Tag: "Business Continuity"

Data Protection, Retention and Archive Starts with Data Value


It feels good to open up the blogging again to new topics, especially ones I am intimately familiar with.  (But have no fear, there will be references to primary storage optimization / compression.)

This weekend I had an interesting conversation with my Dad.  We were discussing backup.  My dad basically runs IT for the State of Maine.  The State of Maine uses CommVault backup software.  So I posed the question to him, “What would it take for you to rip out CommVault and replace it with another solution.  He thought about it for a moment and replied “I wouldn’t”.  His answer came down to a couple of reasons.

First was the expense.  It’s not just about buying the new software, it would be training people to run the new software and it would be about throwing away the massive investment they have in their existing product as well as converting all the years of backup takes created with one software to the new software.  This is one of the biggest things vendors forget when trying to sell a customer on their backup software.

Second was the fact that, feature for feature, the top 5 traditional backup software products are not really that different from one another.  Sure, I do agree that some products have features that others don’t, and others products have features that work better than others, but in reality, the delta is so small and the workarounds are so simple it doesn’t really matter.  Unless your replacing traditional backup software with an evolutionary source based data deduplication software (which is only applicable for some environments) there is no advantage to switching software.

The challenge is if Data Protection is still one of the biggest and most expensive pain points within IT, how do the problems get resolved if replacing the software controlling it all is too costly to change?

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May 09, 2011 | 1 comment View Post

Business Outcomes are what Matters


I spent last week in London meeting with IBM Real-time Compression customers and partners and supporting the launch of the new IBM Storwize V7000 (not to be confused with the company IBM purchased a month ago).

While on this trip I met with a great colleague Matthew Yeager.  Matthew is one of the leading technologists working for ComputaCenter in the UK.  We spent a couple of hours discussing how the IT business was changing.  Once revered and dressed in shirt and tie, the IT manager now is plumber / electrician of the company.  The first to get yelled at when systems / applications / devices aren’t working, always lacking resources and always being asked to do more with less.  While the plumbing matters, everyone just expects it to work.  Like plugging in a phone to a phone jack, users expect a dial tone.

The shift in technology within IT is moving from “What does it cost?”, to “What is the business value I can achieve with this technology?”  More and more, especially as we are moving out of this recession, albeit slowly, customers are trying to figure out how to spend less in IT (as a percentage of overall revenue) but increase their business outcome.

If you read the blog post I did last week about Allianz.  The goals set forth in IT were to cut spending by 10% each year but increase overall efficiency.  How do you do that?  New technology is how you do that but it is not sold under the premise of a vendor brining in a new technology that they have developed or acquired, it is about identifying a problem: ‘Our storage growth and management of that growth is costing us too much money’, and then solving that problem with new technology that fits into the business.

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Oct 18, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Disk Elasticity and Storage Efficiency


Storage is elastic.  How do I know you ask?  Yesterday I visited a customer who is using the Storwize product to do Real-time Compression on their primary storage.  The customer is Allianz and has been using the product for over a year.  They see 75% compression on their users home directory data.  To give you an idea, Allianz is an insurance company and generates TONS of spreadsheets, 14TB worth of spreadsheets (okay, not all 14TB is spreadsheets but you get the picture).

Prior to Allianz purchasing the Storwize technology, Allianz didn’t have great data management practices.  Users store data in their home directories and there is really no discipline around deleting or cleaning up files so data just grows.  Additionally, storage isn’t really budgeted for.  Overall IT is but at a storage level, they just purchase some when the need some.

Again, prior to the Storwize technology, Allianz had their primary storage and a backup to tape at their local site.  They then replicated the data to their remote site and also performed a backup to tape.

Allianz has an overall IT mission to reduce spend by 10% per year.  The thing to think about is that this 10% could come from a lot of places including data management.

Once the Storwize technology was installed the first things they saw were:

  • 75% capacity optimization
  • Better data management capabilities through Storwize reporting
  • The ability to keep more data on line and available for faster recoveries
  • No change in any of their existing storage processes
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Oct 05, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

A Data Proteciton Reference Architecture – Part 4


Business Critical Applications

The tip of the triangle focuses on the applications (or data) that drives your business.  It is these applications within your business that, should they go down for any length of time, cost you money.  The recovery of this information, in the event of a ‘disaster’, needs to be very fast (RTO in minutes) and the data can’t be very ‘old’ when it is recovered (short RPO, less than 24 hours).   Typically,  the technologies that are used for these types of applications are replication (synchronous or asynchronous) or continuous data protection (CDP).  These technologies ensure that recovery at the alternate location  are instant (or near instant) and / or give users the ability to pick a point in time they want to recover to in order to ensure no data loss and the ability to bring up the applications as fast and accurately as possible.  This category, much like the rest of them, have the same disclaimer, 'one size (product) does not fit all'.  Depending upon the value of the data in this tier, and the risk to the business if this data is unavailable drives the technology and spend in this part of the triangle.  Keep in mind, the right technology (Don't choose CDP if you need an active remote file system) gives you the best recovery (RPO) for your business needs and can keep you on the Road to Recovery.

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Aug 27, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

No More Tiers / Tears


The great thing about blogging and independence is that we can post things that add value that we want to share as long as we give the proper recognition.  One of my colleagues, Mike Dutch from the CTO office of SSG and long time SNIA member had some thoughts as it pertained to storage tiering that were insightful  so together we decided to share this post.  I hope you enjoy it.

I'm guessing that many people define a storage tier by its particular storage technology (like SATA). While this may be a useful working definition it obscures the essential notion of what a storage tier really is and leads to confusion when a new technology like data deduplication comes around.  A precise definition may also lead to some interesting innovations if we were to take a slightly different path.

Should deduplicated storage be considered a storage tier?  I would say “no” and here's why: because a technology such as deduplication can span, and optimize across all tiers.

A storage tier is storage space that has availability, performance, and cost characteristics different enough from other storage tiers as to economically justify the movement of data between it and other storage tiers based on the importance (value, performance need etc…) of the data. While storage tiers are often thought of as being tied to a particular type of hardware,

e.g.,  Flash, FC, SAS, SATA, VTL, PTL, COM (Computer Output Microfiche), or even paper, this is not necessarily the case. For example, highly available cloud or network-based virtual disks could leverage multiple technologies within their single tier.  Since a variety of technologies can be used to provide a particular storage service level, you should not think of a specific technology as a specific storage tier, but should instead evaluate what technology, or combination of technologies would deliver the availability-performance-cost point that I need for this level tier.  "SATA" is not a storage tier, it just happens to be one "technology-set" that can deliver for a single storage tier.

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Jul 16, 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
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