Entries categorized under “Disk Based Backup”

Most organizations simply do not like to think about their backup problems. To many their backup problems feel so overwhelming and the steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. (read more)

Most organizations recognize that the introduction of disk into the data protection process is fundamentally changing the landscape of how data is protected. But what organizations are failing to entirely grasp is how disk fundamentally alters how applications can be protected and recovered. Disk can minimize the impact of data protection on production applications while providing shorter recovery times and improving recovery reliability. It is as organizations come to this realization that they also begin to grasp how recovery can displace backup as the next IT headache. (read more)

"We need cheaper and simpler backups and recoveries for our remote and branch offices." That statement is repeated more often by mid-size companies as they seek solutions that take the pain and management overhead associated with backup and recovery out of their remote offices without breaking the budget or requiring heroic efforts to implement. This is exactly the type of scenario that the recently announced DXi2500-D appliance and version 3.0 of Quantum Vision™ Software from Quantum is designed to address. (read more)

It's time to start thinking ahead. Over the next 60 - 120 days someone is going to acquire Data Domain - be it EMC, NetApp or some other suitor that may yet emerge. That means Data Domain, today's leading mid-market deduplicating disk-based appliance player, will be changing its colors. To discuss how and if ExaGrid can take advantage of this opportunity, I recently met with ExaGrid's CEO, Bill Andrews, to discuss this development, his perspective on the deduplication market as a whole and how ExaGrid stands to benefit (or lose) from Data Domain's acquisition. (read more)

Normally I refrain from immediately jumping in the fray when major announcements occur in the storage industry. This is in part because much of the initial news is often speculation with insufficient facts to support any meaningful conclusions. However the announcement yesterday that EMC and not NetApp may be the likely acquirer of Data Domain is of a little bit different nature since the future of Data Domain has now been up in the air for a few weeks. (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)

The proclivity of vendors to emphasize jumps in performance is almost as commonplace as the proclivity of IT veterans to view such claims in performance gains with high degrees of cynicism. So when a system administrator recently went on the record during a recent round table and said that he experienced a 4 - 5x improvement in testing and a 2x improvement in his production environment using Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) API for backup, it caught my attention. (read more)

Deduplication has emerged as "the" quick fix for the myriad of problems associated with enterprise backups. Deduplication enables organizations to shrink backup windows, minimize their reliance on tape, and more easily and cost effectively replicate their backup data to an offsite location. But as deduplication has grown in popularity, so has the number of ways that organizations can chose to implement it in their environment. (read more)

By now most enterprise backup users have heard about Symantec's new Open Storage (OST) API that was included as part of the Veritas NetBackup 6.5 release in August 2007. However the full benefits of OST are still largely unknown mostly because so few users are taking advantage of them. Now that more systems have added this feature, Symantec recently held a round table discussion during which it shared some of the progress that has occurred around OST with one early adopter on the call sharing a pretty amazing story about the performance gains that he has seen in his production environment using OST. (read more)

Recently Kelly Polanski (another DCIG analyst) and I had a rather lengthy discussion about the value of keeping archive and backup data on disk versus tape long term. We were both in agreement that using disk in some form as an initial backup target makes sense in most environments but as we started to debate the merits of keeping data on disk versus tape long term, the issue can get more cloudy. While DCIG has previously argued that eDiscovery is becoming a more compelling reason to keep archive and/or backup data on disk long term, the concerns we had centered on the fact that some disk-based archival and backup storage systems can become as problematic as tape. (read more)

It's easy for organizations to believe that disk will solve their backup problems. But some organizations are starting to discover that while disk solved some of their backup problems, they are still not realizing the full reductions in backup times and improved performance rates on their application servers that they may have initially expected. If an organization finds itself in this predicament, then it probably behooves them to take a closer look at their backup architecture and determine exactly how much backup traffic is going across their corporate LAN. (read more)

You can't talk about storage these days without including virtualization somewhere in the conversation. The Spring 2009 SNW was no different as one of its Summits was devoted to virtualization. The Tuesday, April 7, Virtualization Summit proved very interesting even though it was dominated by vendors. Some of the better data points that came out of this Summit were from TheInfoPro and Boston Medical Center. Also, interesting tidbits on SSD are emerging as SSD appears to solve performance challenges for VMware-access-to-storage in high I/O environments as well as performance intensive development environments. (read more)

