DCIGInc.com

iSCSI has Setup Mid-Sized Organizations for a 2010 Data Migration Wakeup Call

2010-02-09T11:00:00Z

In 2007, IDC estimated that 211 PBs of iSCSI storage was shipped worldwide. This grew to 500 PBs shipped in 2008 and was forecast to continue to grow in 2009 and beyond. But what those numbers do not reveal is that it is mid-sized enterprises who bought the majority of these iSCSI storage systems. Now these same organizations are about to get a wakeup call as they start their upgrade cycles and encounter the challenges associated with migrating data to newer iSCSI storage systems.

The period of 2006 through 2008 saw the rapid adoption of networked storage among mid-sized organizations with iSCSI storage systems assuming the role of favorite for these size organizations. So as they deployed these iSCSI systems, they went through great pains to centralize the storage of their application data on these arrays.

But that was 2 - 4 years ago and, with 2010 now upon us, these first generation iSCSI storage systems are starting to show their age. 250 GB hard disk drives (HDDs) and 1 Gb Ethernet ports are so 2007, manufacturer warranties on these storage systems are expiring and, as they do, pricey support contracts are kicking in.

This is prompting more mid-sized organizations to start product refresh cycles for their existing iSCSI storage systems to get newer systems. But as they do, the costs and disruption associated with this transition to a new system start to rear their ugly head.

The cost and disruption hit them in one of two possible ways. If mid-sized organizations are using and elect to stay with an iSCSI storage provider like Dell EqualLogic or HP LeftHand, they can leverage the software on these systems that do data migrations for them from the old to the new hardware so their disruption is minimal.

However there is a catch: organizations have to purchase all of their new storage from these providers to take advantage of these features. This leaves them with little flexibility or negotiating power when it comes to acquiring new storage since they can only buy storage from these providers in whatever storage configurations and prices that they make available.

Switching to another storage provider is just as bad if not worse. While organizations are always free to buy from any iSCSI storage provider that they want, migrating the data from the old system to the new one becomes a costly and disruptive proposition. A worst case scenario includes:

Purchasing data migration software for each application server attached to the iSCSI array
Install and configure the data migration software on each application server, possibly requiring a server reboot
Configuring the application server to discover its assigned storage on the new iSCSI storage array
Use the application's processing resources to copy the application data from the old system to the new system
Stop the application to start using the new storage system

Then there are the hidden costs associated with data migrations no one likes to discuss. Organization may need to continue to pay maintenance on the old storage system should the data migration take longer than expected or not go as planned (a likely scenario). Another probable expense is obtaining the vendor's professional services that are needed in order to successfully complete the migration of data from one system to another.

The good news is that new options are now available that give users more flexibility to perform these data migrations without locking them into a specific solution or making the selection of other solutions impractical to implement.

Specifically, the RELDATA 9240i includes its own data migration software that can migrate data from any other iSCSI storage system to the 9240i. This can be accomplished without requiring third party software or contracting for expensive professional services to perform the data migration.

Further, because the 9240i can migrate the data while the application is still operating, application disruption is minimal and only needs to occur during the final stages when the application switches from it current storage system to the storage presented to it by the 9240i.

Storage system refreshes and data migrations are a natural part of the life cycle of any networked storage solution and beginning in 2010, more mid-sized organizations are going to run up against this reality. However this expense and disruption is not a requirement for those organizations willing to looking outside of the box for new and innovative solutions. By taking advantage of data migration features found on the 9240i, these organizations get both flexibility and choice when it comes to making a selection of an iSCSI storage system.

"To Cloud" is Officially a Verb in Today's Data Center

2010-02-08T11:00:00Z

This is part 3 of a 3 part blog entry series exploring how VMware and server virtualization technologies are evolving data center infrastructure, operations, and future requirements. HP virtualization technologies combined with Bell Micro packaging and services enable OEM vendors to more rapidly respond to and prepare for these changing requirements.

Cloud is this year's virtualization, or ILM, or even ASP for those of us who go back a while. Cloud is the latest term of interest in the data management market, but one that is fraught with the same level of confusion and misunderstanding as those previous terms. However, cloud brings with it a certain level of interest and for good reason: virtualization technologies are one of the only methods available that offer to solve a problem plaguing IT budgets and environments.

The problem with computing today is that the majority of IT budget, time, and administrative effort is spent on status quo computing. The bigger problem is that the percentage spent on status quo computing gets larger every year.

What is status quo computing? It's the effort put in to maintain the capabilities and infrastructure already present in the environment. Status quo computing is merely keeping it all running, available, and in good enough shape to support business as usual.

Computing infrastructure takes too many resources and traps businesses in status quo operational methods. New initiatives have less resource to support them. New methods of doing business cannot be easily supported. Competitiveness drops.

Virtualization helps solve this problem of consuming IT budgets with status quo computing by dramatically streamlining, consolidating, and simplifying those environments. The combination of virtual server, virtual network, and virtual storage technologies enable dynamic resource provisioning at all levels of the infrastructure. This offers better flexibility for maintaining and upgrading these environments while keeping applications and data available for business use.

The coming cloud is a reality for which OEM vendors must prepare. Previously in this series, I discussed how VMware and virtual server technologies in general offer better flexibility for OEM vendors interested in packaging new application capabilities into Virtual Machines (VMs) which can be dynamically added to OEM appliances already deployed in end-user customer environments. However another reason to build appliances on a virtual server platform is because of the coming need to participate - and to take advantage - of data center clouds.

In the coming cloud environment, IT teams will expect appliance platforms to come with certain core capabilities built into the platform. Thought of as add-on capabilities today, these include systems monitoring and policy enforcement to avoid VM sprawl, security at the hypervisor level, assisted network and storage provisioning, and even built-in data protection like data backup and replication. All of these capabilities must be rebuilt and reinvented to fit better with virtual environments so they can take better advantage of the inherent capabilities of virtual environments.

The good news for OEM vendors working with technologies from HP and Bell Micro is that they can build their appliances knowing that their platforms technology includes the latest in virtualization capabilities. Technologies like VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms act as the basis for the OEM appliance solution. Technologies like virtual networks and storage. Technologies that include software capabilities built into the platform. Working with HP and Bell Micro, OEM teams and their end-user customers have a path to the cloud environments of the future.

Part 1 in this 3-part series discuss how VMware is gaining ground as a better OEM platform and what benefits OEMs derive from HP and Bell Micro services and support.

Part 2 in this 3-part series explores the factors contributing to and inhibiting OEM success with server virtualization, HP's and Bell Micro's roles in that success and the future of where virtualization can take the OEM community.

DCIG Midrange Array Buyers Guide - Coming Your Way Soon

2010-02-05T11:00:00Z

Ever since I stopped writing technology reports for Storage magazine a few years ago, people periodically ask me when I am going to start writing them again. Until a few months ago, the answer was "No plans to write them." But then I started to receive some really good ideas from individuals like Kelly Polanski over at WaveBreak Marketing as well as Jim Nash, DCIG's new Business Development Manager. Their ideas, coupled with my own internal desire to once again resume writing these reports, pushed me over the edge and down this road again.

While there are any number of subjects for which I could first develop a technology report under the "DCIG" moniker, part of the reason I selected the midrange array category was organizations are constantly buying new new midrange storage arrays. Data storage growth, storage consolidations, aging storage hardware, new storage array features are just some of the reasons that organizations are constantly buying storage with midrange arrays often the preferred hardware on which to store this data.

However deciding to buy a midrange storage array is easy. Coming up with a list of viable candidates, narrowing your choice down to just a few models and then eventually selecting one - that is a much more difficult decision and a process that is very arduous to say the least.

As I have been going through the process of coming up with a list of midrange array providers and their available models, I can quickly see why most organizations rarely look beyond the list of the names of the providers that they may readily recognize - say HP, EMC, IBM, HDS, NetApp and maybe Dell and Sun.

If an organization just limits itself to those seven providers, it already has over 60 different models from which to choose. If it attempts to factor in every other provider that offers a midrange array product, the list of providers quickly grows to over 20 and the number of midrange array models to over 130.

But in many respects, building the list of storage providers and their available models this is the easy part. More difficult is creating a list of which features matter on each storage system, which ones may matter in the future and then weighting each of these features appropriately. Needless to say, I could find no guidelines from anyone on how to weight these different features or how to prioritize which ones mattered and when.

That is part of what I intend to accomplish with this report: objectively build a report that covers as many midrange arrays as possible, rate them and then recognize the winners in different categories.

The key here is developing a list that is "objective" and still try to pay its bills. (Yes, DCIG does have people to pay and does not provide "free" coverage.) So I called and spoke to a number of contacts that I have in the industry as to how to best accomplish this and here is some of the feedback I received.

First, one individual told me that another analyst who attempted something like this in the past had to rate almost all of the products that he/she evaluated with a high ranking. The analyst was forced to do this because he/she planned to sell the report to the providers. However the providers would only buy it if the analyst rated their product well (a 9 or better on a 10 point scale).

So to get the sale and sidestep the issue, apparently the analyst gave many of the products a "9.X" rating. In this way, the providers would buy the reports but the real product rating on each feature was subtly embedded in the "X" after the 9. Needless to say, this made everyone a winner except the end-user who, unless they perceived the subtleties of the rating system, was just as much in the dark as before.

Another interesting tidbit I turned up was that many storage providers are very frustrated by the lack of transparency behind analyst reports. While I certainly respect the right of any analyst firm to keep its evaluation method private, in this day and age I have found that the more transparency that is provided, the more credibility the reports tend to have.

A prime example of a report that some are starting to question is the value of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I was just looking at the November 2009 Midrange Array report and it shows about 20 midrange array providers in the quadrant but provides little information on any of the individual midrange array models. Further, how Gartner ranks the providers is some what of a mystery to everyone.

Water cooler chatter isn't helping Gartner in this matter any either. I recently talked to one individual who allegedly was sitting behind a Gartner analyst during a vendor presentation and who saw the analyst dragging and dropping dots on the quadrant during the presentation. Whether or not that quadrant was ever published or if that story is even accurate, I do not know. But what is disconcerting is the fact that the story sounds plausible because of how its reports are constructed.

Having now done my preliminary research and talked to a number of people as to how to best evaluate these different midrange arrays, I believe I have arrived at a method where all midrange array providers are treated fairly and scored appropriately. I will plan to provide more information on how my research is progressing as I continue to compile my report, alert everyone when this midrange array buyers guide is available for purchase, share in the report once it is published how conclusions were arrived at and announce the winners as the date approaches.

Have a good weekend everyone and I look forward to talking to you again next week.

Point, Click, Recover: Cloud-based DR has Arrived

2010-02-02T11:00:00Z

At the conclusion of a recent call I had with Rob Tellone, the CEO of vBC Cloud, he asked me, "What do you consider the difference between business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR)?" I gave him my definition of each but then went on to explain to him that on the business side of the house no one really cares about the definition of either BC or DR. At the end of the day, all they care about is how quickly and cost effectively IT can bring the affected parts of their business back online regardless of the scope of the incident.

As simple as recovery sounds, bringing a business back online has proved incredibly elusive as barriers to doing it run the gamut. It may require a dedicated off-site location, proper hardware and software and people properly trained to run and manage the site. Then even for those organizations that take all of these steps, they still may not be able to recover all their applications. If you combine that with today's tighter budgets and lower tolerances for any type of outage, it's clear that companies have to reconsider how they've been addressing this challenge.

Case in point is a Fortune 500 data center at which I recently worked. It had thousands of AIX, Linux, Sun Solaris and Windows servers in production and there was no way it could possibly recover all of them despite having a dedicated off-site DR facility. All it could recover was the most mission-critical applications and, even then, those could take up to a week to recover.

Everyone in the company who was in the know knew that to successfully do a recovery, the stars had to almost perfectly align. They hoped they had selected the right applications to recover, all of the application data required to do the recovery would need to be accessible, and the people needed to do the recovery had to drop everything else they were doing to come in and perform the recovery. Then even if this all went off like clockwork, it still took days to do this base line recovery. This was more than enough time for the business to potentially fail, anger current customers and shake investor confidence.

