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Get the Teams Together
Commission both a testing team and an advisory team that represents the requirements of end users.
Know What You Have to Protect
Conduct an initial discovery of what's in your environment with each vendor to ensure the POC testing plan is representative of the specific infrastructure.
Test Big Data Workloads
Test large volumes of data to capture an accurate assessment of how the data protection system will actually handle the high capacity and high performance requirements.
Shop Around
Compare vendors in a way that puts pressure on them to push performance to the full requirements of the enterprise—and then some—to ensure it will meet the inevitable growth needs.
Understand How It Will Scale
Consider their ability to add capacity as storage and retention needs grow. This includes adding processing capacity, FC and IP connectivity, and storage expansion.
Test Secure Erasure
Test the system's ability to securely erase expired data and recapture capacity automatically according to the user's policy settings.
Make Sure You Can Monitor System Efficiency
Test the reporting and dashboard capabilities to ensure you can monitor the status and efficiency of backup, deduplication, replication and restore operations.
Be Comfortable With the Vendor's Service Reps
Make sure the vendor is able to work as if they were an extension of your IT staff with experience, professionalism and responsiveness.
How Well Will It Fit into Your Business Strategy?
Use a decision matrix to evaluate how each of the systems that will be tested compares when tested against the business priorities.
Plan for Additional Horsepower
Monitor the system on an ongoing basis and track your need for added throughput and capacity in order to plan for inevitable upgrades. You want no surprises on a weekend—or any other day, for that matter.
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Selecting the right data protection platform can be a complex and risky process. Many enterprise IT professionals rely solely on proof of concept or side-by-side comparisons of systems in their own data center to make this selection. Depth of security features, access control and protection of data quality should be the critical factors in selecting a data protection provider. But it's not security against hackers and viruses that should stir the most alarm; instead, it's the loss of irreplaceable data due to outages and technical glitches that has proven most problematic. Whether this data is manifest in email messages, contracts or other critically important business documents, the permanent loss of such information can and has proven devastating to companies of all sizes. Dennis Rolland, director of advanced technology in the Office of the CTO at storage provider Sepaton, believes POCs should be only one part of an overall evaluation process. Rolland recommends that IT managers go beyond the generic POCs designed to demonstrate a given product's value proposition and consider the following list of talking points.