Category: EMC

Marketing, FUD and Doing What You Do Best


Rather than leave a lengthy comment on Tom Cook’s blog post from Friday Compression and Dedupe: Business Value and Data Safety (and from a marketing perspective, Friday’s are bad days to post blogs – especially in the summer) – I thought I would respond here (this may get lengthy as Tom made a number of points which I need comment on).

The first thing I do want to say is that when doing technical marketing; the proper strategy would be to not be on defense but rather take an offensive approach.  However, given the amount of FUD that Tom put in his latest blog post, I have to defend compression to some degree.

Now, I think we can all agree that data compression and data deduplication are two technologies that can complement one another very well.  Avamar (EMC) deduplicates the data at the source and then compresses the data before sending it to the Avamar Data Store gaining tremendous efficiency in network utilization.  ProtecTIER (IBM) compresses the data once it is deduplicated at the target device before it stores the data.  Other solutions also combine compression and data deduplication.

I’d like to comment on some key point Tom made in his piece where he is just blatantly wrong:

1)      Compression identifies redundant data across a very small window, usually 64 KB. – While this may be true for other compression technologies, this is not true for Storwize.  Storwize performs compression where the initial window is not fixed in size at all; it is the resultant write that is fixed in size.  This size is also specifically mapped to the I/O patter of the data being written.  The goal is such that in 1 I/O Storwize can do all the work it needs to on a particular file or LUN and it is for this reason Storwize has no performance penalty.

2)      Compression produces data reduction rates at most 2X for most data types. – Seems Tom needs a lesson in the most common answer in IT – “IT DEPENDS”.  Data compression ratios are 100% tied to the data type.  For a true indication of data compression ratios see Figure 1.

This is a preview of Marketing, FUD and Doing What You Do Best. Read the full post
PDF Creator    Send article as PDF   
Jun 21, 2010 | 10 comments View Post

Confessions of an ex-EMC Blogger


It is an interesting time we live in.  In a world where high-tech meets social networking things can run on the hairy edge of information leakage or brand management, especially in a public company.  However, during 2008 and 2009, when big companies were trying to figure out what to do within the ‘social media’ fray, I was working at EMC and EMC did a fantastic job of embracing social media and using it to their advantage to drive a number of very positive initiatives.  So much so that I believe in August of last year they won an award (or were at least publicly recognized) for their use of social media.  I have to commend Polly Pearson for this.  Driving a brand with no less than 20 bloggers (probably more), among them the likes of Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke and StorageZilla, all of whom tweet as well, one would think would take quite a bit of corralling.  Interestingly though, it didn’t.  The main reason, trust.

Each person at the company who blogged took that ‘role’ very seriously.  Each person I knew who blogged wanted to not only be the top EMC blogger, but the top blogger in their respective area of expertise.  EMC bloggers are very smart people and have a desire to be the best at what they do.  EMC bloggers have driven some of the most authentic and original blogs with great thought leadership in the storage industry.  It is because of the desire to deliver great quality content that they lived by a set of rules that anyone who worked for a public company would adhere to.

1)      Don’t divulge any company secrets – which is a part of your employee agreement anyway

2)      Don’t say things that are untrue or could get you in trouble in the future

3)      Deliver great content

And if there was ever a question, there were always folks internally who you could bounce your thoughts and ideas off of before posting.  It was for these reasons, as well as trust that propelled EMC to the top of the high tech social media ladder.

This is a preview of Confessions of an ex-EMC Blogger. Read the full post
PDF Creator    Send article as PDF   
Mar 17, 2010 | 24 comments View Post

Storage Tiers – Take 3


I find myself in a true quandary.  First, I have true admiration for my good friend and fellow blogger 3Par Farley and never feel comfortable being on the other side of the coin from him.  Second, I find myself agreeing, to a degree, with Jon Toigo (who still uses crazy permalinks and considers Novell a serious storage player.  What is up with that?).

I’m sure by now most of you all have read the fury lately over Tom Georgens’ comments about the future of storage tiering.  A number of folks who have ‘tiering’ technology reacted with disdain (see a list on Storagerap).  Some wondered how a storage visionary like Tom could turn his back on technology that helps people save money in storage.  Some even suggested that this is just marketing to overcome deficiency in the NetApp product line.  However, one applauded Tom for understanding how the real world deploys storage.  All good points, but I have my own theory on storage teiring...

