Editor's note
IT organizations need to replicate and copy data for a variety of reasons besides data protection. These reasons include application development testing, data mining and analytics. But maintaining multiple copies of data can constrain storage and become an expensive organizational headache.
Organizations can use copy data management technology to help control this data sprawl. Copy data management uses only one copy of data for all of these functions, enabling organizations to consolidate this secondary storage and reduce costs. Copy management systems create and store a snapshot of the changes made in the production environment, which ensures that only one copy of the data is ever retained on physical media.
But copy data management systems are not all the same, as there are distinct product categories and implementation models. Some vendors offer physical appliances, including storage, while others sell virtual appliances either alongside the physical appliance or as the main delivery mechanism. Some products also support public cloud for running instances of the software as a cloud virtual machine.
Before investing in a copy data management system, you need to examine the features and options the various products offer and determine how they match your organization's needs. For example, although most of the products profiled here have the ability to capture data, how long are individual backups or other data retained by the platform? What are the pros and cons of the various deployment models? How do the various products integrate with data sources?
This guide will help you answer these questions so that you can compare products from the leading vendors. Using extensive research into the copy data management market, TechTarget editors focused on vendors that offer well-integrated and automated copy management systems. Our research included data from TechTarget surveys, as well as reports from other respected research firms, including Gartner.
A roundup of these copy management systems provides an in-depth look at their features and functionality. How these vendors address scalability, performance, retention, cloud support, integration, automation and security can help influence your decision of which copy data storage system to purchase.
1Making the case for copy data management
You can help justify the purchase of a copy data management system by identifying how many copies of data exist across your organization and determining the hard costs of storing that data.
2What to look for when buying a copy management system
Before you can evaluate the various copy management products, it is important to understand what features they offer and how they match up to your needs.
3How the leading copy management systems compare
Learn how the leading copy data storage products measure up when it comes to data protection, policy-based management and operation, and data management capabilities.
4Assessing products from the leading copy data management vendors
This in-depth overview examines how the leading copy data management products are sold, what main features they offer and how they are priced.