Entries categorized under “Disk Based Backup”

Backup is about more than just deduplication ratios and faster backups. While these are important, companies also want assurance that the solution that they deploy in-house is continually developing, will help them manage their existing backup infrastructure and will scale as they grow. Today's announcements from Quantum indicate that it is committed to making these ongoing, continual and incremental changes to its product lines (hardware and software) in order to meet current and future customer demands. (read more)

However my intent is not to leave readers hanging or fretting as to what storage systems they can select that take this problem into account. The NEC HYDRAstor is one such product that has taken steps to address this issue. HYDRAstor includes a feature called Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) that is able to offer more protection than RAID 5 or RAID 6 without their rebuild performance drawbacks. Because HYDRAstor is based on a grid storage architecture, it can by default survive the failure of not only multiple disk drives but also multiple Storage Nodes. The default setting is 3 disk drives or 3 Storage Nodes if multiple nodes are present (based on the video on the HYDRAstor web site, it looks like a company needs at least 12 nodes for a company to have assurance it can recover from the failure of 3 different nodes). (read more)

Here's a question for you to answer. Backup software and continuous data protection (CDP) software: same or different? And if different, is CDP software a replacement kind of different or a complimentary kind of different? This is a critical question for companies to answer as they contemplate the adoption of CDP software in their enterprise because the answer to it influences how companies spend their money and in what circumstances. (read more)

Almost any disk-based solution - deduplicating or otherwise - is going to expedite backups and recoveries. Sure, some solutions may deduplicate better or do it faster but at the end of the day most companies are at the point that putting in place any disk-based system that supports replication and deduplication is better than dealing with the current backup pain. However what companies often fail to account for is how fast their backup data stores grow when they start backing up data to disk. More than once I've talked to system administrators in companies where "undisclosed" or "hidden" departmental application servers start to come out of the woodwork once department managers hear that corporate IT backup processes actually work. (read more)

The one I want to focus on in this entry is Televaulting's new replication functionality. Replication is a key function in any facet of the storage landscape and, with Asigra adding this feature into its latest release of Televaulting, it becomes an even more robust player in the enterprise space. (read more)

Overland Storage's ULTAMUS RAID near-line data protection products and REO SERIES disk-based backup solutions provide a solid starting point for addressing customers' data protection requirements. However, Pendekanti astutely points out that the market is ravenous for innovation and it's obvious from recent management changes that Overland Storage feels the need to pick up the pace to become more competitive in the rapidly changing data protection market. (read more)

It is easy to understand why disk-based backup solutions such as Quantum's DXi Series are growing in popularity as a primary target for backups. Disk shortens backup times, expedites recoveries and removes the inconsistent results that tape delivers when used as a primary backup target. However the difficulties that arise with using disk as a primary backup target are less intuitive. Disk solves the immediate pain of backup but creates other less intuitive, longer term data management issues. (read more)

It is no secret that Overland Storage (Nasdaq: OVRL) endured a period of declining sales and management shake-ups in 2007 and 2008. A new CEO, VP of worldwide sales and VP of marketing in the past year indicate the company is trying to right itself from a leadership perspective. These changes provide insight as to where Overland Storage intends to go as it starts its makeover. Yet this transition will be far from easy as traditional technologies like tape libraries and drives are now taking secondary roles in organizational backup processes. Because of this, Overland Storage needs to make more than just leadership changes but move disk-based storage and deduplication products to the forefront of its product strategy. (read more)

At recent storage conferences (Storage Decisions, Storage Networking World, etc.) replication has emerged as a hot topic of discussion among end-users. In talking with these different users and listening in on a number of end-user panel discussions, there are a number of factors that they attribute to their increased interest in using replication as part of their company's overall disk-based data protection strategy. (read more)

David: The Data Collectors can do an automated discovery of new VMs by connecting to either individual VMware ESX servers, XenSource servers or a Virtual Management Center, which stores and organizes data about physical hosts and VMs. The Data Collector provides a GUI that displays the new VMs that require backup so all an administrator needs to do is select the VM from the Televaulting management interface to initiate backups on those VMs. (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)

In this entry, David explains why an appropriately configured Data Collector is so important to data protection and information recovery and what features Asigra has introduced into Televaulting in time to ensure its Data Collectors are appropriately configured in order to optimize the management and placement of data long term. David also shares his views on the use of removable media in data protection and information recovery. (read more)

Have you ever looked at a technology solution that left you wondering why a specific technology matters? I often look at a technology solution and take note of its many features but then may walk away thinking it was a slick presentation but wonder why I should care about it? So when I evaluate a technology solution, I first look to see if it solves a real problem. This can include making me more productive, addressing a key operational pain point or in some way reducing operational costs. (read more)

