Tag: "Restore"

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

Compressed Thoughts – Compression and Deduplication


This video doesn't talk about the merits of one versus the other but how when compression (or capacity optimization is done right) it should enhance data deduplication, not impact it.  Enjoy and for more videos like this one go to the StorwizeChannel.

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May 06, 2010 | 0 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

The Side Effects of Backup on Server Virtualization


Server virtualization has changed the IT landscape dramatically.  It has become a magic potion curing a number of ills in the physical server world such as low individual CPU utilization and excess use of space, power and cooling in the data center.  However, like all potions that cure what ails you, there can be side effects.  You need to be careful of what the Witch Doctor orders.

When I speak with customers who have aggressively implemented a virtual server infrastructure, 9 out of 10 will tell me that they underestimated the affect that virtualization would have on their backups and backup process and how backup might actually make virtualization less of the magic potion they had hoped, when not considered during the virtual server assessment and planning process.  So what is the issue?  Backup is a virtualization bottleneck, and without addressing it, you may not be able to obtain the server consolidation ratios you had been expecting which can have a negative effect on your virtual server TCO and ROI.

This is a timely discussion as VMworld has just concluded.  VMware users flocked to VMworld looking for best practices when it comes to implementing virtual server technology.  Because virtualization allows IT to reduce the overall physical hardware infrastructure, users will be looking at how to maximize their server consolidation ratios (get as many virtual servers on a physical server as they can and still provide good application performance).

I often hear that companies assess their environments by looking at the production applications on their physical server environment, identify their work loads and translating that into some consolidation ratio of physical servers to virtual servers.  I also hear, from these same customers, that backup was never taken into consideration during the assessment phase when trying to identify the best possible consolidation ratios.  These customers implement their new virtual server environments, install the backup agent they had previously been using for physical server backups and attempt to backup their virtual servers and they find that they would only be able to protect 50% to 60% of the new environment.  Why?

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Sep 14, 2009 | 2 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

A Data Proteciton Reference Architecture – Part 3


The 'Fat Middle'

In the 'fat middle' of the triangle, as I stated last week, there are a number of ways to protection information.  I have chosen to break apart the middle into two categories.  The reality is, this is meant to be used as a tool for helping you lay out a strategy so your boxes could be based on capacity and could end up in different areas of the triangle depending upon your business needs.  The thing to keep in mind is that it's not about your environment matching these boxes exactly, but it's about making sure that all of the critical data that requires backup with a 24 hour RPO is protected; you then alignthe data value in the box with the most appropriate technology to 1) solve the challenge 2) fit best in your environment.

SMB / ROBO

First, let me clarify my terminology.  ROBO is remote office, back office and SMB is small to medium business.  If we think about the business needs that are most important in this arena, they are:

1)      Low cost

2)      Simplicity (one tool)

3)      24 hour RPO is adequate

Small and medium businesses, as well as remote offices, need a robust data protection solution that allows them to meet their backup windows and that has the ability to recover data that is not any older than 24 hours (RPO).  The RTO drives whether the backup target is disk or tape.   Faster recoveries come from disk.  Another thing to keep in mind is that there isn’t usually a lot of technical expertise at these sites so the backup application needs to be very simple to manage.

Backup appliances or appliance-like backup technologies tend to work very well in these environments.  A self contained backup appliance, (disk based) with the ability to replicate efficiently to another site for disaster protection is a great solution for sites like these.

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Aug 24, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

A Data Protection Reference Architecture – Part 2


Archive

The most fundamental part of developing a good data protection architecture starts at the base of the triangle with Archive.  Archive is often an overlooked component of data protection - It’s not just for regulated business anymore.  Archive essentially gives users 100% data deduplication efficiency.  What I mean by this is that you have the ability to remove ‘stale’ data (and by 'stale' I don't mean unimportant data, I just mean data that is not accessed frequently) completely from your backup stream so you don’t continue to back it up.  Let’s face it; the two most important commodities in backup are time and capacity.  Both of these are interdependent of one another.  The more capacity you have, the longer it takes to backup and the more money it costs to store.  The longer it takes you to backup, the less likely you are to be meeting your business objectives.  Data capacities aren’t shrinking, they are growing.  According to the latest IDC data, capacity is growing at a staggering pace of 65% year over year and the digital pack rat in all of us is too afraid to get rid of anything,  compromising backup windows and hence the business.  By archiving data that hasn’t been touched in some period of time and removing it from the backup stream, you can relieve some of the pressure on your backups and possibly not have to make any significant changes to your backup infrastructure.

Also, you don’t have to backup to a special purpose device or appliance for archive.  You can archive data to any file system.  I would keep in mind however, that you want to archive to a platform that can keep costs low.  Remember this data is not unimportant, just not highly used.  Take into account your RTO and store the data on the most cost effective platform possible that also aligns to the business objectives.  This may be tape, it may be optical or it may be disk.  If it is disk, you want to store it on disk that is optimized for this type of data, optimized for capacity (deduplication, compression, single instancing), has low power and cooling costs, can replicate for availability and is highly reliable.  You will also want to make sure that it is integrated to some extent with an application that lets you find the data pretty quickly when you need it and put you further down the Road to Recovery.

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Aug 20, 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
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