Category: Replication

Storage’s 2010 Hottest Technology


Each year there tends to be one technology that stands out in the storage space.  In 2009 it was data deduplication.  At the end of 2008 EMC made an acquisition of a source based deduplicaiton solution called Avamar.  Later, in 2009, they announced a strategic partnership with Quantum for data deduplication at the target.  Then in 2009 EMC made a bid against NetApp for Data Domain and won.  In addition, NetApp had data deduplication announcements with its ASIS technology.  Quantum, Falconstor, and Symantec all had their own story with data deduplication and a host of non-public companies such as Permabit, Sepaton, and Exagrid all were talking about the merits of data deduplication.

As the story goes, if you haven’t put data deduplication in your backup environment yet you’re either in an environment where there is not one iota of duplicate data, which is highly unlikely, or the company you work for has gobs of money and has no problem:

  1. Backing up to slow tape
  2. No worries about slow recovery from tape
  3. Keeping massive amounts of data on unreliable tape
  4. Backing up full streams of data to disk (and wasting valuable storage space)

What I am saying is that if you haven’t implemented a data deduplication solution by now, you have been left in the technology dust.  Data deduplication just makes too much sense.  I know we have all heard the expression “No one ever got fired for buying X.”  But has anyone ever got promoted because they bought X?  I have to believe that the IT team that can save their company 50% or more of their storage will get promoted.  Storage is a cost drain on IT.  It’s the applications that make a company money.  Its time to start focusing some of those valuable IT dollars on the applications that make your company money, its time to be the IT Super Hero!

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Apr 19, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

How Much Backup Capacity Does Deduplication Really Save?


There is a lot of discussion around data deduplication for backup these days.  (I wish I could deduplicate all the turkey I ate last week.)  In fact, Gartner claims that “…by 2012, deduplication will be applied to 75% of backups.”  And when asked “Why?” the response was “…deduplication is too compelling to ignore.”  But I say “prove it”.  So I put together some backup capacity numbers for storing data on tape (non-compressed and compressed) versus storing data, deduplicated (fixed block and variable block), on disk and the numbers show a dramatic savings in backup space which translates into cost savings.

The Parameters

As with any ‘analysis’ numbers can be ‘spun’ to make them say what you want.  That said, I tried to be as straight forward as possible, so let me also show my methodology so you can see how my numbers were derived.

  • I charted the amount of capacity created using a retention policy of:
    • 14 Dailies
    • 4 Weeklies
    • 12 Monthlies
  • I selected 10TB of primary storage capacity
  • I did this for file system backups only
  • I charted the data for 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% primary storage growth rates
  • I charted traditional tape based backup (non-compressed)
  • I charted traditional tape based backup (compressed, 2:1)
  • I charted fixed block disk based deduplicated backup
  • I charted variable block disk based deduplicated backup (3 to 5 times more efficient than fixed block deduplication)

The Effect

The first thing to think about is the sheer number of full backup copies that must be maintained when utilizing the above retention schedule.  The above retention policy leads to 17.2 copies of the primary storage (12 yearly’s + 4 monthlies + the equivalent of 1.2 with dailies = 17.2 copies) .  Translation: one terabyte of primary storage becomes 17.2 terabytes of tape storage.  This means, backup administrators need to pay for the physical tapes as well as the offsite transport and storage costs.  Now 17.2 terabytes of tape doesn’t sound like much but keep in mind that is for 1TB of primary capacity.  Ten TB of primary capacity yields 172 TB of tape capacity.  Now add in year over year storage growth.  At 30% primary storage growth, the backup storage growth grows 23%, at 40% primary storage growth, the backup storage growth grows 29%, at 50% primary storage growth, the backup storage growth grows 33% and at 60% primary storage growth and the backup storage grows 38%.

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Nov 30, 2009 | 0 comments 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.

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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

A Data Protection Reference Architecture – Part 1


This blog will have multiple parts.  I will introduce my view of a data protection reference architecture and the next few blog posts will talk to components of that architecture.