In continuing my dialog about my insights at the Spring SNW 2008, I did multiple briefings on Tuesday, April 7, but none was more insightful than the sit-down meeting I had with Fusion-io's self proclaimed Chief Mind Bender Rick White. So while I plan to come back and cover material from some of the other briefings I had on Tuesday, what he revealed to me about what Fusion-io is doing and has on its roadmap is not just disruptive, it's disturbing. Granted, a lot of what he told me he promised that I not reveal but he told me enough public information to get my head reeling with possibilities. (read more)

Back in March I received a call from a records management provider in the upstate New York area who was inquiring, "How do I get started in providing disk-based backup for my current clients?" This records management provider currently only stores paper and tape in his company's facilities but rightly recognizes that there is a growing trend towards disk-based backup and did not want to be left out in the cold. But he was wondering what options were available in the market that he could offer his prospective clients. (read more)

Replication software is increasingly entering the conversation as the logical replacement for backup software in client environments. Yet replicating data is really the easy part. Integrating the replication software so it becomes part of the fabric of a company's infrastructure is a far more difficult task. It is also one of the reasons that replication software has, to date, made so little headway in terms of displacing backup software for enterprise wide data protection. But as replication software matures, that will change. (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)

The use of tape as a primary target for backup has changed over the years. The onslaught of low-cost, disk-to-disk based backup solutions coupled with the many problems associated with using tape as a primary target has rightfully enticed many data centers not to use tape in that capacity. But that does not mean there is no requirement to use tape within the data center. (read more)

A little over two years ago, an article appeared on the Smart Computing website that provided some tips for how to select the appropriate backup software for your PC. Of the tips it suggested, one of the more interesting was its recommendation to select backup software that stored data in a native format. Storing data in its native format eliminates the need to use backup software to recover it since any computer can access and recover the data. But this article was written for PCs. So the question that companies now need to ask is, "What do they need to consider before selecting a product that will allow them to store replicated data of its enterprise production servers in its native format?" (read more)

In this final entry in a three-part series, I finish my conversation with Deepak Mohan, Symantec's Information Management Group SVP, as he takes a look at some of the current gaps in data protection and recovery today, tape's evolving role in enterprises and why Symantec still views tape as a viable technology and why large enterprises in general and healthcare IT specifically can benefit from Symantec's suite of products. Mohan provides some specifics on data protection and recovery gaps in different market segments, why the transition from tape to disk is going to occur gradually and why enterprise organizations need an enterprise software solution that addresses all of the needs of today's organizations from the end-user to the data center. (read more)

The cost for small businesses and the remote offices of corporations to use networked storage for functions such as centralized storage, data protection and video surveillance is often cost prohibitive. But today's small business NAS products are changing that trend. Recently I met with Jonathan Huberman, President of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, to discuss Iomega's growing role in networked storage for small businesses. In this second of a 3-part series, Jonathan describes Iomega's NAS product offerings and how large corporations can leverage them to more cost-effectively store, protect and manage data in their remote offices as well as how businesses of any size can more easily build and deploy video surveillance solutions. (read more)

The folks at Quantum recently announced that they had cracked the code for Oracle RMAN, allowing their DXi deduplication appliances to screen out the metadata in RMAN files and greatly increase their dedupe results (read more)

Enterprise data protection software is experiencing a fundamental shift in terms of what organizations expect it to deliver and the amount of distributed structured and unstructured data that it needs to protect. As recently as a few years ago, the expectations of enterprise organizations were relatively modest - support for most major operating systems, integration with major applications (MS Exchange, Oracle, etc.) and tape library support - as compared to today's standards. While some of those requirements still hold true today, more has changed than has stayed the same. This is putting a great deal of pressure on data protection products to swiftly evolve. (read more)

Almost 3 years ago now, Robin Harris over at Storagemojo.com starting posting the list prices for different vendor's products so customers have at least a starting point when comparing product prices. Though I suspect the list prices associated with these vendors' offerings have changed since he originally posted some of them, what I specifically found remarkable is how difficult it is to ascertain what a deduplication solution will cost for an organization. The difficulty in pricing deduplication solutions had less to do with making sure you getting deduplication than making sure you include in your configuration all of the options that your environment needs, such as failover, NAS or VTL interfaces, data retention periods or replication, to effectively compare different solutions. (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)

While storage system vendors initially promoted the importance of deduplication to reduce disk capacities, more recent product releases show that their understanding of the value of deduplication is evolving to help address a broader set of data protection concerns that face IT departments in distributed environments. Yesterday's launch of version 1.1 of the Quantum DXi7500 provides a great example of this. (read more)