The disconcerting part is that this organization's DR plan was better than most. This was a financially stable organization staffed by a relatively sophisticated IT staff putting in place the best solution that it could afford at that time.

This brings me back to the conversation I had with Rob at vBC Cloud. Over the last year and a half while at the helm of vBC Cloud, he has been working to build a cloud-based DR offering that does NOT require organizations:

To virtualize their entire environment
To build a dedicated disaster recovery (DR) site
To buy any hardware or software
Dedicate staff to manage and run it
Take months or years to implement it

Rather, vBC Cloud has taken software from a number of providers including the likes of InMage and done its own custom programming to streamline the deployment and implementation of its software. Now vBC Cloud can deliver to its customers either DR or BC in the form of software as a service (SaaS). As a result, vBC Cloud enables its subscribing customers to:

Protect applications on either physical or virtual machines
Implement a viable DR plan in as quickly as two weeks (or less)
Recover from any type of disaster regardless of its scope
Transparently recover individual application(s) within minutes
Recover application(s) without any data loss

IT continues to wrangle over the definition of BC and DR but all that business owners ultimately care about is recovering some or all of their applications as quickly, inexpensively and effectively as possible. Until recently, achieving this type of recovery was simply not feasible.

vBC Cloud's decision to leverage cloud computing and combine technologies from providers like InMage, 3PAR, VMware and others is resulting in dramatic changes in how companies think about performing application recoveries. So whether they are recovering a file that was corrupted 10 minutes ago, an application server that had a hardware failure or recovering an entire data center that is a smoking hole, vBC Cloud provides organizations access to a DR and BC solution that makes application recovery in the cloud a point-and-click operation.

CommVault Takes another Step towards Bringing Cloud Storage Down to Earth

2010-02-01T13:00:00Z

Just a few years ago disk-based backup was considered the cutting edge of backup. No more as cloud storage is now all the rage. However a cloud-based backup strategy that works or using cloud storage for archival data is still the exception, not the rule. This is why CommVault's announcement today regarding its new cloud storage connector merits attention for those organizations looking to make cloud storage a viable part of their corporate data management strategy.

Using a public cloud storage provider such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Nirvanix SDN, Iron Mountain's ASP or EMC Atmos as a disk-based archival or backup target sounds great on many levels to organizations. Organizations do not have to build their own disk-based backup infrastructure; they can scale out storage capacity as required; the headaches of managing and supporting the storage infrastructure belong to the third party cloud storage provider; and, they only pay for as much storage capacity as they consume.

If anything, cloud storage sounds like the perfect complement to a data management solution like CommVault® Simpana® software. Since Simpana software compresses, encrypts and optionally deduplicates data before it stores it, using cloud storage as an archival and backup target seems to be a logical next step.

However storing data to a public cloud storage solution has three specific obstacles that a solution like CommVault needs to be prepared to address:

Access the public storage cloud via the Internet. Most data management solutions only recognize and support NAS or VTL interfaces. Accessing a public storage cloud requires going though an HTTP interface.
Requires support for each public storage cloud provider's REST API. To traverse corporate firewalls and manage data stored in the storage cloud, the REST API has emerged as the preferred way to deliver this functionality since it runs as part of HTTP. However each public storage cloud provider implements its own version of the REST API since no standard exists.
Avoiding public cloud storage vendor lock-in. Storing data with a public storage cloud provider carries certain inherent risks. The amount of data stored with a provider may grow to the point where an organization wants to move the data from a public storage cloud to a lower priced competitor or even wants to move to a private storage cloud that they implement in-house. This requires the solution to support the REST API from multiple storage cloud providers in order to have this level of flexibility available.

This is what makes today's new cloud storage connector from CommVault of note. Using this new connector, CommVault Simpana users can detect and connect to public storage cloud offerings such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Nirvanix SDN as easily as any other disk-based backup targets. And, customers will be able to take advantage of the cloud connector for cloud storage services from EMC and Iron Mountain at a future date.

Future support for REST APIs of other public and private cloud providers will hinge on how each provider has implemented it. If they are similar in nature to the ones it already supports, support for them could be added rather quickly while others that possess properties that significantly differ will take longer to add. In either case, CommVault's intentions to continue supporting more cloud storage providers - public or private - are important since it addresses consumers concerns about public storage cloud vendor lock-in and gives organizations the cloud storage flexibility they are certain to need in the future.

CommVault's approach to adding this new storage cloud connector to Simpana is also clearly inline with how it has brought previous features to market. It does not require complex upgrades or administrators to do extensive scripting to make it work. Rather CommVault customers with active maintenance contracts can download the latest CommVault service pack, license this feature and immediately use it to begin backing up data to any of the public cloud storage providers currently supported by CommVault.

Using cloud storage as a disk-based backup target is emerging as the next "Big" thing in data protection. But bringing cloud storage down to earth and making it easy for organizations to use as a backup target has remained somewhat elusive and difficult for end-users to implement. But my making it an optional add-on to the current Simpana product line, eliminating any requirements for scripting on the part of end-users and provide connectivity to multiple cloud storage providers, CommVault goes a long way towards moving cloud storage from hype to practical opportunity and perhaps pave the path for a new tier of "far line" storage as well.

Values Exposed at The BDEvent: A New Era in Data Storage is Dawning

2010-01-29T11:00:00Z

Anyone who has ever witnessed a disaster knows that one of two things can happen. Either the area affected by the disaster can be devastated, never to recover; or, new life can spring up in its place. In many respect, the economic disaster that hit the entire nation and world hit the data storage industry equally hard. However the data storage industry is picking itself back up and, based upon what I saw and heard this week at The BDEvent in Palo Alto, CA, it has brought an end to one era in data storage while the dawn of another is now upon us.

This past week I had the opportunity to attend the three (3) day BDEvent, a conference that specifically facilitates business-to-business networking for those individuals and organizations in the data storage and electronically stored information (ESI) industries. While it is a relatively small gathering (~150 people), it is one of those conferences where almost all of those in attendance are regularly engaged in off-the-record conversations.

That said, there were enough on-the-record comments and presentations made during the course of the event that I can reference them in this week's recap blog. In fact, the analogy that I used at the outset of this blog came directly from some comments made by Dave Hitz, NetApp Founder and EVP, during the event's closing presentation.

His analogy pretty well summarized what I had been thinking during the course of the event: a new era in data storage is dawning. Technologies that met customer needs and budgets as recently as a couple of years ago are now viewed as inadequate, inefficient and no longer cost effective. Further, some technologies that have been incubating for years and quietly developing extensive user bases are coming out of the woodwork because of their value proposition. There were three that I specifically wanted to highlight who were in attendance at this event.

First is Coraid. It is a storage array provider that I covered some years ago for Storage magazine in a Trends article but have heard nothing from this company since. However there was Coraid's CEO Kevin Brown at the conference who explained that Coraid had now grown to the point where it had approximately 1100 customers.

Not 10 or 50 customers, mind you, but 1100. That's remarkable considering that the knock on Coraid then and now is that it uses a non-standard Ethernet networking protocol - ATA over Ethernet (AoE) - which is not used by anyone else (at least to the best of my knowledge)

The upside of using this protocol (which is delivered via an OS driver supplied by Coraid) is that you get all of the benefits and speeds of a FC SAN while only needing to put in place an Ethernet network. Since AoE is a layer 2 Ethernet protocol, it does not introduce all of the overhead of TCP/IP so companies can use the Ethernet cards that are embedded in servers and take full advantage of 1 Gb and 10 Gb Ethernet networks.

Now, granted, the use of AoE as a non-standard network protocol could be a barrier to adoption but for the 1100 customers using Coraid, they do not seem to care. As long as Coraid continues to give its customers a good value for the money, meets their application needs and does not try to take advantage of them, their customers probably could not care less whether the protocol is a standard or not.

Ocarina Networks is another company that is adapting to new demands from its customers. Originally it started out doing post-process deduplication of large image files (JPGs, MPEGs, etc.) that had been dormant for 30 days or more - great stuff! But now its customers and even OEMs (Ocarina did not say who) are coming to it and asking for it to do end-to-end data deduplication from primary disk to backup disk without ever reconstructing it. After all, once the data it deduplicated on primary storage, why reconstruct it to then deduplicate it again when it is backed up?

But here's the rub - no one was running around at this conference asking "Where is the deduplication standard?" No one was crying foul because SNIA or IEEE or whoever had not yet finalized a deduplication standard. The reason no one has - aside from the fact everyone else is guilty of the same transgression - is that deduplication saves customers money and solves real world problem. So again it was clear that customers do not care nearly as much about standards as they do about saving money and working with providers that they trust.

The third provider at this event that caught my eye was Netex. All we have heard over the last few years is that Riverbed is the best way to do WAN optimization using one of its Steelhead appliances. That's all fine and good but after talking to Netex, it appears it has come up with a better mousetrap. Rather than deploying a physical appliance that consumes additional rack space and power, Netex's HyperIP does the same things but it is deployed as a virtual appliance on an existing ESX server. This could give Netex a decided edge in competitive situations at a fraction of the cost of the Riverbed appliance.

Yet regardless of whether organizations use Riverbed or Netex, both are again delivering value as they accomplish approximately the same thing and neither one uses an optimization standard that is recognized or is supported by the other. However the customers they are supporting probably do not care about the standards, they only care about the business value that either of these technologies deliver as well as the upfront cost of obtaining the software.

These were not the only three that supported the thesis of my title. I saw emerging technologies from providers like ProStor Systems, Virsto Software, and Zetta that all re-enforce my belief that the dawn of a new era in storage is upon us. However it is not just the financial value that these companies are providing in terms of dollars saved that are contributing to their current success.

While that is part of it, they do not appear to be taking advantage of their customers and backing them into corners with exorbitant price hikes once they have them hooked on these non-standard platforms. So as long as they continue to treat them fairly both ethically and financially, why would their customers switch?

This brings me back to Dave Hitz's comments. He sees a new era in data storage and information management dawning right now for the reasons cited above. Yes, old ways no longer work so well. Yes, better technologies are emerging. But providers are being forced to become more transparent than ever before because of Web 2.0 outlets like blogs, forums, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter where, if a Tweet or a blog post goes viral, their credibility can grow or be instantly shot. This combination of factors is leading to rapid change in the storage environment - maybe even more quickly than I anticipated - and those users and providers that fail to recognize that this confluence of forces is occurring may be the next ones victimized by it.

NAS Gets the Nod over iSCSI as one SMB's Preferred Backup Protocol

2010-01-28T11:00:00Z

Some of the most read blogs on DCIG's website in 2009 covered how small and midsize businesses (SMBs) were implementing disk-based backup in their environments. So it should come as no surprise that individuals like Ken Clipperton, the Director of Information Technology at Midland Lutherans College (MLC), is also in the midst of implementing disk-based backup at MLC. What is unexpected are some of the decisions that he needs to make as he implements it at MLC.

In previous blogs, I examined what problems Ken was trying to solve by implementing a disk-based backup solution and what led him to select the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d over competing NAS solutions. However now that Ken is moving the ix4-200d into production, he is facing two important decisions.

One of them is deciding what type of backup target that he should offer to his end users. The ix4-200d supports iSCSI, NAS (CIFS and NFS) or both so he can present either a block-based or file-based backup target to his users. However each one has its pros and cons.

iSCSI enables his users to do backups more quickly since there is less network overhead associated with iSCSI than CIFS and NFS. However using iSCSI is somewhat problematic.

First, he has to pre-allocate each user a certain amount of storage. This eats into his available pool of storage capacity plus iSCSI arguable takes more to configure and manage.

Second, to access an iSCSI target, each user's PC has to have iSCSI installed on it. Since his users use a myriad of Windows operating systems (XP, Vista, Windows 7), this may require them to download and install the Microsoft iSCSI driver on their PCs and configure it to discover the iSCSI target presented by the ix4-200d. This makes it more complicated for users and may create support problems for his IT staff.

Finally, Ken has found in his preliminary testing that the Retrospect Express client that is included with the ix4-200d does not work particularly well when using iSCSI as a backup target.

It is for these reasons that he is leaning towards using a NAS interface as a backup target. Though it may result in slower backups, it does provide a number of distinctive benefits over iSCSI when used for backup.

