Category: DPM

A Data Protection Reference Architecture – The Final Chapter


The Architecture

This ‘architecture’ diagram, as you can see, is not a typical architecture diagram, but hopefully it can be used to align your business and business objectives with the technologies that are available and can best be applied to solve your issues helping to balance, cost, complexity and compliance.

This diagram can also be used to do a couple of other things.  It can help you begin to classify your data and align your  data to your business objectives.  It also lets you begin to identify what data or data services in your environment that may be more important to you than others and based on this help you to choose areas you may want to outsource or move to the cloud.

As you can tell, there really is not one solution for meeting all your data protection needs.  The challenge comes with managing multiple solutions in an effort to meet your business objectives.  While there are only a few technologies available that allow you to manage your environment across all your RPOs and RTOs, it is important that I point out EMC’s NetWorker is able to do this, centralizing your data protection infrastructure  for ease of management.  It allows you to manage traditional backup, source based deduplicated backup with Avamar, CDP with RecoverPoint, as well as the EMC disk libraries and tape where the data is stored.  Now, I am not saying that NetWorker solves all of your data protection challenges, nor am I suggesting that replacing one traditional backup technology for another is the right answer, but what I am saying is that if you’re looking to have all the feature functionality required to meet all your business objectives and you want easier management, NetWorker is one avenue to get you there.  Additionally, the underlying image of the triangle represents data protection management.  Putting all the new technology in place is one thing, managing it, and ensuring you are now meeting your business needs is another.  EMC’s Data Protection Advisor can help here as well.

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Sep 01, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

Storage Switzerland


One of the more thoughtful analysts in the industry, in my opinion is George Crump from Storage Switzerland.  (I like the name and George is as independent as you can get in

this business.)  Yesterday I had the pleasure of briefing George on EMC’s Data Protection Vision.  I like talking with George for a couple of reasons.  First, he gets it.  What does that mean.  Read his material.  He is genuinely trying to educate IT folks on what is really important in the data center and how to address these challenges.  Next, he keeps the ‘pay for’, ‘vendor spin’ to a minimum.  George works hard to just talk about the facts of a product or industry and talk about how products can help without selling.  The reality is, we live in a great technological time.  The problem with IT is that only 50% of the problems are technology related.  The other 50%  is psychological.  IT can’t just implement new technology because its cool or even because it really does solve a problem.  Sometimes new technology is too expensive to implement or the solution that is currently in place had a three year amortization and your only two years into your product life.  Or, more importantly, the new technology may be the greatest technology at the right price but it doesn’t fit into the current IT priorities.  These are all things IT needs to work through when considering whether or not to invest in new technology.  The other thing George and I spoke about was the fact that it gets difficult to be ‘strategic’ in IT especially given certain economic times.  A lot of times IT just needs a band-aide or quick fix to move on to more important issues that really drive the business.  I talk about this  a lot, especially when it comes to backup.  Lets face it, it may not be what we all want to hear but backup is not strategic to most environments.  The applications that drive the business are most important.  Backup is about risk mitigation and information availability if everything else fails.  Right, ‘if everything else fails’, and IT typically invests in technology in the front end in an effort to have as little failure as possible.  Meaning, IT doesn’t just buy JBOD with no RAID if they think the environment shouldn’t be put at that kind of risk.  So IT is  already investing in some risk management up front which drives the spend on the back end for data protection.

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Aug 18, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Accelerating Backup Efficiency


EMC’s announcement on accelerating your backup efficiency hits some very important concepts to help users make significant progress in solving some key backup challenges.

A lot has been said over the last 18 months regarding an inflection point, where the growth of data is out pacing the capabilities of traditional backup technologies.  This has driven the ‘one size does not fit all’ belief when it comes to backup technology for your infrastructure.  Vendors talk about utilizing new technologies such as disk based backup, VTL (virtual tape libraries), deduplication and data protection management in order to improve the backup process.  While each of these technologies can help to improve the process, customers need to act faster in order catch up with the growth of data.

It’s not to say run out and buy one of each of these technologies and collectively they will solve your all your backup challenges.  The first and perhaps the most important thing is to assess your backup environment.  The reason there is not a one size fits all policy when it comes to backup is because different data types behave differently with different backup technologies.  Data deduplication is great, but it can work much better when it is applied in the proper manner.  A combination of source and target deduplication can complement one another to maximize your backup efficiency.  As an example, by leveraging source based deduplication for the proper data in your environment can give you a significant number of cycles back to your traditional backup software and improve performance on data types that aren’t a good fit for source based deduplication.  So the message is, use assessment services to help you gain a realistic understanding of your data profile that allows you to choose the right deduplication for your environment.  Additionally, make sure the tools that you use to understand your deduplication efficiency utilize similar algorithms as the products you will use in your environment so there are no surprises.

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May 19, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Backup Takes Off!


There has been a lot written about the airline industry and its ongoing challenges.  Bankruptcies and mergers have been frequent topics on the business pages of the newspapers. Stranded passengers and jets sitting on runways for hours make are page news.

