Micro Focus® Data Protector

Reliable, secure IT services are central to business continuity planning, and a key requirement is protecting service data so operations can continue after events like physical or logical storage damage. Organizations typically address this by creating copies of service data and storing them securely for restoration. As hybrid IT and “cloud-first” adoption expand, data protection must cover on-premises systems, SaaS applications, and IaaS workloads. Cloud services can appear to reduce continuity concerns, but many contracts do not guarantee customer data availability, and even when guarantees exist they may not satisfy all Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). Using multiple cloud vendors plus on-premises infrastructure often forces multiple protection tools, increasing cost and risk, strengthening the need for a unified approach.

For on-premises services, local copies are insufficient due to disaster risks; physically separate storage is needed, but moving media introduces delay and risk. Cloud storage offers resilient, geographically distributed targets that can reduce reliance on physical transfers and has driven both new and adapted cloud-backup solutions. Effective solutions should preserve not only data but also structure and metadata (e.g., permissions), allow customer control over geographic location for compliance, secure data in transit and at rest (e.g., encryption), and reduce cost and attack surface via deduplication. Centralized management, reporting, and SLA monitoring across environments is emphasized.

Micro Focus Data Protector (from the HPE software acquisition) is positioned as an enterprise backup and disaster recovery platform for complex heterogeneous environments, offered in Premium (hybrid physical/virtual) and Express (virtual) editions. It provides deep VMware and Hyper-V integration, application-consistent recovery for major enterprise apps and databases, enhanced automated disaster recovery (including bare-metal recovery), broad storage targets (disk/tape/cloud), extensive storage-array and deduplication integrations, and security features such as TLS 1.2 communications and encryption support. Key gaps include missing SaaS backup (e.g., Microsoft Office 365) and lack of built-in sensitive/personal data discovery in backups.

• Micro Focus reported revenues of over $4.7B in 2018.
• Micro Focus acquired the HPE software business in 2017.
• The acquisition included HPE Data Protector, now sold as Micro Focus Data Protector.
• Data Protector is offered in two editions: Data Protector Premium and Data Protector Express.
• Data Protector Express is designed for backup and restore of virtual environments.
• Data Protector supports agentless backup integrations with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Supported application-aware backup includes Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, SAP HANA, IBM Db2, Sybase ASE, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Enhanced Automated Disaster Recovery (EADR) can be enabled with a simple checkbox in the GUI.
• Data Protector uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 for communication between Installation Server and Cell Manager.
• The product currently lacks support for protecting data in SaaS clouds such as Microsoft Office 365.

• “Cloud services appear to offer improved continuity and there is a temptation to believe that their use removes the need for the customer to perform data backups.”
• “The customer should always have control over the geographic location of their data – often very important for compliance reasons.”
• “It should be possible to restore not only the data but also its structure and metadata such as permissions.”
• “Deduplication to remove multiple copies of the same data is also useful to reduce the costs of transfer and storage as well as to reduce the attack surface.”
• “Data Protector is an enterprise backup and disaster recovery solution for large, complex, and heterogeneous IT environments.”
• “Data Protector features centralized bare-metal recovery from or to physical and virtual systems from any backup set at no additional cost.”
• “Disaster recovery images can be created from any existing file system or image backup including object copies, without needing to create a separate special backup for system recovery.”
• “Integration with HPE StoreOnce Cloud Bank enables data transfer between on-premise backup data sets and cloud targets… without the need for a separate appliance such as a gateway.”
• “Protocols encrypt communications traffic.”
• “To reduce the management burden, the solution should support common processes for and provide a common administrative interface across all types of data and services being protected.”