File shares work better with the Retrospect Express backup software than iSCSI.
File shares take less time to setup and manage. He set up one file share as a backup target for students to use and another share that faculty and staff can use as a backup target.
He can leverage the ix4-200d's quota and security management features. Since the ix4-200d integrates with Active Directory, he can limit each student to a maximum of 20 GBs of storage capacity and the faculty and staff to a maximum of 50 GBs. Further, he can deny students access to the file share where faculty and staff data is backed up.

The other decision facing Ken is which backup software to recommend to his end-users. While he was initially planning on recommending that his users take advantage of the free Retrospect Express client licenses included with the ix4-200d, he is now having some second thoughts about that recommendation.

While the Retrospect Express client is free, easy to deploy and quickly discovers the file share presented by the ix4-200d during setup, he is somewhat concerned about its system overhead on Windows PCs. During his testing of Retrospect Express, he has found that it consumes 114 MB of RAM. This is more resources than he expected it would consume as it takes up even more memory than Microsoft Outlook which reserves 98 MB of RAM. This does not mean he will abandon Retrospect Express in favor of other backup software but it may preclude him from deploying it as widely as he had first anticipated.

Disk-based backup is becoming a priority among all size organizations as a solution to their backup problems and SMBs are pursuing it just as actively as anyone else. However as this example with MLC points out, the challenges that SMBs face can be just as complex as those encountered by enterprise organizations.

Solutions like the Iomege StorCenter ix4-200d certainly do make the implementation of disk-based backup fast and easy to implement. However SMBs still have to make decisions as to which interface they will use for disk-based backup and if the default backup software that ships with these solutions is appropriate for their environment. In the case of Ken, a NAS interface appears to be the right backup target for his users while he still tries to decide whether or not he should universally recommend Retrospect Express software to his end-users.

Nexsan Refreshes Dedupe SG to Address Next Gen SME Disk-based Backup Complexity

2010-01-27T11:00:00Z

I have heard it said that you cannot compare the complexity found in small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) to what is found in the "really big" enterprise shops. That is certainly true in some cases but when one starts to examine the complexity associated with backing up, recovering and managing data at the dozens of branch offices that many SMEs support, it equates to any challenge that large enterprises face. However it is this exact complexity that the new features on the Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 are designed to address.

As SMEs transition from using tape to disk as a primary backup target in their remote and branch offices, they quickly find out that using disk as a backup target is easier said than done. While it solves their day-to-day backup and recovery problems, new levels of complexity await, especially as it pertains to managing the solution and ensuring that it meets new demands for power, space and cost efficiency. These requirements include:

Appropriately sizing the storage capacity of the backup target at each site
Replicating the backup data to a central data center
Controlling what data is replicated
Scheduling when this replication occurs
Ensuring the solution maintains constant availability

No silver bullet may exist that hits on all of these challenges but the Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 comes pretty close to doing so. The Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0, which leverages version 2.0 of FalconStor's File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) as it deduplication engine, combines the new features found in FDS with its wide arrange of storage models and focus on delivering highly efficient storage systems to better tackle this next generation of disk-based backup challenges.

Since remote and branch offices each contain varying amounts of data to backup, Nexsan offers seven (7) different Dedupe SG models. Each one includes the new FDS 2.0 software though they come with different size storage repositories and optional 10 GbE interfaces.

The smallest unit, the DDSG-4, supports up to 80 TBs of logical data capacity (assuming a 20:1 deduplication factor) and is intended for use in the smallest of remote offices. At the other end of the spectrum, the DDSG-72 can scale up to 1.4 PBs of deduplicated data which puts it in the realm of enterprise solutions.

This range of Nexsan models gives organizations the option to place an appropriately sized appliance in each of their offices. Once in place, they can leverage the new features found in FDS 2.0 to address this aforementioned issues that disk-based backup creates.

For instance, one new feature that FalconStor added to FDS 2.0 was to increase its replication fan-in ratio from 32:1 to 150:1. This gives organizations using the Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 the flexibility to deploy appropriately sized SG models at their remote offices as backup targets and then replicate that data back to a larger Dedupe SG 2.0 model (say, the 26, 52, or 72 models) in the home office.

Another new feature that Dedupe SG 2.0 brings to the table is the ability to better control what data is replicated and when. It does this in a few ways. First, the Dedupe SG 2.0 can now globally deduplicate data so only new unique deduplicated chunks of data at remote sites are replicated back to the central site. This minimizes the amount of data sent which in turn decreases the amount of bandwidth that organizations need for replicating data to their remote site.

Second, Dedupe SG 2.0 users can select which files and/or folders that they want to replicate. It is conceivable and quite probable that all of the data backed up at a remote site will not need to be replicated back to a central data center. Using the new policy features found in Dedupe SG 2.0, users can optionally control at a very granular level which data at a remote site get replicated back to the central data center. In so doing, this can further save on network bandwidth requirements and minimize the size of the Dedupe SG 2.0 appliance needed at the main data center.

Third, Dedupe SG 2.0 now includes support for the NetBackup OpenStorage API (OST) protocol. While it is unlikely many remote offices use NetBackup, many do use Backup Exec. Since Symantec earlier this week announced support for OST in Backup Exec 2010, this will eventually make it possible for users to leverage either Backup Exec or NetBackup as the tool to set and manage these replication policies.

A final feature that Dedupe SG 2.0 brings to the table is high availability (HA). While HA is available on any Dedupe SG 2.0 model, one would expect users to select this option and deploy it in conjunction with the models that are located in their central data center to ensure it is constantly available as a target for backup and replication as well as a source for recovery.

The Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 continues to bring forward all of the features for which Nexsan's storage systems are historically known for - energy efficiency, space efficiency and high levels of reliability. But now coupled with the powerful new features found in FDS, the Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 clearly is well-positioned to address and solve these complex issues that next generation disk-based backup introduces and which many SMEs face.

3PAR Introduces a Dose of Reality into Virtual Data Center Management

2010-01-26T11:00:00Z

The benefits of virtualization - server or storage - start to loose some of their shine as organizations come to grips with the reality of actually managing a virtualized environment. As the move from implementation to management, the hidden issues of managing virtualized environments become clearly exposed. It is for these reasons that storage providers like 3PAR are more tightly integrating their InServ Storage Servers with VMware's vCenter Server management console to provide better management of virtual data centers.

Transitioning to a virtualized environment creates new requirements for the effective management of the underlying storage resources that are virtualized. This can become a challenge as many storage management tools were built for physical environments which make them of only marginal assistance when managing a virtualized environment.

Storage and system administrators are then left with an incomplete view into how physical resources in the virtual environment are used which creates knowledge and visibility gaps. These gaps result in:

Increases in the amount of time and effort required to manage the environment
The inability to definitively associate storage resources with specific virtual machines (VMs)
The creation of complex, error-prone manual processes that try to do these virtual-to-physical mappings

Developed in part to help eliminate these types of issues, VMware vCenter Server provides an open plug-in architecture that supports the addition of new functionality from VMware and its partners. Through vCenter Server APIs, VMware's partners can give VMware administrators new ability to manage their virtual and physical infrastructure through the vCenter console.

It is integration with these vCenter APIs that 3PAR announced yesterday. 3PAR's new plug-in for vCenter Server provides an integrated view of individual VMs and the storage resources associated with them. In so doing, it bridges this visibility gap that exists in virtualized environments and provides a complete end-to-end mapping that graphically illustrates exactly what storage resources are associated with individual VMs.

Since all of 3PAR's T-Class and F-Class storage servers support thin provisioning, 3PAR's vCenter plug-in enables administrators to, at-a-glance, determine whether a LUN assigned to a VM is 'Fat' or 'Thin'. Then if it is a "Thin' LUN, VMware administrators can see what storage resources a given VM or VMDK is actually consuming as well as document the storage savings that they are achieving, an excellent benefit for those responsible for charge back of a "slice" of the virtualized environment back to users.

3PAR's integration with vCenter also opens the door for 3PAR to introduce new management functionality which it promptly did in the form of VMware Recovery Manager. While 3PAR has supported snapshot functionality on its InServ storage servers for some time, storage administrators had to set up and schedule snapshots to occur from the 3PAR management interface. By integrating with vCenter, 3PAR extends these snapshot setup and scheduling capabilities so they can be performed by VMware administrators within vCenter.

The benefits of the 3PAR-vCenter integration go beyond just providing a convenient central management interface for administrators. By using vCenter as the platform to configure these snapshots, VMware administrators can also take consistent snapshots of the VM. Since vCenter is scheduling the snapshots on the 3PAR storage server, it first pauses the application on the VM so that the snapshot created is a restorable image of the application on the VM.

This integration reduces recovery management within VMware to almost a point-and-click operation. All VMware administrators essentially now need to do within vCenter is select the VM they wish to recover and they can essentially bring that VM back online rapidly. While there are a couple of other steps that administrators have to do once that step is done, these all can be done through vCenter.

If anything, possibly the biggest challenge that organizations may face is how to best internally administer this functionality. Often there is a dividing line, spoken or unspoken, between what tasks server and storage administrators perform. By making all of this functionality available from the vCenter console such that a single administrator can perform them, organizations need to give some thought to how they best want it administered. But probably better to have this choice than not having this functionality available at all.

The creation of virtual data centers is a new reality that many organizations are now in the process of putting in place. But once they are in place, the new reality of managing these virtualized environments immediately confronts them.

3PAR's integration with vCenter and its new Recovery Manager feature provides a dose of reality in today's world that many administrators are seeking out. vCenter already gives them the foundational platform to manage their virtual environments through a single console. Now with 3PAR's advanced integration with vCenter, they get a comprehensive view into both physical and virtual infrastructures, an end-to-end mapping of their virtualized environment, and a new tool that enables them to schedule the snapshots and provide rapid recoveries of individual VMs on their own.

Archiving, Deduplication and Virtualization Take Center Stage in Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7

2010-01-25T11:00:00Z

Small, mid-sized and large enterprises are not the only ones looking to consolidate and simplify their IT management to create more cohesive management solutions. In the last few years, Symantec has been taking many of the same steps to integrate components of its Backup Exec, Enterprise Vault and NetBackup product suites to deliver solutions appropriate for the different size organizations that it serves. The progress that it has made in delivering on these ideals is reflected in today's Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 product releases.

One of the real strengths of Symantec's portfolio of information management products is that it has a solution for every size business. For example:

Backup Exec System Recovery is intended for small organizations with 10 - 99 employees, 1-4 Windows servers and no IT staff.
Backup Exec is intended for mid-sized organizations with 100 - 999 employees that have 3 - 100 Windows servers and 1 or 2 IT staff
NetBackup and Enterprise Vault are intended for organizations with 500+ employees, 50 or more servers of any OS type, specialized backup teams and a data center

The challenge that Symantec has taken on in the last few years is porting the best features from each of these products to the others. In the process, its goal was to still keep Backup Exec easy to implement and manage when ensuring that NetBackup continued to deliver the rich set of features that enterprise organizations demand and need. Today's releases of Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 do a pretty good job on both accounts.

Of the two products, Backup Exec 2010 probably received the larger makeover. One major improvement it made was pulling in both NetBackup's PureDisk and OpenStorage API (OST) technologies. These features now give Backup Exec users the option to use deduplication on the client, on the media server or manage deduplicated data on an external deduplication appliance.

Possibly the slickest part about this new deduplication feature is its licensing. Users only need to purchase a single deduplication license to get deduplication everywhere, meaning at the client, media server and support for hardware partners via OST. This helps them in two ways.

First, if users can efficiently and effectively deduplicate data on either the client or the Backup Exec media server, they are all set. However there might be those organizations that are using Backup Exec to protect large database servers where client-based or media server-based deduplication is not a best fit and they need a deduplication appliance.

In these scenarios, Backup Exec's inclusion of the OST functionality as part of its deduplication license allows organizations to immediately support these deduplication appliances. Using this new OST feature, Backup Exec users can manage catalogs on these appliances and may even see faster backups depending on the level of the integration that exists between Backup Exec and the backup appliance.