I travel a lot and have been doing so for 20 years.  It’s an interesting industry I have observed first hand, often times painfully.  I would postulate, the air travel industry is one of the few industries that effectively hasn’t improved in any measurable way over the past 20 years.  Consider:

- It still takes you six hours to fly from Boston to London, just as it did 30 years ago. Despite the brief, and ultimately failed foray into speed improvements via the Concorde, jets still fly +/- 500 MPH and get you to your location no faster than they did a quarter of a century ago

- Customer satisfaction has been steadily declining – across the board

- Flight delays and lost / mishandled baggage continue to increase

- The food is still awful, if you get any at all

It is, however, worthy to note that air travel continues to have excellent safety records. So if the airlines haven’t improved in speed, comfort, or the basics like taking off and landing on time, what the heck have they been focused on? After all, look at another travel related industry, automobiles, over the past 25 years. More features (how many of you still “roll-up” your windows), safer (airbags, traction control), more fuel efficient (introduction of hybrids), and more dependable (Six-sigma, Kaizan!). Airlines? Well, no such luck. They’ve been focused on “cost.” With de-regulation and the entrée of low cost carriers coupled with the price of fuel, cost savings is where all of their focus has been. Let’s think about these two facts:

- Fuel efficiency in the airline industry increased 21% over the last five years

- But the price of oil, increased 130% over the last five years

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May 08, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Information Classification – IT's Hardest Job


I have decided information today, is like a group of friends. If you look at my LinkedIn page or my Facebook page you see that I have over 600 connections and over 180 friends respectively. What does this really mean? Obviously don’t stay in touch with all of these people. So why do we have these connections? I think it is because we believe that in the future, each one of these connections will offer some kind of value to us. It may be that they will be a friend to us, they may share common experiences to help us through a personal issue, and they may help us find a mate or even a job. We just don’t know so we hang on to the connection.

This is not unlike information. We are all tired of hearing that “data is growing at an exponential rate” but we never look at why. It is simple. We believe that ‘someday’ we may need that ‘valuable’ piece of content so we better not delete it. More importantly, the people who are accountable for managing that data (IT) are one step removed from the ‘value’ discussion (usually) so rather than delete anything and be responsible for “loosing data” they save and protect everything.

Recently I spent 4 hours on my Facebook page ‘categorizing’ my friends. I created a number of categories, friends from high-school, friends from college, colleagues from work (current), colleagues from work (past), industry connections and relatives. As you can imagine there are some friends that belong in more than one category – so how do I choose which one they should go in? Also, what happens if I change jobs? Where do the ‘colleagues (work)’ friends go? When do I move them? Do I remember to move them?

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Apr 16, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Road to 'Data' Recovery – 12 Steps


Hi, my name is Steve and I have a recovery problem.  Well, a data recovery problem that is.  So, I think it is about time that I apply the ’12 steps’ to help me with my data recovery problem.

Step 1 – It is time that I admit that I am powerless over my backup environment and my data protection world is unmanageable.

Step 2 – I have come to believe that there is a Technology greater that I that can help me restore (my sanity).

Step 3 – I have made a decision to put our company’s data and the process of recovery into the hands of a true data protection specialist.

Step 4 – I have helped to create a classified inventory of our company’s data.

Step 5 – I will admit to our CEO that I have failed at 63% of my recovery attempts costing the business $MMs.

Step 6 – I am prepared to have the new data protection administrator remove all of my defective technologies.

Step 7 – I will humbly ask ‘him’ to remove all of my failed processes.

Step 8 – I must make a list of all the people I have been unable to recover data for and be willing to try to restore their lost information.

Step 9 – I must make amends to all the people I have been unable to recover data for.

Step 10 – I must continue to take an inventory of all the tapes we have and promptly convert them to a newer technology to enable faster recovery.

Step 11 – I will seek out best of bread technology, parnters and vendors to improve our company’s capabilities for daily operational recovery.

Step 12 – Having had this spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, I will carry this message to all IT administrators who are challenged with data recovery issues.

I believe that by following these 12 steps, I will have put our company back on… the Road to ‘Data’ Recovery.

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Mar 25, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

Lean Six Sigma Your Backups


Last week I took a course offered by EMC entitled ‘Lean Six Sigma’ – Yellow Belt. This is a training course that is used to help ‘solve problems’ in a given process, typically work related. When I think about where the biggest problem is in IT its in the Backup arena so I thought, what a better place to test it.

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Enterprise Strategy Group 2008

There are two components to Lean Six Sigma. Lean or Leaning a process is about removing excess from a process to make it more efficient. For backup, moving as much data out of the backup stream as possible would increase backup efficiency.  Deleting unnecessary data or archiving static data in the production storage can cut down on as much as 50% of the data in the backup, ‘leaning’ the process.

Next, when looking at Six Sigma, we learned about the DMAIC process. That is:

  • Define – Business case, scope, problem statement, goals
  • Measure – Process flow, run charts, Pareto charts
  • Analyze – Cause / Effect, waste identification
  • Improve – Waste removal, improve plan, control charts
  • Control – Monitor to prevent repeat failure, control charts, control plan

First, as I was thinking about this, I kept coming to the measure phase. If you don’t currently measure your backup process, unless of course only when there is a recovery failure, then perhaps its time to invest in a tool to help measure the current process.  This measurement will allow you to identify current problems, serving as a benchmark against wich you can measure the success of your ‘leaning’.  So, if we apply the steps in the DMAIC process to your typical backup environment, here is what it may look like.

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Mar 25, 2009 | 0 comments View Post