Entries categorized under “Disk Based Backup”

Innovation within the data center seems to be on the lips of IT managers, vendors, and analysts alike. Innovation, it is said, will pull us through this economic downturn even as organizations experience cutbacks in budgets, staff and just general doom and gloom. These innovations include maturing technologies such as virtualization, grid computing and deduplication coupled with management initiatives like consolidation, outsourcing and reduced expansion. These ensure organizations can continue to cut costs and stay on budget while creating more efficient data centers that are ready for whatever tomorrow brings. (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)

Are deduplication guarantees really something you can take to the bank? As more companies look towards using disk in general as a backup target and deduplicating systems specifically, deduplication guarantees are emerging as a way to influence users' decision to deploy deduplicating systems. But in these tightening economic times, deduplication guarantees do not necessarily guarantee money in the bank and may shift your attention away from more critical evaluation criteria such as system reliability, scalability, and performance. (read more)

Offering the appropriate technology solutions to your internal business customers is a priority for any technology manager that desires to provide high levels of service at the lowest possible costs, particularly in the troubling economic times that we are living in today. However, knowing when to pull the trigger and outsource a critical IT function such as backup versus making further investments in infrastructure choice is not so cut-and-dry when your name is on the dotted line. Further, every IT manager now regularly faces the "Do I continue investing in hardware and software upgrades to support the data growth in the data center and remote locations ?", or "Should I start leveraging the backup services of a Managed Service Provider via a cloud computing offering?" conundrum. (read more)

Despite what happens out on the pitch, the Premier League is experiencing a small awakening amongst its clubs - and some unexpected harmony - for their IT disaster recovery solutions. The challenges, demands and expectations to deliver a robust backup and recovery solution for these clubs is just as pronounced as any other corporate datacenter. However, faced with meeting the escalating salaries of their best football players, the IT staff often comes out on the short end in these organizations. (read more)

Having managed multiple types of storage systems from multiple different storage vendors, there are two flaws that are common across many vendors' storage systems: the inability to transparently migrate data to subsequent generations of their own hardware and the inability to share administrative permissions with other like storage systems from that vendor. How acute this problem is depends on how many storage systems a company manages and how often it replaces them. However any administrator that is responsible for managing five, ten or more storage systems in today's enterprise corporations understands exactly what I am talking about. (read more)

Any storage architect or administrator that has ever dared to accept the challenge of engineering or re-designing their company's backup and recovery environment has undoubtedly discovered that he or she has had to sacrifice functionality or features based on the practical limits of their budget. Reasons for this vary from vendor to vendor, but mostly it comes down to how many backup and recovery software options are they willing to pay for? Most vendors offer reasonably good licensing for the core software, but once you step outside of that realm, some of the most basics features are not included. (read more)

With all the debates going on out there today about which vendor offers the best deduplication approach, one wonders, "How is a customer supposed to make the right deduplication decision?" Of course, any approach that demonstrates real-life space reductions ratios makes the technology worth purchasing. But even in this scenario, there are several different camps about the best way to deduplicate data and where the deduplication should occur. Should companies deduplicate data on the client; should they do it using in-line processing; or, should they deduplicate data using a post-processing algorithm? (read more)

As small and midsize businesses (SMBs) take a look at the worsening economic crisis and begin to understand how it impacts them, reality is starting to set in. A recent survey reports that nearly 80 percent of SMBs are not convinced the U.S. government's $700 billion financial bailout will help them. Furthermore, SMBs' purchasing power is being drastically altered, which will undoubtedly cause ripple effects throughout the economy. Case in point, the reluctance and abrupt spending halt of SMBs has impacted SAP -- causing SAP's third-quarter earnings to tank. This has already prompted SAP to implement financial help and discounts on its software that is explicitly intended for SMBs. (read more)

One of the more elaborately crafted illusions that deduplication vendors have created over the last few years is that deduplication appliances are simply a "plug-n-play" proposition. In one respect, this is true. Companies can often introduce a deduplication appliance into their backup environment without substantially changing their existing backup configurations. Where the slight of hand comes in is when it comes to the vendor appropriately sizing the deduplication appliance for the client's environment. If it is too small or undersized, companies end up with a deduplication appliance that does not perform as anticipated; if it is too large, companies end up with an oversized appliance that costs them too much money. (read more)

As 2009 approaches, the traditional benchmarks for enterprise backup software such as the management of physical tape libraries, support for multiple operating systems and SAN backups are yesterday's news. Instead support for backup to disk, continuous data protection (CDP), protection for laptops and desktops and a common repository where protected data is stored, deduplicated and available for rapid access and search is how enterprise data protection software is now defined and measured. Yet even when one factors in these new benchmarks for enterprise data protection, how products such as Atempo Time Navigator play in this rapidly evolving space, and in which verticals they best play, are less than intuitive to the untrained eye. (read more)

Deduplication is rapidly becoming the new battleground in corporate backup and no technology vendor can afford not to enter this fray. Yet until recently, Dell, the world's third largest supplier of servers--and a leading supplier of data storage solutions - lacked any native disk-based backup appliance that was capable of deduplication. That changed earlier this month with its announcement that it will develop its own line of disk-based backup appliances that will use Quantum's software, of which deduplication and replication are primary features. (read more)

Continuous data protection has long been a staple for R1Soft on the Linux platform. With 90,000 to 95,000 servers protected by R1Soft's continuous data protection (CDP) product for Linux, one can only wonder how their recent release of CDP for the Windows platform will prevail. It was my pleasure to speak with David Wartell, VP and Founder of R1Soft about this new offering, what it entails, and how it will affect future Windows backups. (read more)