I want to come right out and say I think that storage tiering is an incredibly smart concept.  (Now that that is off the table…) I would also say that much like the prediction that tape is ‘dead’ (I guess Data Domain didn’t get that memo), storage tiering, while it can’t be dead, because in reality, it never actually was, nor do I think it will be for a very long time.  Let’s look at the facts:

First, HSM never really went anywhere.  There is not mass adoption of HSM technology.  Second, tiering is not a technology issue.  Humans are lazy.  What do I mean?  HSM / Tiering or whatever you want to call it depends on policy.  IT can’t get any two groups in a company to decide on anything other than storage is too expensive.  When I speak to well respected people in IT the ‘real world’ (my dad), they tell me it is too difficult to get organizations to agree on when data can be archived in order to save money (and that is what this is all about really).  Finally, IT processes get in the way of a good tiering strategy.  Getting data to go one way is easy – move data to cheaper and cheaper tiers of storage until it vanishes.  Try getting it back.  That takes a lot of management tools and integration and costs just as much as doing nothing.

This is a preview of Storage Tiers – Take 3. Read the full post
Free PDF    Send article as PDF   
Mar 07, 2010 | 15 comments View Post

Enterprise Data Protection at the Edge


What does that really mean?  When I worked for Veritas, back in 1998 we acquired a company based out of Canada called TeleBackup that backed up desktop / laptops.  In 1999 Veritas acquired Seagate and the Backup Exec product which also had a desktop / laptop option.  These products were meant to eventually be integrated into the main backup applications but never were.  Additionally, a lot of that software was given away (hard to make a business on that) and for the most part,  lived on a shelf somewhere and was never installed.

In 2004 I worked for Connected Corporate (acquired by Iron Mountain), who’s sole business was desktop / laptop backup.  (In fact, from 2000 to 2004 I worked as an analyst for ESG covering all the vendors in the backup space and used the Connected product to backup my work laptop – and it actually saved my hide once.)  While the company executed a successful exit, the business was (and probably still is) only about a $20M to $40M business.

Why do I bring this up?  There is a new reality in IT these days.  I have said it before, IT is accountable for 100% of the data created in any company, including that stored on desktop/laptops.  This means that not only do they have to provide a location to store this data but IT also needs to provide tools to protect this information and ensure that this information is highly recoverable for both business productivity purposes as well as corporate and legal governance.   This means that desktop / laptop backup is now gaining a lot more visibility in the enterprise.

However, desktop / laptop data protection is one of those areas in IT that is just a nuisance because it seems like it should be an easy problem to solve, but there are so many moving parts to it that it ends up falling by the wayside.

A successful desktop / laptop backup technology needs three very specific capabilities:

  • Integrate seamlessly with the existing backup solution in the enterprise
This is a preview of Enterprise Data Protection at the Edge. Read the full post
PDF    Send article as PDF   
Nov 19, 2009 | 3 comments View Post

Architecting for Recovery


Here is a shocker for you, backup IS a science.  Good backup administrators / architects are worth their weight in gold.  CIO’s just wish backup would go away.   Backup costs money, it’s not strategic, it chews up man power and when it is 'running' (successfully or not) no one really pays attention to it, but when it fails or more likely when you need to restore data and can't, someone can lose their job - so backup is VERY important, it is a science and to architect a backup environment correctly  it takes time, skill, money and someone who knows what they are dong.

Good backup administrators architect for recovery, not for backup.  Prove it you say.  Okay, question: “Why do backup administrators do full backups of Exchange every night?”  Answer - because it is way easier and much faster to perform a one step full recovery for Exchange than it is to lay down the weekly full and apply the incrementals.  Since mail is considered a “critical application” in the enterprise these days, and down time is critical for this application, good backup administrators architect for the least amount of downtime for the application.  This also applies to databases.  Ninety-five percent of all databases are actually snapped for quick recovery and I would also bet that a full backups is performed on them (or the snap) every evening.

Recovery is a primary driver of any good backup architecture but lately I have been hearing a great deal of talk around ‘backup consolidation’.  The reality is, there is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to backup software or hardware.  Consolidating backup software may make your environment easier to manage, but does it provide you the tools/technology you need to maximize your data protection objectives in your environment?  Consolidating backup targets (tape / disk) may yield fewer devices to manage, but what happens to your overall backup and recovery performance when doing so?  While new technologies may help fine-tune the science side of backup, they still need an artist’s touch.

