Entries categorized under “Data Reduction”

While attending SNW last week and receiving a briefing from WhipTail Technologies CTO James Candelaria, Bob Farkaly, Director of Marketing for Exar's Storage System Products, was never far away. Because of the brevity of my meeting with Candelaria, I never really had a chance to formally talk with Farkaly at the show and connect all of the dots between Exar and WhipTail, other than to assume some component of Exar was an integral component of WhipTail's Racerunner solid state storage appliance. (read more)

Every week I talk to a lot of people within the storage industry - end users, other analysts, resellers, public relations, CEOs, storage engineers, etc. While none of the news I pick up is necessarily enough to substantiate a blog on its own, when aggregated it becomes interesting and noteworthy. In fact, I was talking to Don Jennings at Lois Paul and Partners (LPP) about this yesterday and he suggested that I weekly post a blog that recaps what I hear and do on a weekly basis. Since Friday's are typically a slow day during the summer months and anyone who is anyone is always looking to cut out a little early on Fridays anyway, I thought I'd give everyone a reason to check out the DCIG website before they do. (read more)

Determining backup performance has consistently been extremely difficult for customers to rationalize, seeing as there is no real meter or benchmark to look at. Just take a second and think of all the moving parts inside your backup and recovery environment (media servers, clients, databases, email, network, SAN, disk, tape, offsite vaults) - you name it, there is a laundry list of things to look at when trying to determine accurate performance metrics. (read more)

I have made no secret about my skepticism of using dual controller architectures for inline deduplication, specifically at the enterprise level. My concern was that the workloads in enterprise backup environments would essentially overwhelm the capacity of just using two controllers and negatively impact backup jobs. However a recent briefing I had with Data Domain's VP of Product Management, Brian Biles, has started to change my perspective as to why doing inline deduplication using dual controller architectures is becoming a more viable option for enterprise environments. (read more)

Most businesses small and large have many IT needs but one that they continue to focus on as they move into a completely paperless world is data protection and, more specifically, data recovery. They know their current in-house backup and recovery processes are often less than adequate so when they ask hard questions like, "How long can I afford to be without my data?" and "What does losing that data mean to the company and the company's public reputation?", they don't like the answers. But what IT managers are surprised to learn as they look to move to a SaaS offering based on a cloud-based computing architecture for their backup and recovery services, they find there are many options from which to choose. (read more)

Today's release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy. (read more)

The STN-6000 Series resides in the data path on corporate LANs between production servers and corporate file servers and compresses data stored on the corporate file servers. While it supports any file server that does CIFS or NFS traffic (which is pretty much all file servers) and is available in models suitable for departments, organizations that are using enterprise network filers like the EMC Celerra, HP StorageWorks 9100 or NetApp FAS are likely going to see the greatest benefit. The simple reason is that organizations need to generate enough savings in capacity to justify the cost of introducing the 6000 Series into their environment. (read more)

For the vast majority of the IT Directors and CIOs one of the more elusive questions that that they need to answer is, "Will the useful life of the infrastructure I just acquired match up to my depreciation cycle?" This is a slippery financial slope that anyone in IT management has to constantly be concerned about. If the useful life estimate is three years of depreciation and the equipment lasts only two, then you and your company are stuck with an extra year of depreciation on the books, as well as an extra year of maintenance you didn't really need. Conversely, if it lasts four years, you end up depreciating too much up front and not extending the depreciation out over the appropriate period of time. (read more)

Companies sometimes assume that they must continue to use legacy archival techniques for retaining their critical intellectual property and business data. Based upon my experience, when developing new and more up-to-date archival strategies for organizations, tape and optical can no longer be viewed as the primary media for archival data. (read more)

One of the more interesting conversations I had was with John Martin, VP of Product Management with Riverbed Technology. For those of you unfamiliar with Riverbed, its Steelhead® appliances provides WAN acceleration to improve application performance across corporate WANs. As part of the underlying secret sauce in these appliances, Riverbed uses compression and deduplication technologies (among others) to accelerate application performance. That information is fairly well known. What is not so well known is that it has seen instances where it has improved the data reduction rates by 30 - 70% of data that was already deduplicated, and it has specifically seen these results when testing with Data Domain's appliances. (read more)

When you really look into the data that your organization is archiving, there is usually a good reason for the business to retain that data, otherwise why would it be archived at all? Placing that data on a system designed and built from the ground up to be an archival repository is probably a really good idea. (read more)

The enterprise data center continues to evolve, driven by ever-growing amounts of data and new demands for data availability - local and remote. These demands are driving companies to identify alternatives to existing data protection methods with deduplicating disk-based storage systems, such as Quantum's DXi Series, becoming a preferred backup target. However deduplicating data is only half the equation. To fully deliver on enterprise data protection, companies need efficient, cost-effective options so they can move this deduplicated data off-site for long term compliance and disaster recovery, or centralize and consolidate data from remote offices. (read more)