Backup Exec 2010 will initially offer OST support for deduplication appliances from both ExaGrid and Quantum with OST support for other deduplication appliances in the pipeline. However users should note that just because Symantec deduplication license includes OST support, an additional OST license may be needed from the deduplication appliance provider depending on the appliance selected.

The other significant enhancement that Symantec makes to Backup Exec 2010 is the introduction of Unified Archiving. In 2010, Symantec ports the email and file archiving capabilities from Enterprise Vault and includes these as an optional feature within Backup Exec. If this option is selected and licensed, users can now archive either email messages on their Exchange server or files on protected client servers.

To do the archiving, the Unified Archive option leverages its integration with Backup Exec 2010 in two ways to do the data archiving. First, as data is backed up by the Backup Exec client, it takes data from that backup and moves it into the archive vault, indexing it as it occurs. This avoids any performance impact on the server since the data only need to be pulled from it once. Second, once the data is archived, the Backup Exec client is then leveraged again to schedule the deletion of the archived messages on the Exchange server and the archived files on the file server.

Organizations should note, however, that the introduction of Unified Archiving into Backup Exec is not the full-blown Enterprise Archive software. Rather, it has been tailored to meet the specific needs of mid-sized organizations. So if they need to do eDiscovery, satisfy external compliance requirements or archive data from another email platform such as Lotus Domino, then they will still need the full Enterprise Vault product. However the upside is that Symantec did include an upgrade path from Unified Archiving to Enterprise Vault so they can start with optional feature in Backup Exec 2010 and then upgrade to Enterprise Vault if needed later on.

The final major new feature that Symantec added to Backup Exec 2010 was improved support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. While Backup Exec 12.5 already supported these OSes, Backup Exec 2010 better leverages its Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) to do single pass backups and granular recoveries of VMs that host Active Directory (AD), Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server applications. This integration enables organizations to recover individual email messages or AD objects without first having to recover the entire database.

The other news from Symantec today concerns the latest release of NetBackup 7 which also extends the ability to deduplication to the client server.

In a fashion similar to Backup Exec 2010, NetBackup delivers improved support for virtual operating systems per the ways referenced earlier. However one key differentiator between it and Backup Exec 2010 is that it can identify 'dead' or 'unused' blocks in VMDK images. By identifying these blocks, it can avoid backing them up which Symantec claims can reduce backup capacity amounts by up to 40%.

Another improvement that Symantec made concerns its NetBackup RealTime CDP product. Like PureDisk, RealTime was already an option in NetBackup but with NetBackup 7, it adds replication to RealTime's feature set. Also, as a way to encourage prospective customers to adopt this feature, it is for a time including free NetBackup catalog shipping as a way to introduce and promote RealTime's replication feature.

In the past few years, Symantec has made it no secret that it intends to better leverage the features found in its individual products more fully across its entire information management portfolio. Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 clearly reflect those efforts. However it is Backup Exec 2010 and mid-sized organizations that are the clear beneficiaries of this latest round of product releases from Symantec. The addition of archiving, deduplication and better support for server virtualization should provide current Backup Exec users plenty of reasons to upgrade and prospective users new reasons to consider Backup Exec as their preferred data management platform.

Disaster Proof Hardware and a Case of Mistaken Cloud Storage

2010-01-22T11:00:00Z

This week it was evident everyone is getting back to work - at least those individuals who still have jobs and received something other than pink slips over the holiday break. People started returning my phone calls and emails, PR agencies reached out to me requesting my time for briefings and, maybe most importantly, news releases started flowing again so I have something other than 2009 recaps and 2010 trends to write about. This week three news items caught my attention: FalconStor Software's FDS 2.0 release; a cloud storage announcement from Pillar Data Systems and a new term (like this industry needed any more): Disaster Proof Hardware.

First, I want to talk about the release of the FalconStor FDS 2.0 software. Well, actually I talked about that a couple of days ago in another blog I wrote so what I actually want to discuss is the ramifications of that software release and FalconStor's expanding relationship with Nexsan Technologies.

It is an understatement to say that every deduplication provider in the space - hardware or software - has EMC/Data Domain squarely in their sights. FalconStor is no exception and many of the features that FalconStor introduced as part of FDS 2.0 are clearly intended to give EMC/Data Domain a run for their money.Falconstor's increase in the FDS 2.0 replication fan-in ratio (now 150:1 up from 32:1) and new integration with Symantec's NetBackup OpenStorage API clearly were needed to keep it on even footing with Data Domain.

However FDS 2.0's release is notable in two important ways. First, by introducing high availability (HA), it recognizes the growing importance of HA in disk-based backup solutions. Obviously, every site does not need an HA solution but some sites - like the site that serves as the replication target for all of the other remote sites - probably need better than two 9's of uptime. This is one of the first disk-based backup solutions in this market segment that offers this feature functionality.

The other feature that it incorporates is recognizing that not all data at remote sites needs to be replicated back to the main site. Granted, this means users have to somewhat engage their brains and can no longer just click the big red "Replication" button when backing up data (well, actually, I don't think the button is red on the FalconStor configuration screen and you can still replicate all of the data on the remote appliance if you want). However, the point I am trying to make is that if you have bandwidth issues between the remote site and the main site or you want to try to control your storage capacity growth at the main site, FDS 2.0 now gives you the opportunity to do it.

This more granular management control and new features like HA in disk-based backup solutions is what I was referring to last Friday when I started talking about disk-based backup 2.0 being one of the trends of 2010. Companies are figuring out that disk coupled with deduplication and replication are just the first steps in implementing disk-based backup.

All those three technologies do is result in successful backups and get the data offsite. But now that you have these copies of data, how are you going to optimally manage them and effectively use them for other purposes? Since IT employees are no longer spending half of their work weeks tracking down what went wrong with last night's backup because they are now succeeding on a regular basis, they can start to do tasks that add more value to the organization.

I also briefly wanted to touch on the growing alliance between FalconStor and Nexsan. As anyone who is close to the storage industry knows, a number of storage providers use FalconStor's software in some capacity for data protection including the likes of EMC, IBM and Sun. However, FalconStor's relationship with Nexsan merits special attention because of what it means for both of them.

First, Nexsan sells exclusively into the channel and with EMC's acquistion of Data Domain, this creates the opportunity for Nexsan to access some reseller accounts in which it may not have previously had a presence.

Second, Nexsan has a solid midrange system that, in talking to its users, they find more efficient and reliable than midrange systems from their better known competitors - namely IBM, HP and EMC. However getting a foothold in customers accounts without one of these three letter names behind them can still be a challenge. By partnering with FalconStor and making it available in the form of its Nexsan Dedupe SG, Nexsan can now compete in accounts whereas they otherwise may have been on the outside looking in.

All told, everyone is saying that in the midrange deduplication appliance one should keep their eyes on ExaGrid and Quantum as EMC/Data Domain competitors but, frankly, Nexsan and FalconStor have quietly built themselves a nice little solution for SMBs that may have them nipping at the heels of these other players in the space sooner than later.

On an unrelated note, this week I also spoke to Pillar (which also resells FalconStor) about their new Axiom Slammer Series 2 that was announced this. Yet what caught my attention was another Pillar press release that it put out regarding the "Solid Cloud" offering from one of its resellers, Eagle Business Solutions.

Now when I read that press release, at least the first line of it, I wasn't sure what to make of it. It reads, "Eagle Business Solutions introduced today a cloud-based solution that combines the highly-efficient Pillar Axiom storage system ..." and I stopped right there. When I read a cloud-based storage solution, I could not figure out what that meant - a private cloud, a public cloud, or some combination of both.

In talking to Pillar yesterday, they straightened me out and explained that Eagle Business was talking about building a private cloud-based solution using the Pillar Axiom. However users need to be on their guard when talking to any midrange array providers who start throwing the "cloud storage" term around. Cloud storage can mean just about anything and, with this space changing as fast as it is, what a storage provider meant 2 or 3 months ago when it used the term may have totally changed when you talk to them again.

Finally, I had a really great chat yesterday with Robb Moore, the CEO of ioSafe. For those of you unfamiliar with ioSafe, on the surface it does something very basic - provides users with an external drive called the ioSafe Solo. I know - big whoop - everyone and their brother does that.

However, here is what makes this product worthy of mention. I use Mozy Backup to protect my home PC and I have come to hate it.

Yes, I know I have been a long time proponent of online backup but I am constantly downloading huge PDFs, getting 10 GB PPTs from every storage vendor under the sun and saving all of that stuff to my hard drive. So when poor little Mozy goes to back it up, it has a minor coronary. So I had resigned myself to adopting some sort of disk-based backup scheme and dealing with the headache of shuttling disks off site and storing my backup data somewhere offsite.

Using ioSafe's appliance, I don't have to do that. ioSafe is part of an emerging generation of disaster proof hardware that is designed to withstand most natural disasters that might occur in my home office such as dumping coffee on my PC, my youngest son throwing a ball at me and hitting my computer instead, even a house fire started by my faulty wiring in my dishwasher (don't laugh, that happened just a few months ago which GE replaced it for free - thanks GE!).

The beauty of ioSafe is that I can now backup locally and don't have to worry about taking my backups offsite since it will withstand most natural and man-made disasters. While Rob cautioned me not to expect the ioSafe Solo to survive a direct nuclear hit or a drop from a 5-story building, I don't have any immediate plans to get nuked or take it along with me on a swan dive from a high rise building in Omaha so I think I am covered.

In any case, because I was looking to buy something like this anyway, Rob is sending me one. That means sometime in the near future I will do a write-up on it which you can read about at that time on DCIG's website. (Don't worry - I'll disclose it is a pay to play blog but that's what DCIG does anyway. If that causes anyone any heartburn, you can contact the owner of DCIG and he can take it up with me.)

Well, that's it for my musings and observations this week. Next week I am off to Palo Alto, CA, to hobnob at The BDEvent with the storage elite - Steve Duplessie, Stephen Fosket, Dave Vallente, George Crump, Deni Connor and, yes, even the illustrious Curtis W Preston will be there gracing us all with his presence - so expect a blog or two next week based upon my observations and thoughts while in attendance.

DCIG highlighed in "The Spectrum of Vendor Blogs" by Stephen Foskett

2010-01-22T03:35:09Z

"Above-board examples like DCIG do an excellent job of providing solid content along with sponsor-oriented paragraphs."

The Spectrum of Vendor Blogs

FalconStor FDS Delivers on the New Prerequisites of Disk-based Backup 2.0

2010-01-20T11:00:00Z

Right now deduplication and replication are the two main features seen as critical to delivering on the promise of disk-based backup. But as organizations store more of their backup data to disk, they are quickly realizing that other features are required to successfully execute on the redesign of their backup infrastructures. Specifically, companies with numerous remote offices are finding that systems availability and data management cannot be overlooked in their disk-based backup redesigns and is what today's release of FalconStor's File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) 2.0 is intended to address.

It is no secret that deduplication and replication are becoming inextricable linked with disk-based backup. But as organizations deploy disk-based backup in conjunction with deduplication and replication, they are finding that it is not quite enough to solve all of their problems. Disk solves their immediate tactical problems of successfully completing backups more quickly; deduplication reduces their backup data stores; and, replication moves the backup data offsite. But as organizations scale out these solutions, they are encountering new challenges with managing and recovering this data.

Two specific concerns that have emerged include:

The availability of the disk-based backup solution. Many disk-based backup solutions are based upon single controller architectures that keep the upfront costs associated with disk-based backup low in remote and branch office. However when replicating this backup data to a central target, this target needs to remain constantly available both to receive the incoming replicated data and be ready to act as a standby unit should an appliance in a remote or brand office go off-line.
Better centralized management of the backup data. As organizations centralize their data repositories in these remote offices, they are finding that it is not a requirement that they replicate all of the data at these sites to a central site. Further, managing what data is replicated and when it is replicated often becomes the responsibility of someone in the main office. This calls for the solution to include policies that can perform these tasks.

Addressing these specific user concerns is what FDS 2.0 is designed to do. To increase the availability and scalability of FDS, FalconStor took a two-pronged approach.

First, FalconStor increased the replication fan-in ratio of FDS from 32:1 to 150:1. This was done to meet the requirements of some of its customers that had over 100 remote and branch offices and wanted to replicate that data back to a central site.

