Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect DD Series Appliances > PowerProtect DD Data Invulnerability Architecture: Enhancing Data Integrity and Recoverability > Overview
Despite all their added value, specialized storage systems are built on software and general-purpose computing components that can fail. Some failures have an immediate visible impact, such as the total failure of a disk drive. Other failures are subtle and hidden, such as a software issue that causes latent file system corruption that is only discovered at read time.
To ensure data integrity in the face of such failures, most storage systems include various data integrity checks and are generally optimized for performance and system availability, not data invulnerability. In the final analysis, they assume that backups get done, and they make design tradeoffs that favor speed over guaranteed data recoverability. For example, no widely used primary storage file system reads data back from disk to ensure that it was stored correctly; to do so would compromise performance.
But data cannot be considered invulnerable if it is not stored correctly in the first place. With purpose-built backup appliances, the priority must be data invulnerability over performance and even availability. Unless the focus is on data integrity, backup and archive data are at risk. If data is at risk, then recovery is at risk when the primary copy of the data is lost. Most purpose-built backup appliances are just primary storage systems built out of cheaper disks. As such, they inherit the design philosophy of their primary storage predecessors. Though labeled as purpose-built backup appliances, their designs emphasize performance at the expense of data invulnerability.
This white paper focuses on the four key elements of the Dell PowerProtect DD Data Invulnerability Architecture, which, in combination, provide the industry’s highest levels of data integrity and recoverability.