The other day  I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague of mine in Australia.  He was looking for a data protection reference architecture that he could use to speak to his customer.  As you can imagine having this conversation over the phone could pose to be a difficult challenge.  When the conversation began, my fear was he was looking for an ‘architecture’ diagram that included data protection appliances, backup servers, disk libraries, tape libraries and backup agents.  I quickly realized that this is an impossible conversation to have with him without knowing:

A)     the customer’s environment or challenges

B)      the customer’s business objectives

I find that most vendors don’t know A or B when speaking to a customer about their data protection ‘issues’, but they really should.  Having a more thoughtful conversation with customers in a consultative fashion is more relevant to customers in understanding their challenges and helping to align these challenges to the best possible solution.

I started my conversation with the diagram shown below (Figure 1).  A simple triangle divided horizontally into 4 segments and the middle two segments divided vertically in half.  Each segment represents different business objectives within a company.  As you go around the triangle, you can see that there are different technologies and different methodologies for attacking data protection challenges, which is why there is no longer a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to protecting data today. Let’s face it; the two most important commodities in backup are time and capacity.  One of the primary drivers behind the type of protection that is used is the Recovery Point Objective or RPO.  Different technologies provide different RPOs and each has a different price point as well as there are different processes that can be applied to attach RPOs.

Figure 1

Figure 1

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Aug 14, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Process vs. Technology


The hardest thing to change inside IT is not technology, it is process!  I say this because all too often there are technologies available that provide a far superior solution to a complex IT problem, however, this new technology may not fit into your existing business process.  Need proof?  Let’s take data protection as an example.  Did you know that VTLs (virtual tape libraries) and data deduplication technologies came out at the exact same point in history, 10 years ago?  Which technology had faster market adoption?  VTLs of course because implementing them didn’t cause a major disruption in processes.

Let’s take a look at a simple backup environment.  We won’t worry about archiving or compliance for the moment, just operational backup and recovery.  Today’s backup has a number of complexities.  There are some data sets that have weekly full backups and daily incremental backups.  There are some data sets that sit under applications that, for faster recovery capabilities and simplicity, require daily full backups.  Once the backups are done, in order to ensure true data protection reliability, a process of checking the backup logs to ensure every system was successfully protected begins.  Next, backup tapes are either created (if it is a disk based backup) or tapes are taken from the library and moved to a transportable box, hopefully a secure box.  Finally, a third party vendor comes to pick up the tapes and take them off site for safe-keeping.  Additionally, if the data is backed up using encryption, then the encryption keys are also kept off site for security purposes.

 Customers face these standard backup challenges:

1) Backups take too long and cannot meet backup windows as a result of too much data.

2) Backups fail due to poorly configured (networked) backup environments.

3) Backups at remote offices are ‘unreliable’. (Don’t follow best practices set in the data center.)

a. No one with the appropriate skill set is available to monitor these backups.

b. No one with the appropriate skill set is available to troubleshoot these backups.

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May 01, 2009 | 1 comment 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

Road to Recovery


Our domain, Backup & Beyond was the tagline for Avamar Technologies, a company EMC acquired in November of 2006.  This tagline was very fitting from a data protection standpoint because Avamar utilized a traditional client / server architecture to protect data but with a twist.  Avamar utilizes a more intelligent client side agent that provides source based, variable block deduplication to enable the most efficient backups available in the market for more than 80% of a data centers data.  Avamar also leverages this same technology to replicate this data between disk based backup targets there by dramatically reducing the reliance on tape.  This new technology, that has enabled new processes is taking backup beyond.

The title of our blog, Road to Recovery – well, like every good title it is a play on words and trust me, as with every title it took us a while to come up with it.  That said, the industry has been talking about the fact that backup is really about recovery.  The same can be said for other data protection tools.  This is why our goal is to talk about methodologies (technologies and processes) that help you to recover data.  When IT professionals are polled, they often say that data protection (backup) is still the number one issue they have in the data center.  We say it is time to stepup and admit it and start the ‘Road to Recovery’ when it comes to your data protection environment.

Let us know what your challengs are, we are here for you, your support system and we welcome you comments and questions.

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Feb 14, 2009 | 0 comments View Post