Azure, and Google), and private cloud offerings.

For copy data, one advantage is that Rubrik reduces the number of data replicas through policy-driven automation. And since the platform unifies management across infrastructures, it can be used as a strategic tool for multiple teams. Here are some ways IT organizations benefit from Rubrik’s approach to copy data management:

  1. As IDC reports, data protection is a leading reason companies make copy data. Policy-driven management reduces the need to take additional snapshots since workflows can be easily automated. This means more space, and avoids the need for costly space expansion.
  2. Application owners and DBA teams gain back control with self-service, role-based access (including multi-tenancy), and automation via Restful APIs. In other words, Rubrik delivers strong data protection and a trustworthy point of recovery. For Oracle DBAs, this is all achieved while natively integrating with RMAN and doesn’t affect existing workflows.
  3. Disaster recovery and test/dev are other major reasons for creating data replicas. With our Live Mount feature, quickly recovery from a disaster and create a test and dev database – even one that’s several TB – in just seconds. There is no coordination required for other organizational teams. Just point, click and done. Speed! Check this video of our own Michael Fal showing us how Rubrik helps you mount a Microsoft SQL database almost instantly.

In my experience, IT shops do not set out to create many copies of data. However, many copies of data are the result of a need to have more flexibility, availability, and control. Well, finally these needs have been addressed by Rubrik.