These same customers also wanted high availability for the FalconStor FDS solution deployed at their central site to ensure replication and recovery at the remote sites could occur without interruption. To accommodate that requirement, an FDS appliance can now be configured with two highly available controller nodes.

This new high-availability feature on FDS 2.0 also has another application: ensuring that the backup windows of large capacity, highly available database applications are met. One of the problems of using disk-based backups for these applications is that if the backup appliance fails, so does the application's backup. By using this new high availability feature, organizations can mitigate the possibility of these backup failures occurring.

Backup software defaults may need to be increased to account for the failover time of the FDS appliance or the backup jobs put into a queue so they can restart and pick up where they left off after a failover. In either case, the possibility for backup job failures is minimized while negating the need for someone to come onsite or login and restart the backup job remotely.

The other major improvement that FDS 2.0 brings forward is improved management of the backup data. FDS 2.0 now integrates with the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API (OST) protocol so organizations with NetBackup can use it to control and manage replication of data, even down to what backup jobs are replicated between sites.

Those sites that do not have NetBackup can still take advantage of these more granular policy management features for data movement and replication using FDS. FDS includes its own central management console so these policies can be setup and administered for all FDS appliances under its management. In so doing, FDS 2.0 empowers administrators to specify which files and folders that they want to replicate which contributes to minimizing the bandwidth and storage capacity consumed while enabling centralized management of backup data.

All size organizations are moving towards disk based backup but, as they do so, are finding deduplication and replication are alone not enough to ensure a seamless transition from tape to disk. This is leading to disk-based backup product moving to 2.0 offerings that add higher fan-in ratios, higher availability and improved management capabilities such as what the new FalconStor FDS 2.0 offers. In the process, it addresses new user requirements for making the implementation and management of disk-based backup a more automated process to successfully execute upon.

Put the ROI of Deduplication and Replication into a Broader Business Context

2010-01-19T11:00:00Z

An article that appeared back in 2009 on the Forbes website commented on the questions that executive management teams are asking about proposals that they are receiving from their IT departments. Their uncertainty is probably only heightened when their IT departments bring forward a proposal that recommends a seemingly new process that involves the deployment of lesser understood technologies like deduplication and replication.

The author of this Forbes article attended an Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) panel in April 2009 that featured executives from a number of companies. During the presentation, the executives stated they wanted to see their IT departments present them with proposals that demonstrated a return on investment (ROI). However they were concerned that these proposals included technology that was just a new toy for the IT department and did not have much business value.

While the economic climate appears to be improving in 2010, their concerns about their inability to understand the business benefits of new technology still apply. They recognize they need to innovate but, they want proposals that address two key business concerns:

Solutions must be executed as part of a broader plan. Companies are often facing problems that span across departments and locations. Proposals that just focus on a specific problem without explaining how they fit into a broader context of what the company is trying to accomplish are not prioritized.
Companies are too complex for sweeping changes. Technologies have to be explained in the context of how they can be implemented in the least disruptive way while proving their benefit. To accomplish that, the proposal should include an explanation of how it can transform fundamental, long standing operations in the company while lowering costs, leveraging current investments, and increasing revenue.

These comments provide some insight into how IT needs to respond and position new data protection technologies such as deduplication and replication in their proposals to executive management. These two technologies are now regularly being proposed as they most effectively address both of the aforementioned concerns.

By dramatically reducing redundant data, deduplication allows for more cost effective short-term backup on high performance disk and complements long-term tape based backup by reducing media requirements to achieve optimal ROI. This allows for a gradual change in architecture while improving results.

Secondly, for companies with distributed environments, replication brings it all together by allowing tape replacement in remote sites and consequently reducing costly media and IT staffing requirements. This demonstrates an impact to a company's broader business strategy and will appeal to top level decision makers.

Those who have already implemented these two technologies with products such as Quantum's DXi-Series of deduplication appliances have compelling results to share:

Deduplication has no impact on backup success rates to disk. Backup to disk (whether or not backup data is deduplicated) results in backup success rates that climb to 99% or more with both backups and recoveries occurring more quickly.
Backup data is conducive to deduplication. Backups contain a great deal of duplicate data which makes deduplication especially well suited for backup. This can be even more dramatic when backing up virtualized environments. According to a 2009 survey conducted by Quantum of its DXi-Series customers, those users that deduplicated their data saw real reductions in disk usage of 90% or more. This resulted in them spending 48% less on tape media for long term retention.
Deduplication coupled with replication minimizes the costs and inefficiences associated with distributed backup environments. Many companies face the challenge of having multiple sites with inconsistent and costly backup infrastructures. By deploying deduplication appliances in remote or branch offices and replicating back to a main data center, those challenges are solved.

Companies can then focus their most costly IT staff at the main office and automate backups in other locations. This also eliminates the need for media handling in those locations.

This is why deduplication and replication complement each other so nicely. Since deduplication first reduces the size of the data store, advanced replication solutions such as the Quantum DXi-Series only send changed blocks to the target. This can reduce costly network bandwidth requirements by a factor of 20.

Deduplication and replication demonstrate ROI in multiple ways. This same Quantum survey found that their customers lowered their off-site vaulting costs by 32%, reduced their tape recall costs by 97% and spent 63% less time managing backup. At the same time, these same users increased their backup speeds by 125% and reduced the number of failed backups by 87%.

Organizations can still leverage their investment in tape. Tape's roll in the organization is changing. While disk is assuming this new role of short to medium term protection, using tape for long term storage and to meet compliance requirements in main offices and DR sites is still the most viable and cost-effective method. It also allows organizations to leverage their previous investment in tape as part of a more balanced backup solution.

Executive managers are looking to buy new technologies that show an ROI and improve business processes but they also want to understand what it is they are buying, what benefits it will provide and how they can best leverage what they already own. As they do, they are bound to encounter proposals from providers that promise improved end user experiences and projected savings. Quantum takes that a step further by offering ROI services and content that take the customers specific requirements into account and quantify the benefits and cost savings executive management can and should expect when its solution is deployed.

Subtle Storage Trends for 2010

2010-01-15T11:00:00Z

Right now on Yahoo finance it is counting down what it considers the top 10 tech trends for 2010. However some of the trends that it is including in its top 10 are so broad in their definition that when it lists 'Data Centers' as its #2 trend and then identifies nearly every technology company in the space as being part of this trend, you have to question just how real this trend is? The list of what I consider the more subtle storage trends of 2010 will be a bit more specific in terms of what features, products, services and/or vendor alliances are taking place that support these theories.

Disclaimer: The trends listed here are in no particular order other than I see far more interest in these technologies among end-users than I do in them re-introducing tape as their primary backup target.

The Emergence of Disk-based Backup 2.0. I am not sure if I should classify this trend as disk-based backup 2.0 or 3.0. However since I do not recall ever seeing disk-based backup with deduplication ever classified as 2.0 (1.0 being just plain disk-based backup with a NAS or VTL target), let's start with the assumption that disk-based backup solutions that offered deduplication defined 1.0 disk-based backup.

Backup 2.0 solutions go further. The inclusion of features like deduplication and replication are assumed but new products start to introduce features like high availability and better management of the backup data. This will be done for the simple reason that as organizations have now solved their day-to-day tactical backup problems, they can now turn their attention to better management and actually automating the entire backup process, including the replication, placement and recovery of the data. This cannot be done solely with disk, deduplication and replication but requires better data management policies and solutions that are highly available.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) will start to compete with more traditional backup and recovery approaches. This was reinforced by Symantec's 2010 State of the Data Center report that was released this past Monday. While CDP has been steadily maturing over the last few years, it seems all size enterprises are taking notice of its progress and recognizing the full breadth of features that it can bring to bear on expediting and simplifying not only backup but recovery, disaster recovery and even lowering test and development costs. While it is way too early to say CDP will displace once a day backups in 2010, 2010 appears to be the year that the clock begins counting down as to when that will occur.

Thin provisioning will continue to get the nod over deduplication on high end primary storage systems. While some storage providers, probably most NetApp, are making deduplication available on their primary storage systems, what will ultimately drive the adoption of either of these technologies on primary storage is cost and, right now, I have to argue that thin provisioning is winning and will continue to win the battle in one important area on high end storage systems: upfront cost.

Deduplication introduces processing overhead and that means organizations have to size the controller heads on their storage systems appropriately to deduplicate the data. This will almost certainly add to the cost of the system up front and possibly further down the road depending on the demands deduplication places upon the system.

Thin provisioning eliminates these upfront loads plus some initial surveys suggest that it provides the same reductions in storage consumpion as deduplication. Once recent survey conducted by TechValidate shows that Senior IT Architects have been able to over provision their storage by 2,000%. This equates to about the same 20:1 reduction in storage that deduplication delivers and while the organizations that saw these types of capacity savings were those with more sophisticated IT staff, these are also the ones more likely to be deploying and managing high end storage systems.

Archiving in all of its forms will gather momentum in 2010. It used to be that if users thought of archiving at all, they think of it in the context of email archiving. No more. Judges are no longer sympathetic for organizations that cannot produce requested documents in timely fashions and no organization is immune for having to produce their documents when requested.

So while email archiving tends to get the most attention, continuing data growth in both the unstructured (file servers) and structured (database) segments of the market is creating new user requirements to archive these data stores as well. On the file archiving side, it can often be justified in two key ways: the ability to purchase less expensive storage to keep data online and reductions in backup time.

The same principle holds true on the database side but one of the roadblocks to database archiving has been that managing the databases that house archived data has been as painful as just leaving the data in the primary database tables. However products from companies like Informatica alleviate much of this pain and, based upon the recent alliance that it struck up with CommVault, suggest that companies are actively looking for a broader range of archiving solutions than just the email and file archiving solutions that CommVault natively offers.

Cloud storage will be the most talked about non-adopted trend of 2010. Personally I see a very bright future for cloud storage, just not in 2010. Most of the products are still in their early stages, users are still kicking the tires and the 'gotchas' associated with cloud storage are still being discovered. Until the majority of those 'gotchas' associated with cloud storage are understood, documented and worked around, do not expect to find cloud storage anywhere but in the shops of a few early adopters.

Organizations are finally getting serious about data management. There is no one force driving this trend. Part of it is that management is getting sick and tired of asking their IT staff to report on the status of their corporate data and only getting partial or incomplete reports. Part of it is that organizations are worried about the increasing demands that the judicial system is placing on them to produce data when requested. Another part is that server virtualization is centralizing data so that organizations can quantify the scope of the problem. Maybe the largest driver is that the process of managing distributed data has finely gotten so broken that organizations intuitively know that it is costing them more money in terms of staff, hardware and software not to fix it than to fix it once and for all.

Have a good weekend and stop by again next Friday as I once again begin my weekly musings as to that week's events in the storage industry and how they stand to impact end users.

Symantec Bringing Stability to the Emerging World of End-to-End Vendor Solution Offerings

2010-01-14T11:00:00Z

Right now a major re-alignment is taking shape in the computer industry driven in large part by enterprises questioning the value of heterogeneous hardware and software solutions. Heterogeneity originally lowered upfront procurements costs but over time it created new levels of complexity when it came time to make these disparate solutions work well together. These difficulties are leading more providers to build end-to-end solution offerings that are raising questions about the role that independent enterprise software providers like Symantec will provide in this new world.

The trend of enterprise providers putting together end-to-end solutions is well under way. In the last two years, HP has acquired companies like EDS, LeftHand Networks and 3COM in its attempt to become a sole provider of these solutions. Cisco has added server hardware to its portfolio of offerings and bolstered its alliance with EMC and VMware in the form of their Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Coalition. Even Oracle got into the act with its recent acquisition of Sun so it too can stake claim as an end-to-end solutions provider.

But as these companies make acquisitions and alliances, how enterprise software providers like Symantec fit into the picture becomes a little hazy. After all, much if not all of Symantec's software is intended for deployment in heterogeneous environments but if the market trend is towards more homogeneous, end-to-end solutions offerings, where exactly does Symantec's value proposition come into play?

A recent conversation that DCIG had with Symantec helped to clarify the new role that Symantec is playing in the emergence of these end-to-end solution offerings from these different players in the market.