This is a preview of Architecting for Recovery. Read the full post
PDF Download    Send article as PDF   
Nov 17, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Comprehensive Capacity Optimization – Deduplication 2.0


Technology is great isn't it?  When someone thinks they have a new idea on the same old technology foundation they call it "X 2.0".  I have been watching the banter between analysts and vendors (specifically NTAP’s Dr. Dedupe and Permabit’s CEO Tom Cook) on the topic of Deduplication 2.0 and it is my belief that the proverbial boat is being missed (since we are using water analogies).  I have been watching these guys hash it out for the past few weeks and decided I have to jump in.  I find the real value to these conversations is the value to the end user.  At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who 'coined' or 'invented' a term (like deduplication 2.0) but what does matter is if  the term actually helps describe a technology and how that technology can be leveraged to make things better in the data center.  We should focus on the implications of this new generation of deduplication - ‘deduplication 2.0’.

In May I delivered a presentation to a number of EMC customers on the topic of Data Deduplication 2.0 - Comprehensive Capacity Optimization.  The point of my presentation was simple (and keep in mind this was before the Data Domain acquisition); there are a number of capacity optimization technologies/capabilities that are available to customers today.  Originally these deduplication technologies were used primarily for backup purposes but slowly, deduplication is making its way into primary storage. Deduplication in primary storage makes a lot of sense FOR DATA THAT IS STATIC.  Why only static data?  Static data is data that isn't used frequently (doesn't mean it's not important, it just simply is not accessed often); because access to this data is infrequent, the performance requirements for this data is less than that of active data. Remember; nothing in IT is free.  If I deduplicate data, in order to use it, I must ‘rehydrate’ it and thus there is a performance implication so I want to be careful where I deduplicate data so as not to inhibit performance on production data.

This is a preview of Comprehensive Capacity Optimization – Deduplication 2.0. Read the full post
Create PDF    Send article as PDF   
Oct 07, 2009 | 1 comment View Post

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.

This is a preview of A Data Protection Reference Architecture – The Final Chapter. Read the full post
Fax Online    Send article as PDF   
Sep 01, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

Nick Glasgow Update…


If you all remember, back in May the blogging community kicked off a world wide search to help a fellow colleague, Nick Glasgow, with a bone marrow transplant that could save him from leukemia.

Earlier this month Nick received a successful marrow transplant and is on the Road to Recovery.

I wanted to keep you all apprised of his progress and let you know you can learn more @ http://markfredrickson.wordpress.com/

Thank you to all for your support and kindness.

Permanent link to this post (81 words, estimated 19 secs reading time)
PDF Printer    Send article as PDF   
Aug 28, 2009 | 0 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.

This is a preview of Storage Switzerland. Read the full post
PDF Creator    Send article as PDF   
Aug 18, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

A Data Protection Tribute to Michael Jackson


I was walking through the data center the other day when I heard one of my colleagues, MJ “Scream”, “I wish I had some ‘Morphine’”.  Well, I have to say I was “Speechless”.  I walked over to where MJ was standing, near the tape library, and when I asked him what was wrong, he replied “there was another backup tape ’Jam‘.”  MJ told me he had been “Working Day and Night” on a major backup problem and he was now bouncing “Off The Wall”.  He told me he was sick of dealing with traditional backup tools and just wanted to get rid of tape.  I told MJ that it was “Human Nature” to feel “Bad” in a time like this but I also told him, “You Are Not Alone”.  I said MJ, “’Keep The Faith’, we all ‘Remember The Time’ when backups ran like a ‘Speed Demon’ and were ‘Unbreakable’, but that is ‘HIStory’, tape isn’t that fast any more given the amount of data we now have.  I also told him that “We are Backup Administrators, we are ‘Invincible’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait’ for us, and while we may not have our issue fixed at the ‘Break Of Dawn’, we would ‘Come Together’ to ‘Heal The World,’ or at least the datacenter’ (I chuckled).  I proceeded to tell him about a revolutionary new backup concept utilizing source-based deduplication technology.  It’s “PYT”, a pretty young thing, but  more importantly it’s here to stay.  EMC  offers it with a product called Avamar , the most efficient variable block,  source-based, deduplication technology on the market that:

  • Helps to eliminate tape all together
  • Is perfect for VMware environments
  • Protects remote offices most efficiently
  • Stems the tide of data growth on NAS platforms
This is a preview of A Data Protection Tribute to Michael Jackson. Read the full post
PDF Creator    Send article as PDF   
Jul 07, 2009 | 6 comments View Post
« Previous Page — Next Page »