Enterprise data protection and backup environments need a lot of care, with administrators having to spend too much time on mundane tasks just to maintain the status quo of operations. Freeing people from these tasks is a key benefit of automation—but there are other advantages as well:
Get more details about Compass Analytics-Driven Automation in the Technical Brief.
“We eliminated about 80% of the time we previously spent managing our backup solution since deploying Cobalt Iron.”
— Travis Cooper, VP and IT Manager Capital City Bank
BUILT-IN BACKUP AUTOMATION FEATURES
With Compass, customers never have to log into a backup server again. Compass automates most infrastructure and operational tasks associated with backup, including:
- Keeping backup server software at the latest validated release levels.
- Automated configuration, maintenance, monitoring, reporting, best practices tuning, and other administrative tasks.
- Constant health monitoring and predictive failure analysis of backup server and environment.
- Proactive problem determination and remediation.
- Defect identification, management, and resolution with vendors as needed.
- Automation assistance with file system client installs.
- Automation of all backup, replication, data migration, scheduling, policy,
maintenance, and other backup operations. As an example of the power of Compass automation, certain actions (e.g. policy or schedule changes) in the Compass Commander portal may result in automated updates to hundreds or even thousands of clients.
maintenance, and other backup operations. As an example of the power of Compass automation, certain actions (e.g. policy or schedule changes) in the Compass Commander portal may result in automated updates to hundreds or even thousands of clients.Before Compass
vs
With Compass
INDUSTRY-DEFINING ANALYTICS
Compass analytics are informed by the system’s extensive data collection and monitoring of backup infrastructure and operations, as well as on environmental conditions. Through the automation capabilities described previously, Compass constantly monitors and analyzes metrics, conditions, and events associated with backup infrastructure, operations, and environment.
The ever-expanding set of Compass analytics includes:
- Simple capacity analytics. Compass continually tracks free and utilized resources with historic and predictive analytics including trending at all levels, out-of-space projections, and future modeling based on past growth rates.
- Performance analytics. Including out-of-bounds performance metrics on storage, servers, networks, and backup operations.
- Health analytics. Including analysis of exhaust (metadata and metrics) for errors, recurring transient errors, out-of-bounds health metrics, predictive failure analysis, and problem avoidance.
- Cyber-attack detection and other security analytics. Including monitoring various metrics, conditions, and events and analyzing for indications of ransomware or other security attacks. Specific examples of security analysis include: data or deduplication rate anomalies, file type anomalies, abnormal operational behaviors, any unauthorized access attempts into the Compass Commander portal, and any access attempts into any of the Compass infrastructure components.
Many of these analytics are internally optimizing, meaning Compass may make adjustments to its own operational and infrastructure management based on conditions, behaviors, and events it detects across the entire Compass universe. Compass is continually evolving and learning. Cobalt Iron regularly adds additional automation and analytics to the Compass platform, making them immediately available to customers.