For instance, consider the new look of Oracle. Oracle with its acquisition of Sun now has an extensive stack of hardware and software upon which to build its solutions. However its solution set still does not provide all of the features that enterprises might want or demand.
It is because of this that Symantec is actively engaging with Oracle as a development partner in the following ways:

Put out software releases according to Oracle/Sun's build schedule
Track when they want to go live with their products
Help them differentiate their products from the competition so as to provide unique solutions

A prime example of this is Symantec's engagement with the Oracle VM (OVM) team. Today, OVM is the only Oracle certified server virtualization solution for x86/x86_64 platforms--supporting almost all of Oracle's products. Every other server virtualization solution running Oracle is technically an "unsupported" configuration which is an unpopular position within the Oracle community, especially as more and more companies wish to implement server virtualization using platforms such as Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

However Symantec saw this as an opportunity to help bring a supported Oracle solution to market by working with the Oracle VM team. Symantec moved out ahead of this watch-and-wait crowd by adding support for Oracle Enterprise Linux to its Veritas Storage Foundation (SF) suite and is actively engaged with the OVM team to extend SF functionality to OVM as well

Symantec admits that OVM provides some unique challenges. OVM is a very heavy application in terms of its memory and storage requirements to effectively manage storage in a block-based virtualization approach so as to simultaneously reduce storage management complexity while adding features like snapshots and replication.

However discussions with Oracle in terms of how to best address these difficult areas are going well. Part of what is contributing to the progress is that a lot of OVM is based upon Xen (Xen is block based virtualization architecture as opposed to a file-based architecture like VMware and HyperV).

This makes the likelihood of Symantec successfully porting Veritas Storage Foundation to OVM high since Symantec has already successfully done so for Citrix XenServer. Further, Oracle wants to run an application stack on OVM that enterprises find acceptable and using Veritas Storage Foundation gives them a road map to accomplishing that objective.

Symantec's partnership with Oracle is just one example of how Symantec is remaining relevant in this world where end-to-end solutions providers are becoming more prevalent. While these end-to-end solutions providers such as HP, Oracle, and others have many of the pieces to provide an end-to-end solutions offering, they lack some of the glue that makes sure they all work as well as they should.

This is a new role that Symantec is starting to assume. Because it already has the software that solves a lot of these problems plus the best practices in place to test and make sure all of their components work together as designed, Symantec is becoming the glue that acts as the stabilizing force in many of these new configurations.

In so doing, Symantec remains highly relevant as these new end-to-end vendor solution offerings come to market. Symantec gives customers the confidence that these new end-to-end vendor solution offerings will work as designed while still giving customers the flexibility to switch back to a more heterogeneous environment should the situation warrant.

3PAR Succeeds because it Lightens the Load without Needing to Darken the Skies

2010-01-13T11:00:00Z

Good times or bad, all size organizations need data storage. The difference is that when times get tough as they were in 2009, we start to see those storage providers that deliver a good value for the dollar get the nod over those that deliver only so-so value. But what is notable about 3PAR, which recently received some positive comments from Barron's, is that 3PAR is making inroads in the high end of the storage market where start-ups are not supposed to succeed.

In the last week of December 2009, Barron's commented that 3PAR has "cheaper, more advanced technologies that larger rivals initially ignored", its data storage systems "do more with less", they are "unusually flexible" and support a "multitenant environment".
Given the Barron's article, I wanted to examine further how 3PAR's technologies are contributing to the company's appeal.

3PAR has managed to accomplish something that few other providers of storage systems have succeeded in doing: break into high end data center environments as a start-up without first starting in the small and midsize space. The article mentions that 3PAR has picked up some impressive enterprise customers such as MySpace, Verizon, Credit Suisse and Priceline.com but it fails to mention or examine just how rare it is for any start-up storage provider to experience any type of success in the enterprise data center space.

Talk all you want about "cheaper, more advanced technologies", "doing more with less", and being "unusually flexible" but to succeed in enterprise environments, it takes more than that. In these data centers, storage providers need dependable and reliable enterprise solutions which traditionally has been a prerequisite to success.

3PAR has succeeded in a rather unique way by delivering dependable and reliable enterprise solutions without the need for professional services. Some of its competitors continue to get enterprise business with what I consider inferior products because they make guarantees to enterprise IT management and staff that they will "darken the skies" with professional services people should they ever have a problem with their product.

While this sales tactic sounds good in theory, there are only two problems with it. First, to make this offer means that they (the storage provider) are assuming that you (Mr. Customer) will at some point have a substantial problem with their storage system or that the solution presented by sales somehow will fall short of its intended objective. This also makes it a necessity that they put such a guarantee on the table so that when this unforeseen and unexpected disaster strikes, the customer has assurances the storage provider will be there to make things right.

But from where I sit, this guarantee is somewhat disconcerting. If you are buying the right product for your environment, one would think the need to "darken the skies" with professional services help would be an isolated and rare incident, not a regular occurrence.

Having talked to both 3PAR and a number of 3PAR storage customers, such incidents appear rare. Richard Siemers, a storage admin with Pier 1 Imports, probably puts it best in regards to 3PAR's services model. He says, "Professional services (PS) are something I prefer to do without. A 'Statement of Work' is not intended to be a customer friendly document. Often the 'professional' sent is nothing more than a below average tech with a collection of good instructions and a speed dial to a real professional. I appreciate 3PAR for the way they operate without PS, and I appreciate the SE we have assigned to our account."

Second, many of the storage systems sold into today's enterprise data centers were initially designed to work in mainframe environments and then retrofitted to work with today's distributed system environments. This is not necessarily wrong but a certain amount of baggage accompanies such design decisions. This is largely reflected in the level of complexity and amount of knowledge that one must first possess in order to setup and manage these storage systems.

In the past, this may have been less of an issue since many of the individuals responsible for managing these storage systems had years of expertise and technical ability that they acquired while managing storage on the mainframe side of the house.

But that experience does not come easily, data stores are burgeoning and organizations need storage solutions that match their virtualization requirements. Administrators no longer have the time and patience to learn everything there is to know about storage and the speed of today's business world is forcing them to select storage solutions that are designed - not retrofitted - to meet today's requirements.

It is these demands that 3PAR's InServ Storage Servers meet. They are easier to manage, more space efficient, handle multiple application workloads, require less time to operate and are a help rather than a hindrance to the organization. In short, they better match the skill sets and time constraints of the administrators tasked with the responsibility of managing them.

From a technology and support perspective, 3PAR is succeeding where many others have tried and failed. And while some speculate that 3PAR may be negatively impacted by its competitors as the economy begins to rebound in 2010, don't count on it.

3PAR delivers the high availability, reliability and support that enterprise environments demand but its storage servers are architected to deliver the new levels of flexibility and ease of use that today's enterprise storage administrators need. It is precisely because 3PAR delivers these features for today's more distributed and increasingly cloud-oriented enterprise data centers that it should continue to succeed against incumbent storage providers without the requirement for professional services engineers to darken enterprise data centers to keep everything up and working.

Unified Storage Platforms Becoming a Prerequisite for Delivering on the Promise of Networked Storage

2010-01-12T11:00:00Z

Failing to capitalize on all of the possibilities that networked storage offers is a mistake that many midsize organizations can and do make. "Disk drives" and "storage arrays" condition these organizations to think of storage as a "dumb" device so much so that they fail to realize that today's storage systems and disk drives have little in common. It is for this reason that these midsized organizations must change their mindset when they adopt and implement a network storage solution, especially those classified as a unified storage platform.

It was just a little over decade ago that networked storage first moved outside of the server and started to displace internal disk drives and direct attached storage (DAS) arrays. Even at that time, the distinction between internal and external storage was not that great other than how they physically connected to the server.

Fast forward to 2010 and networked storage systems are much more than disk drives. They are now storage platforms that can manage data separately and distinctly from the servers which store data on them. As such, organizations are no longer bound to application, file system or operating system specific software and instead may use the software native to these storage platforms to manage the data that resides on them.

This storage technology has evolved to the point where new unified storage platforms can manage both block and file storage and is creating new data management possibilities that simply were not possible when servers and storage were tightly coupled or even when storage is only block or file. Now midsize organizations can leverage unified storage platforms like the RELDATA 9240i to accomplish the following tasks:

Increased utilization of existing storage resources. By aggregating existing storage assets into a sharable storage pool, organizations are no longer left in a predicament where one application has too much storage capacity and another too little. Further, because the 9240i supports both block and file, organizations eliminate the creation of storage silos that can still occur when block-only or file-only storage systems are deployed.
Complete data migrations independent of the attached application, file system or operating system. Migrating data from aging direct attached or networked storage to another new storage device is historically one of the largest challenges of managing storage. A unified storage platform such as the RELDATA 9240i includes its own data migration software. Because it does, it can non-disruptively migrate block or file data with minimal or no disruption to the attached application, file system or operating system.
Standardized approach to storage management. The last thing any organization wants to do is develop one set of skills and procedures for managing and replicating data for block-based storage systems and then another set of skills and procedures for managing and replicating data on file-based storage systems. Using the 9240i, once an organization has individuals trained and policies set, they are the same for either file or block storage they can all be managed the same way going forward using the 9240i.

Realizing these new benefits that today's networked storage systems deliver is only possible if midsize organizations start to view storage in a new context and select solutions that merge block and file storage. However not just any networked storage solution will deliver on these promises.

Only unified storage platforms such as the RELDATA 9240i can turn them into a reality. By supporting both block and file- level storage on a single storage system, enabling the migration of data from current storage assets to the 9240i and offering advanced storage management and replication features, midsize organizations can efficiently and cost-effectively accomplish these tasks in such a way that will meet their storage needs of today while positioning them for tomorrow's requirements.

CDP Poised to Lead the Charge and the Change in 2010

2010-01-11T13:00:00Z

Small enterprises want to make technology changes but can't afford it. Large enterprises can afford to make technology changes but won't. That leaves it to midsized enterprises that are seeing the benefits, have the resources and are making the changes that are resulting in them emerging as the new IT leaders in 2010. This in a nutshell summarizes the 83-page 2010 State of the Data Center report just released by Symantec.

The decade of the Aughts saw a significant amount of innovation in data center technologies but maybe not the broad implementation of these technologies in data centers that many expected to occur. Now going into 2010, this survey indicates that this adoption is starting to occur and it is mid-sized enterprises that are leading the charge in their implementation.

In retrospect, the reasons mid-sized enterprises are at the forefront in their adoption was best described by a Seattle-based IT manager who referred to them as residing in the "Goldilocks zone". Many of the new data center technologies provide more comprehensive benefits than what small enterprises can take advantage of while large enterprises are somewhat leery of the dramatic changes in processes that take place once they are implemented.

However mid-sized enterprises are finding these technologies "just right" (to quote Goldilocks) in that they have the right combination of agility, resources and willingness to take the risks that make these technologies work for them.

The technologies that they are choosing to implement are just as interesting. Security and backup and recovery were the two leaders in terms of data center initiatives classified as "Absolutely Important". But continuous data protection (CDP) was hot on their heels as a third place finisher in terms of a technology that companies are looking to implement. Notably 83% of the mid-sized enterprises are actively pursuing CDP initiatives.

While the survey did not delve into why exactly CDP is poised to become so widely adopted in 2010, other results and user comments in the survey gave some hints as to what organizations may hope to achieve by implementing CDP: simpler, more efficient and easier to manage data centers.

For instance, 36% of data centers reported an increase in the number of applications that they had to manage (an increase of 7% from last year's survey) which is resulting in 35% of them finding data centers too complex to manage (up 5% from last year). One IT manager believes there will be no reprieve in 2010 as data centers continue to become more complex to manage with three factors driving this complexity:

More data than ever that they are collecting at an increasing pace
More real-time applications as opposed to batch-oriented processes
More demanding service level agreements (SLAs)

Another IT director from a large Pennsylvania enterprise summed up the situation that many IT professionals face. He says, "Technology solutions are far more advanced than what they were 3 to 5 years ago. There are certain days where I don't know how I am going to do this."