Deduplication is currently one of the hottest topics in data protection but it takes more than one form. The CommVault® Simpana® software suite implements deduplication as a Single Instance Store (SIS). In this iteration, SIS deduplicates archived and backed up files at the file level and then only stores one occurrence of the file. In part 2 of this interview series with CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, Simon Taylor, elaborates on how Simpana leverages SIS for information search and data mobility as well as how this approach complements block-based deduplication approaches found on certain disk-based storage solutions. (read more)

One would think that at some point organizations would reach the tipping point for storage consumption and that year-over-year storage capacity growth rates of 30%, 50%, 100% or more would come to an end, or at least slow down. If so, it hasn't occurred yet and, if anything, it shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future. Nowhere is this more evident than with the amount of data that companies need to archive and retain. (read more)

As the deduplication debates rage on, it is easy to forget that the debate occurs on many fronts. The debate that tends to receive the most attention is on which method of deduplication is better, "inline" or "post-processing", as it pertains to its use by disk-based backup appliances. However in the "Which is the best deduplication?" debate, an angle that tends to get overlooked is the one between file-based, such as is used by the CommVault® Simpana® software suite, and block-based deduplication. (read more)

Backup to disk is now seen as "The" solution for any company looking to solve its backup problems. Factor in deduplication as part of the disk-based backup solution and it is easy for companies to believe that they are well on their way to solving their backup problems. To a certain degree, that's true. Introducing disk almost always solves the immediate corporate pain of failed backups while shortening their backup windows. In fact, I am only aware of a few, isolated instances where that is not the case. (read more)

However as companies move towards archiving data on disk-based storage systems, you can't just always build bigger buildings or knock down walls. If anything, companies want to store more data in a smaller footprint. Making it more complicated, companies are creating exponentially more data than they were 10, 5 and even 2 years ago and keeping it for longer periods of time. Factor in mobile devices that manipulate existing data and create new data and the increasing use of video in corporations and the result is millions, billions and even trillions of file-based data elements that create thousands of terabytes of data. (read more)

One of the more agonizing choices that some companies face when looking to implement the same deduplication scheme across the enterprise is quantifying which version of deduplication to use: inline or post-processing. From a purist's viewpoint, inline (deduplicating data as it is ingested) is sometimes viewed as the best approach since data is deduplicated immediately as it is ingested. (read more)

One of the toughest aspects of being a storage administrator is finding reliable information that one can use to make decisions about competitive storage hardware or software products, especially when it comes to making decisions about newer technologies like Single Instance Storage (SIS). Even when data does become available, it is often too generic or not applicable to their situation so the individual is left in the position of either trusting the vendor's literature or doing some level of testing. In the case of Blessing Hospital's Technical Support Analyst II, Doug Barry, he opted for the latter. (read more)

Israel's The Marker and Globes Online are reporting this morning that IBM has made it official that it is acquiring Diligent Technologies. Though the two sources differ as to the terms of the deal (Globes Online reports $200 million while The Marker reports $168 million), my sources in Israel's IT community tell me that the $168 million number is the more accurate of the two numbers. Under the terms of the deal, IBM will pay $160 million for Diligent's intellectual property while the balance would be used to keep some of the existing employees onboard. (read more)

It is for these types of reasons that Quantum's field marketing and sales organization has developed what it refers to as its regional solutions specialists or "Tiger" teams to help businesses determine what size DXi deduplicating appliance is the best fit for its customer environments. When dealing with Quantum customers, their mission is to ensure and verify every customer has a positive experience with Quantum's deduplicating appliances. To do this, a core tenant of their responsibilities is doing the front end analysis that includes customer interviews and site surveys. (read more)

Day 1 of the Spring 2008 Storage Networking World is Orlando, Florida, is now in the books and with it came some interesting tidbits but nothing what I consider earth-shattering - at least at this point. First briefing of the conference was with Permabit's CEO Tom Cook, CTO Jered Floyd and VP of Marketing, Mike Ivanov. (read more)

I have expressed skepticism in the past about Diligent Technologies' ProtecTIER™ in light of the fact its primary go-to-market strategy is the enterprise open systems and mainframe environments. This strategy prompts me to exercise extreme diligence about their technology and architecture before endorsing it. The reason? The speeds and feeds that ProtecTIER is likely to encounter in enterprise shops are unlike what inline deduplication appliances will experience in small and midsize businesses and enterprises. (read more)

A majority of organizations still rely on tape as their primary means of data protection. However, with the increasing popularity of disk-based backup, companies are repurposing tape for their offsite data storage and longer term data retention needs. As they do so, new requirements for tape encryption and encryption key management are emerging. I recently had conversations with two individuals at Quantum Corporation to discuss these trends in data protection and how Quantum is responding to them. (read more)