Enterprise data center managers find themselves at an interesting crossroads. Until a few years ago, their choices for data protection technologies were limited to physical tape and a handful of backup applications. As new technologies were introduced, most enterprises made wholesale changes – committing the entire data center to a single backup application.

Today, however, the choices of backup application, backup protocol, and even backup device vary widely. Most data center managers see value in running multiple backup applications to address different requirements. For example, IT might use a traditional backup application like Symantec NetBackup to protect their physical servers and complement that with Veeam SureBackup to protect their virtual machines. But does this add unnecessary complexity? Reduce overall efficiency? The simple answer is no, as long you have the backup system to handle it.

An open systems approach to data protection gives you the flexibility to run multiple backup applications to meet your specific requirements for backup and retention policies, departmental data protection, and mix of data types.

For example, an open system approach with Symantec OST can be used with half a dozen different OST-compatible disk backup systems (including SEPATON) and many can run alongside other backup applications as needed. In contrast, EMC Boost locks you in to using only Symantec OST and NetWorker. This contrast will become even more important as the other leading backup applications enable OST and Boost-like access. Customers will see value in the new innovations, better pricing, or enhanced services offered by these applications as they deal with their fast-growing data volumes and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.

In her article Ten Data Protection Trends for 2010, Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst, Lauren Whitehouse notes, “Continued focus on improving business processes will trigger the introduction of new business systems, upgraded applications, virtualization, and IT service delivery improvements. The impact on data protection? Change—and lots of it. Organizations will, therefore, have to optimize their data protection infrastructures to support the changing IT landscape as well as contend with unabated growth—all while minimizing the risk of downtime, non-compliance, and security threats.”

Ironically, the real key to success in implementing and managing an infrastructure that can handle a mixed application environment is not in the backup software; but rather, in the backup system. You need a backup appliance that can handle multiple backup applications without adding complexity. You need a system with the flexibility to let you introduce OST or new applications in phases, the management view to manage data protection regardless of backup application or status in its progression from backup to deduplication, to replication as well as archiving and expiration.

The backup appliance also needs to deliver the performance and single-system scalability to protect massive data volumes without requiring multiple systems or added complexity.

In a nutshell, as we look to the future of data protection, data center managers should not be concerned with standardizing on a single backup application but should consider the capabilities of their backup target.