Data centers are also being hampered in their ability to respond to this growth in complexity as they are being hit with the double whammy of budget cuts and inadequate staffing levels. While 76% of those surveyed have open job requisitions, the issue is getting the budget to fill them and then finding qualified applicants.

47% are struggling to get budget funds allocated which is contributing to about 40% of the data centers feeling "somewhat" or "extremely" understaffed. Notably, the percentage of data centers that reported being "understaffed" is quadruple the number of those that said they were "overstaffed".

One network manager of a mid-sized New York enterprise says, "We actually lost 25% of our department in cutbacks. I'm now doing a number of different jobs. I work from home and on the weekends I am doing things I never had to do before. I am just trying to do more with less. We could use more people but right now that does not appear to be an option."

This combination of factors would seem to indicate why CDP is resonating so well with enterprises of all sizes. CDP essentially eliminates backup and recovery windows, provides a built-in disaster recovery (DR) solution, can be used for testing and development and requires less time to manage. Further, because it reduces the overhead and manpower associated with managing multiple backup and DR products and current products on the market are well suited for mid-sized enterprises, it only makes sense that they are leading the charge in their adoption of CDP.

While this heightened focus on CDP was the most meaningful information I gleaned from the report, there were some other tidbits of information that are also worth highlighting:

57% of data centers are turning to outside resources for assistance in completing their tasks. Access to expertise is a major reason that they cited for using outside consultants as well as moving certain applications to the cloud.
The functions that data centers are most willing to outsource are those that are not their core competencies. Functions that they are looking to outsource include server maintenance (44%), backup and recovery (43%), IT service business continuity (41%), and storage management (40%).
Human error is not longer cited as a leading cause of downtime. System failures (43%), application failures (41%) and natural disasters (36%) were cited as the leading cause of downtime while human error was only cited as a cause for downtime only 29% of the time. This suggests one of two things. Either internal change control and/or recovery processes are getting better; or, because so many companies are understaffed, there are less people regularly working on and maintaining systems and applications so they are failing more frequently.
The cloud is still more buzz than reality. Despite all of the buzz about cloud computing, fully 28% of those surveyed are not even considering it and less than 25% have done more than move it past the discussion stages. Only 4% of those surveyed having implemented it in any form.

CDP appears to be the technology on the rise for 2010 among organizations of all sizes but especially among mid-sized enterprises. Security and backup and recovery remain number one and number two respectively but are reflective of the day-to-day tactical issues that companies continue to grapple with.

It is CDP's emergence as a major data center initiative that would seem to indicate that companies are recognizing that it is time for them to adopt a more comprehensive technology that tackles their backup, DR and recovery initiatives while requiring less time for them to administer going forward.

Tips to Selecting a Private Storage Cloud Solution that can Compete with Amazon and Google

2010-01-06T11:00:00Z

Data centers face an unprecedented challenge as the next decade approaches. New storage cloud offerings not only bring the upfront cost per GB of storage down to commodity pricing levels but they make it possible for companies to outsource this critical part of their IT infrastructure. This puts new pressure on data center managers to identify and implement appropriate storage cloud solutions because they are no longer competing with internal business units or historical third party providers but new leaner, more efficient cloud providers like Amazon and Google.

It used to be that enterprise data centers only faced competition from one of two sources. In the first scenario, individual lines of business that could not afford to host their applications with their main corporate data center would build their own mini-data center by buying their own servers and storage to host their applications and then hire their own IT staff to manage them.

In this circumstance, the corporate data center would as often as not look the other way since these applications were intended for test and development or, if production, were not classified as "mission critical". As such, these mini-data centers did not pose much of a threat to the main corporate data center since its availability characteristics and the expertise of its IT staff far exceeded what these mini-data centers offered.

At the other end of the spectrum was the possibility of outsourcing all IT operations to a third party such as EDS (now HP) or IBM. While these companies are reputed to do an expert job of managing data centers, it was the rare organization that would see enough benefits to cost-justify outsourcing all of their IT operations to one of these third party providers. As a result, most corporate data centers were relatively immune from either internal or external competition.

That is all quickly changing as today's combination of virtualization and cloud storage technology coupled with high bandwidth network connections make it possible for almost anyone anywhere to build a highly versatile, scalable and much easier to manage data centers. As this occurs, corporate data centers must swiftly adapt and transform their data centers not to compete with their own line of business mini-data centers or HP and IBM but the Amazon's and Google's of the world who are poised to become the new competition.

While they do not pose an immediate threat (0 - 12 months) for supplanting key data center operations, the threat they pose is probably closer than what many data centers expect. As cloud storage security improves, network speeds increase, costs decline and cloud storage offerings from these companies mature, it is logical to expect them to have competitive offerings by 2011 or 2012 that target more than just corporate archive and backup data stores.

Translated, this means enterprise data centers need to start to act now to transform their IT infrastructures so they are in a position to compete against these cloud storage providers or else they risk having both their IT infrastructure and jobs virtualized by these new data center competitors.

The good news is that new private cloud storage offerings are now available that corporate data centers can start to leverage so they can evolve their IT infrastructures into a model that can compete with the likes of Amazon and Google. So as corporate data centers start their searches for appropriate cloud storage solution, here are some tips to keep in mind to select the right one:

The cloud storage software is the secret sauce. Not to diminish the importance of hardware but software is the enabling component of a cloud storage solution. Organizations are rightly recognizing that data tends to far outlive the underlying storage hardware on which it resides so the software needs to decouple the data from the hardware. This is necessary to enable the movement of data between old and new or failing and functional components; ensure the availability of data across any tier of storage; and, the policy-driven placement of data on the appropriate tier of storage with minimal or no administrative attention.
Multi-tenancy. This is a new concept that is cropping up in almost every cloud conversation that I now have. In essence, it permits data from different owners to co-exist on the same hardware while retaining the security permissions and separateness of the data for the individual business units or departments that store their data in the cloud.
Scalable. Data stores are certain to only get larger, not smaller, so organizations should identify cloud storage solutions that scale into the petabytes. Already solutions such as Symantec FileStore scale to manage billions of objects and petabytes of data which is needed to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google.

Enterprise organizations are looking at cloud storage models like Amazon and Google and saying, "We want that!" They want to collapse their line of business mini-data centers by going to a very large data center at the back end in order to drives out costs while retaining the service oriented model to which these lines of businesses are accustomed. New private storage cloud offerings such as Symantec FileStore deliver this new functionality so that enterprise organizations can consolidate their mini-data centers and scale them out with new architectures so they can cost-effectively compete against the likes of Amazon and Google in the not-too-distant future

The New Server Virtualization Imperative for 2010: Application Consistent Recovery with Low Overhead

2010-01-05T11:00:00Z

Server virtualization was one of the hot technology trends in 2009 and there is every reason to believe it will remain that way in 2010. But as this trend broadens to include the virtualization of mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, new considerations come into play. Most notably, organizations must identify a data protection solution that can deliver application-consistent recovery points, bring applications quickly back online and do so without negatively impacting the performance of the physical host.

Gartner Inc. recently commented that it expects that fully 50% of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012 which represents nearly 58 million of deployed machines. So as this trend accelerates, it is only logical to assume that more mission critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL server are bound to be virtualized.

A recent article on FedTech lends credence to this conclusion. Departments within government organizations such as the Air Force, Navy and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) are already in the midst of virtualizing applications like Exchange. Reduced hardware costs, less floor space, and lower power costs coupled with Microsoft's increased willingness to support Exchange on Microsoft Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms means applications like Exchange are ripe for virtualization in the next few years.

It is as more mission-critical applications are migrated to virtual environments that rapid reliable recoveries become more important. The virtualization of these applications may create new data protection and disaster recovery (DR) challenges that organizations have not fully taken into account prior to virtualizing these applications. Consider:

Most physical machines, particularly Windows and Linux servers, operate at utilization rates in the 20 - 35% range.
Once consolidated and virtualized, they can run at utilization rates that approach 85% or greater.
This higher utilization rate leaves fewer resources to run performance-intensive applications like backup.
Traditional backup approaches can consume 20% or more of the physical server's available resources.
This problem is compounded if backup jobs on multiple virtual machines (VMs) kick off at the same time.
Hypervisor-level APIs like VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and vStorage are intended to provide low overhead data protection approaches appropriate for virtual machine environments.
Hypervisor-level APIs lack an application consistency mechanism and can produce only crash-consistent snapshots
Crash-consistent snapshots are not application-consistent, and therefore introduce two problems: they may not lead to reliable data recovery and, even if they do, recoveries take longer than they do when application-consistent snapshots can be used
Application-consistent snapshots are desirable for the proper protection and recovery of applications running in virtual machine environments (just like they are for applications running in physical environments and for the same reasons) because they lead to faster, more reliable recovery
Organizational expectations for near real-time application recoveries (30 minutes or less) are on the rise.

Organizations should not underestimate the growing intolerance that their current customers, internal or external, have for outages of any length, especially when a mission critical application like Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server is concerned. While they can certainly count on some goodwill and understanding among their end users should a disaster strike, a recent Applied Research study quantified just how much goodwill they should expect and found that only about 60% of them will tolerate an extended outage
.
While the exact definition of an "extended outage" is elusive, most will agree that 24 hours now qualifies as an extended outage and it is safe to say that in regards to mission critical applications, any outage over 30 minutes probably fits this definition. So what those responsible for delivering data protection and DR services for these applications should find disconcerting is that based upon the real world feedback that this study gathered, 40% of customers who experienced an "extended outage" left their provider in favor of someone else who was not having the same problems.

It is for these types of reasons that it behooves organizations to seek out a solution like InMage that provides application-consistent recovery points in a manner compatible with the requirements of virtual machine environments. InMage integrates with native application snapshot APIs, using a very low overhead filter driver to drive the creation and marking of application-consistent recovery points, and works in exactly the same way across both physical and virtual machines. This simplifies data protection operations by providing a consistent set of processes to manage recovery across the entire enterprise.

Three Tips for Making the Right Choice between CDP and Deduplication

2010-01-04T11:00:00Z

Deduplication is now widely recognized as a prerequisite technology for next generation data protection. While this is a correct view, to classify it as the only new technology that organizations need to consider in order to successfully redesign their backup infrastructure does not paint a complete picture. More specifically, the recent and rapid maturation of continuous data protection (CDP) has put organizations in a position where they need some criteria to make an informed decision as to how to proceed with these two technologies.

Articles and blogs that cover CDP and deduplication sometimes tend to put these two technologies in competition with one another. While there is some truth in this allegation since they are often both chasing the same funds budgeted for data protection, CDP and deduplication attempt to solve the same problem (backup and recovery) within organizations with very different results. So for organizations trying to decide between CDP and deduplication, here are three tips that can give you some insight as to how to best proceed:

1. Establish what level of change your organization is comfortable making. This may seem like an odd statement to make but CDP opens up many more new possibilities for backup, disaster recovery (DR) and testing and development than what deduplication offers.

Deduplication is designed to work in conjunction with existing backup software and reduce backup data stores. It can be deployed with minimal disruption to your current backup environment while still improving backup success rates and backup and recovery times.

CDP will do this as well but its long term impact on an organization is more dramatic. It will force an organization to re-think and ultimately change the way it does backups and recoveries. CDP can initially run side-by-side with existing backup software but its end game is a change-over in its backup process to CDP as the first line of data protection. This is a shift your organization may or may not be prepared to make.

2. Know the scope of your authority and influence. In my previous job as a storage administrator, I had a great deal of control over the storage solutions I selected. However the decision as what data protection software was used to protect applications was often still left to the many application owners that I supported.

In my case, it was easier and less disruptive to introduce a target-based deduplication solution such as the FalconStor VTL since the application owners could use it with whatever backup software they were already using. While a CDP solution like the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector was certainly a viable option, it required more buy-in on their part.

However it is no secret that more organizations are looking to centralize their data protection solutions so they can gain more value from their copies of their protected data while merging backup and recovery with disaster recovery. To do so, they have to give more authority to those put in positions of responsibility so they can deliver on these new requirements.

Those in this new position will likely find that CDP is a better fit to deliver on these objectives than deduplication because of the number of new application recovery and data management possibilities it delivers.