Hard-disk drive storage is taking center stage as the preferred media for enterprise archiving, data protection and information recovery needs. But as the shift to using disk for long term data storage needs occurs, companies are coming to realize that the software that they have relied on for years is, in many instances, poorly equipped to deal with the management of hard-disks as part of their larger data management scheme. Optimizing the placement of data on hard-disks, replicating data to disk storage systems at different sites and then recovering the data are new challenges that companies face as they introduce larger capacity hard-disks into their environment. (read more)

Configuring, allocating and then managing storage capacity on storage systems has been to date been a very tenuous proposition. To address this, thin provisioning has recently emerged as a way for storage systems to only reserve the storage capacity that is actually needed. By monitoring when data is written to a storage system, it eliminates the need to allocate extra, unneeded storage capacity for an application. In so doing, thin provisioning provides a more efficient and cost effective approach to storage capacity management. However to date thin provisioning has been the exclusive domain of a few NAS and SAN based storage systems. (read more)

Now that this agreement between EMC and Quantum is out in the open, the real question becomes what does Quantum hope to gain from this relationship? On the surface, it appears this agreement puts EMC and Quantum at loggerheads in the rapidly growing space of deduplication. While EMC and Quantum will use different hardware, the software that drives their respective disk systems will be based on Quantum's technology. In this respect, much of the functionality found in the software will be the same, including the policy-based deduplication I detailed in an earlier blog, though Quantum is putting more emphasis on features such as direct tape creation given its continued focus on integration of disk and tape resources within the enterprise. (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)

Despite some of the rumors that were floating around that user attendance was down and not as many vendors were in attendance, I did not necessarily find that the case. I ran into Lindsay Mullen, TechTarget's event coordinator, in the exhibit hall. She said that about 550 end-users had registered for the event and that she still expected another small influx of end-users on Wednesday. Also, in talking to other analysts and TechTarget editors who were in attendance, they said that all of the break-out sessions were full. The number of vendors exhibiting did, however, seem to be down from years past but not as much as I anticipated. Off-hand, I am guessing that the number of vendors exhibiting was about two-thirds of past events. (read more)

In the face of these fundamental shifts among corporate data centers in server data protection and virtualization, data protection software needs to do more than just adapt. It needs to embrace backup-to-disk and server virtualization in order to transform data protection software into an information recovery platform. That is exactly what today's 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting brings to the table in the following ways: (read more)

Paulk revealed that he is now in full production with the production code loaded on the NEC HYDRAstor. However he is still using the same hardware configuration (two Accelerator Nodes and four Storage Nodes) that he started out using due to the high deduplication ratio that he is achieving with the HYDRAstor. Last fall he was achieving a 17:1 deduplication ratio and hoped to eventually achieve a 35:1 ratio. Six months later, his deduplication ratio is now approximately 39:1 which has mitigated his need to buy additional capacity and has driven his cost/GB down to approximately 70¢/GB. "It's like getting 390 TB for the price of 10 TBs," says Paulk. (read more)

Any time one looks at midrange backup appliances, the appliances are almost always NAS based. When configured this way, the backup appliance is attached to the local LAN it appears as a filer server to the backup server and files are backed up to a folder on that appliance. Though I initially called to speak to Overland Storage's Senior Product Manager, Jeff Graham, about REO's Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) technology, I first wanted to get some clarification on why Overland Storage's REO-series appliances are configured as Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) rather than as a NAS-based appliance. (read more)

Bringing backup data from remote and branch offices back to a home office is a particularly thorny problem that enterprises continue to face. Directly sending nightly full, incremental or differential backup jobs over a wide area network (WAN) connection back to the home office can saturate the WAN link and cause backups to exceed backup windows and result in failed backups. However the current procedure of backing up data to disk or tape at the remote site perpetuates the problem of how to most efficiently and securely transmit backup data back to the home office or disaster recovery site. (read more)

NEC's Vice President of Advanced Storage Products, Karen Dutch, recently brought out some salient points about storage management in her Spring 2008 SNW presentation, "Defining Storage Solutions in the Data Center 2.0". Specifically, she described the features that new storage architectures should deliver in order to keep storage management manageable as storage growth in organizations continues. Of course, the not-so-subtle message is that NEC's HYDRAstor delivers on these new features. (read more)

In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage's Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website. (read more)

Once Energy XXI's IT Director Andrew Schaefer had determined that a traditional tape backup system was not going to fit the needs of Energy XXI long term, he began to explore the possibility of using a hosted third party backup and recovery solution. Driving this decision was a number of factors. (read more)