Anyone who works as an end-user is continually confronted with crafting SLAs for various infrastructure components. Aggravating the situation, once SLAs are signed-off on, it is nearly impossible to make changes without completely rocking the boat so it is extremely important to get it right from day one. (read more)

An area that is often overlooked in an IT infrastructure, at least until it's needed, is the backup and recovery environment. Then when the realization hits the company that it needs backup software, it's typically complex to install, configure and maintain, even in small environments, because of the fact that backup consists of so many moving parts (backup servers, tape robots, disk-based arrays, SAN networks, etc.). The good news is that more hardware and software vendors are stepping up to the plate and partnering to take some of the complexity out of installing and configuring backup software in these size environments. The most recent announcement between Dell and Symantec is the latest in the growing number of symbiotic relationships between hardware and software vendors in the backup space. (read more)

All enterprise businesses backup their data but how confident are they that they can restore it? As more companies adopt disk as their primary target for backup, they can be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that their issues associated with recovery are gone. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what some companies are finding out is that while their immediate backup problems are solved, their issues surrounding recovery are just beginning. Tape typically remains part of many companies' backup processes so the movement and recovery of data from tape media cannot be ignored and even recovering backup data from disk after it is copied to another disk system is not without its challenges. (read more)

The focus of cost controls in the data center is often centered on easily identifiable and quantifiable items such as servers, infrastructure and personnel. But for those who track the data center's steadily growing electric and gas bills, these costs have become a much larger cause of concern. Granted, energy costs have abated somewhat in recent weeks but companies cannot assume that trend will continue. Besides, some parts of the country already report that the availability of power to meet their current data center demands is restrained and that is without even beginning to address their future power requirements. (read more)

When server and storage managers out there hear the "A-Word" (Agents) come up in a conversation with a software vendor, they typically cringe, and think to themselves, "Oh great, another set of agents that I have to not only deploy but that I have to manage and track." In the server world, some agents are unavoidable, like performance/security monitoring, virus and worm detection and prevention etc. (read more)

Breaking new ground or turf wars? That's the question that crossed my mind when I heard that Symantec combined its Backup Exec and NetBackup product groups into one new Data Protection Group earlier this year. One of two things can happen in a scenario when you merge the engineering teams of the two data protection product market leaders, NetBackup and Backup Exec, into one. You either get outright war where nothing gets done and everything devolves into turf wars; or the two teams put aside their egos so they can take advantage of the new synergies that come from working together and sharing common code. So far, it strikes me more as the latter. (read more)

NAS is sometimes viewed as a challenge by enterprise shops if their intent is to use it as a target for disk-based backup. Two reasons often cited is that there is only a finite amount of storage capacity available on NAS and backup software does not handle out-of-space conditions on file systems very well. This causes failures in backup jobs as well as performance bottlenecks when multiple backup jobs are occurring . The use of grid storage architectures in products like the NEC HYDRAstor are helping to put some of these concerns to rest and making NAS a more practical option for use as a target for disk-based backup in enterprise shops. (read more)

To say that over the last few years Overland Storage has experienced a tsunami of events that have dramatically impacted the company would be an understatement. Looking at Overland's most recent SEC 10-K filing gives some hint as to the challenges of the last few years: HP notified Overland it planned to stop shipping its tape products; Dell agreed to resell Overland's tape libraries and then cancelled its agreement; Overland then reversed its decision to outsource the manufacturing of its products and bring manufacturing back in house. These developments, along with the rapid shift in the general business market from tape to disk as a backup target, led Overland to aggressively pursue the disk-based data protection market while leveraging its legacy tape technologies to deliver end-to-end data protection. (read more)

As disk-based backup and deduplication becomes more popular in the backup process, it is a natural next step to want to move data off-site. Whether this motivation is driven by disaster recovery requirements or centralizing backup data, replicating data from one disk-based subsystem to another is growing in popularity. It is as companies look to implement replication as part of their disk-based backup solution, especially when replicating data from remote and branch offices to central offices, that concerns about bandwidth availability inevitably arise. (read more)

When I recently attended VMworld 2008, I had the opportunity to get a closer look at NEC's latest HYDRAstor release, the HS8-2000, and some of its features. Of course at a trade show all you generally have the time and opportunity to do is take a quick look at some of the product's hardware and software features. But in this case there was a feature on the HYDRAstor that struck me just from the short time I spent evaluating it: the ability to create a 256 petabyte (PB) or larger file system. (read more)

In my many conversations with backup software vendors, I definitely get the sense that if they hear how great disk-based deduplication appliances are one more time, they will explode. Of course, part of the reason that deduplication appliances are getting under their skin while winning the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of many end-users is for one simple reason: turnkey deployments. But that option of turning primarily to disk-based backup providers for deduplication starts to change as today's joint announcement from Dell and CommVault makes plain. By bundling the CommVault® Simpana® software suite with the Dell PowerVault DL2000, companies can now purchase a single solution and get everything they need to protect their environment - data protection software, file deduplication and storage capacity. (read more)

The ease in which HYDRAstor's underlying grid storage architecture gives companies to migrate to higher capacity and faster performing hardware found in its new HS8-2000 make it easy to overlook some of its other new features. Part of the reason I devoted the last blog entry to HYDRAstor's self-evolving architecture is because I usually have to do just the opposite: educate readers about the advantages of upgrading to a new product so they can justify the pain of going through the migration. In HYDRAstor's case, it is so painless to upgrade and migrate to the new HS8-2000 release that it is almost easy to overlook its new features. (read more)