3. Be clear as what your organization's top priority is in regards to data protection. Having this priority clearly stated and agreed upon as soon as possible will save you a lot of anguish and help you make the right choice between CDP and deduplication for your organization.

For instance, if your organization's primary concern is improving its current backup situation while improving and automating its local and offsite DR solution is still low on the backburner then it only logical to bring in a deduplication solution like the FalconStor VTL or FDS. However if your organization is ready to tackle the broader issue of DR and wants a solution that can deliver 10 to 30 minute application recoveries locally or remotely then a solution like the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector should be given a higher priority.

As organizations look to redesign their backup infrastructures, many will be confronted with a decision between CDP and deduplication. However the choice between these two technologies should not be viewed as a decision between "right and wrong" or "better and worse" but rather, "Which is the right one for me?" These are now both mature technologies with plenty of documented customer success stories to support the justification for their deployments.

To make the right decision, an organization (or those individuals within an organization responsible for its data protection and DR strategies) needs to know its culture, what its highest priorities are in regards to data protection and DR and how much authority those responsible for executing on the decision will have to carry it out. Once this information is known and agreed upon, it becomes fairly straightforward for the organization to decide whether CDP or deduplication is the best fit for it and the challenges it is trying to resolve.

Top 10 DCIG Blogs of 2009 Written in 2009

2009-12-31T11:00:00Z

This is one of my favorite blogs of the year to write. Even though this is only the second time since DCIG launched its blogging site two years ago that I have had the opportunity to write a blog in this format, I have been looking forward to looking back all year. In case you have not yet figured it out, today I take a look back at the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 on the DCIG site. However this year I am doing a two part series with today's blog examining the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009.

#10: SSD - So Disruptive It's Disturbing; Insights from SNW Day 2. I distinctly remember writing this blog in the wee hours of the morning after had a chat with Fusion-io's CTO, Rick White, earlier in the day at the spring SNW conference. In fact, as I was writing this blog, I remember wondering if I was stretching my bounds as an analyst in terms of some of the conclusions I was drawing.

At 1 am in the morning, you always have to think twice and read thrice before publishing anything, but my mind was just racing about the possibilities that Fusion-io's implementation of solid state drive (SSD) technology in its ioDrives created which was part of the reason I could not sleep. While I have since learned more about SSD in general and Fusion-io specifically, I remain optimistic about SSD's possibilities and just as convinced, if not more so, that SSD promises to be even more disruptive that what I alluded to in this blog entry.

#9: Storage Discovery Needed before Backup Design can Begin. Everyday on DCIG's site we cover the latest trends in various data protection, storage and information management technologies but as the position of this blog topic in our overall 2009 rankings reflects, many organizations are still grappling with the basics such as what do they have, how much do they have and what size solution do they need to manage it.

This blog talked about an often overlooked feature in Asigra's Cloud Backup and Recovery technology - it's LAN Storage Discovery feature. Using this feature, organizations can non-disruptively and agentlessly analyze their concentration of data on the LAN and, by constantly sweeping the network multiple times, identify where the data is, possible storage inefficiencies, quantify the amount of data on their network and then size the backup solution needed to protect their data.

#8: How One Company Built a Business Case for Its Disaster Recovery Highway. This blog topic clearly resonated with DCIG readers in 2009 and I expect topics like this to be popular again in 2010. This particular blog is based upon an interview that I had with Dr. James Tu, the Information Security Officer at a real estate services company.

In short, he found the tool he needed (InMage) to build his business case for a disaster recovery solution was right under his nose. A consulting company he had previously hired was unbeknownest to him using InMage to measure data change rates in his environment so they could recommend to him a DR solution. It eventually turned out that InMage both first provided the information he needed to make the internal business case for his DR solution and then became the DR solution he implemented in his environment.

#7: The Next 800 Pound Gorilla in Small Business Networked Storage? Interview with Iomega President Jonathon Huberman. This was an extremely engaging interview and provided a great deal of insight into how he planned to mesh Iomega's consumer and small business portfolio of products with EMC's enterprise oriented culture. While it may be still too early to draw any definitive conclusions as to his success in combining the cultures, early indications are that the two are working well together.

In fact, in a couple of blogs that I completed and just recently posted, they were based on an interview and an onsite visit that I did with an Iomega customer. In his opinion, EMC's ownership of Iomega and EMC's strategic plans to make more of EMC's software available to Iomega and its StorCenter product line were a factor in his decision to deploy Iomega in lieu of competing NAS solutions.

#6: Taking the Discombobulation out of Services with "Design, Build and Manage". Ask any enterprise end-user what they most wish their vendor would deliver and deliver well, and, as often as not, service and support will be near the top of their wish list as the high number of page views of this blog testifies.

To CommVault's credit, in late 2008 and early 2009, it knew that if it was to compete and win at the enterprise level, it had to have an enterprise calibre professional services and support division so it started to build one that was truly differentiated from its competition. These efforts appear to be paying dividends because in the latest CommVault earnings call, CommVault CEO Bob Hammer made the following comment, "It is important to note thar a key factor driving the increased market adoption of Simpana is the increasing strength of our enterprise sales teams about the globe. This includes field technical support, professional services and marketing support."

#5: Server Virtualization Piles on the Savings but Watch out for Those Costs. Server virtualization was clearly one of the top trends of 2009 but more stories are emerging as to how there are some thorns in this rose. This blog talks about some of the hidden costs that can catch organizations unawares; how overlooking items like backup performance and software licensing once application servers are virtualized can negatively impact an organization; and, how implementing some of the commonly recommended remedies like deduplication and native backup tools found in VMware (VMware Consolidated Backup) and Microsoft Hyper-V (VSS) may be insufficient and too complex to configure and reliably use in corporate environments.

#4: Symantec Shows Backup Exec a Little Dedupe Love; Lays out Source Side Deuplication Roadmap. In 2009 it would probably be somewhat suspicious if a top 10 list on a web site dedicated heavily to data protection and storage did not have some blog topic about dedupe appear on that list. Somewhat to my relief, I'm happy to report DCIG's site is not one of those sites. Symantec's planned introduction of source side deduplication by porting some of NetBackup's PureDisk features into Backup Exec 2010 in the not too distant future appears to be anxiously awaited by Symantec's very larger user base.

#3: The Cost of NOT Keeping Archival and Backup Data on Disk. Many organizations still have tape as part of their archival strategy, their backup strategy or both for cost and data mobility reasons. Those are certainly vaild but, as this blog elaborates and which certainly resonated with a lot of DCIG readers in 2009, there are equally good reasons for keeping both archival and backup data on disk.

The most compelling reason these days has to do with the costs associated electronic data discovery as to index 2 million files stored to tape can run as high as $75,000. You can keep a lot of disks online for this amount of money so these eDiscovery needs can be met more efficiently and effectively.

#2: Granular Recovery for the Enterprise MS Exchange Environment. The high readership of this blog should provide some indication just how critical protecting and recovering Microsoft Exchange in enterprise environments has become and the degree to which users are looking for information on this subject. This particular blog breaks down how Symantec's Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) that was added to NetBackup in its 6.5.3 release gives users multiple options to protect and recover their Microsoft Exchange database.

#1: New Considerations for Using Disk-based Solutions for Outsourced Data Protection. I still vividly remember the call that I received in March of this year that led to me to writing thisblog. Up to that point, I had a hard time refuting the arguments for using online backup software solutions but after a call with this records management provider in upstate New York who was looking to offer an online backup solution, my quiver was suddenly full.

More precisely, he pointed out there were two specific reasons he did not want to use online backup software: he had to convince prospective clients to swap out their current backup software and he would need a full-time if not a full-time person to manage it on his end. Based upon this reaching the number 1 ranking on DCIG's site for 2009, it looks like I was not the only one who learned something from this conversation that I had with this individual.

Honorable Mention: Email - Not just Communication but a Legal Document of Record. No top 10 list is complete without an honorable mention and this one is so close to #10 that I could not resist commenting on it. This is a blog written by James Koopmann, one of DCIG's analysts, back in April 2009 that illustrates just how how dramatically the corporate use and perception of email has changed in the last 10 - 20 years.

Personally I still remember introducing email to the police department that I worked at in the late 1990's and how dramatically it altered how the entire department conducted its day-to-day operations. Now more than a decade later, email has firmly entrenched itself as the primary tool for business communication and, as such, it is now on equal footing with any other business document as the court cases cited in this blog bring out.

Next week I will take a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of what year the blog was written.

Have a Happy New Year and be sure to come back as DCIG continues to cover the latest in stroage technologies throughout 2010.

The Four Factor Test to Determine Whether Corporate Email is Protected by Attorney-Client Privilege

2009-12-30T11:00:00Z

The right of attorney-client privilege remains one of the most revered privileges that the American judicial system bestows upon clients as it enables any person to communicate open and honestly with his/her attorney. Now this right is under scrutiny as keeping communications between a defendant and his/her attorney has become difficult to achieve due to the increased role that email plays as a form of primary communication medium between them.

The attorney-client privilege is an important part of any court case but as email has grown in importance, so has the probability that the attorney-client privilege can be compromised. Therefore it behooves companies to understand what role their corporate networks play in preserving and/or undermining this privilege. It also important to understand how best to protect the company when faced with an eDiscovery involving employees and any email correspondence that occurs between them and their attorney while at work.

This is highlighted by two recent court cases that lay out several key rulings regarding privilege and corporate email systems. There are specific differences in these two cases but both share one aspect in common: employee use of a company computer while at work.

First, a case that was closely watched in the past is Stengart v. Loving Care Agency. In this case the New Jersey Superior Court ruled that because an employee used her company computer to access her web-based Yahoo email account, she waived her right to attorney-client privilege. In this particular case, the employee emailed her attorney during business hours about bringing hostile work environment claims against the employer but did so while still at work and in the employ of the company.

The court ruled that the employee waived privilege by using the company's laptop on company time and referenced the company's handbook that prohibited the use of the company's email system for "solicitation or outside business ventures." This ruling showed when a company has an email policy in place they could claim that the employee did not have attorney-client privilege since the employee was using the corporate network to send and receive emails.

However it does not end there. On appeal the appellate court reversed this decision and ruled that in fact the emails were privileged, and ordered all emails deleted. The court also ordered a hearing for appropriate sanctions and was specific in citing that "an employer's rules and policies must be reasonable to be enforced" and must "concern the terms of employment."

The court continued by explaining that although the employer's policy provided that email was part of the employer's business records and was "not to be considered private or personal to any individual employee," employees were permitted under the policy to make "occasional personal use" of the employer computers. This provided a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the occasional personal use, especially regarding communications between an attorney and their client.

Alamar Ranch LLC, v. City of Boise. In this case the employee is again using a work computer for communication with his/her attorney but in this circumstance the employee used the employee's work email address. To establish attorney-client privilege and if it was waived in this case, the court turned to a four factor test:

Is there a company policy banning personal use of email?
Does the company monitor the use of its email?
Does the company have access to all emails?
Did the company notify the employee about these policies?

In this case the company's policies and procedures stated, "All emails become company property, they will be monitored, stored, accessed and disclosed by the employer, and should not be assumed to be confidential."

Therefore the court ruled that the emails were not confidential and stated it was "...unreasonable for any employee in this technological age--and particularly an employee receiving the notice Kirkpatrick received--to believe that her emails, sent directly from her company's email address over its computers, would not be stored by the company and made available for retrieval."

There are two distinct differences between these two cases and why the courts found as they did. First, in the case of Stengart, the company's computers and network were used but not its email system. As highlighted by point #3 in the four factor test, the company's email domain was not the primary email system used. Instead it was the client's 3^rd party Yahoo webmail address that was accessed and used to communicate with her attorney.

Also in the Stengart case, the company allowed periodic personal use of the corporate network which invalidated its claim that it banned the personal use of email since email could be accessed via the web. These are important distinctions and one that companies must understand.

The four factor test to establish attorney-client privilege coupled with the Alamar Ranch and Stengart rulings provides some valuable insight into how companies can respect client-attorney privileges while still protecting themselves. Email archiving and management technologies such as Estorian's LookingGlass allows companies to meet both the letter and spirit of the law of attorney-client privilege such as it applies to e-mail.