Program,CDP’

Tape Libraries and NAS Devices Covered under New ‘Cash for Junkers’ Program We have all heard of the pressures that the current economic downturn is having on companies. Since the beginning of the year, Wall Street Journal, Forrester Research and others have told us that spending on information-technology goods and services for this year is declining or will be declining. But these same outlets are also predicting the current bad economic times are coming to an end and that technology spending will increase again in 2010 across various categories to the degree of 7-10 percent. Despite this forecasted turnaround, some small- and medium- sized businesses (SMBs) can’t sit idle that long. SMBs still must manage data growth and protect more information regardless of economic conditions. So while many parts of a company can limp along through tough economic times, not continually updating the technology in their corporate data centers puts them at a decided disadvantage in supporting their business. As we enter into the fourth quarter of 2009, it seems that some companies are starting to loosen their IT budgets. Companies are still scrutinizing every dollar they spend, however, so they are trying to figure out how to get more for less and still solve their current data growth problems. In that vein, Overland Storage is doing its part to assure companies make every dollar that they spend count, at least in the area of data protection. In a “Cash for Junkers” program that Overland announced last week, the company is offering trade-in allowances for tape libraries and NAS devices when customers purchase a new NEO® E-Series tape library or Snap Server® NAS storage device. This program isavailable now until November 15, 2009, through Overland’s channel partners in North America. The program is fairly straightforward. Any customer, whether or not a current Overland customer, can work through one of the company’s many resellers. To qualify for the credit, the customer only has to let Overland know which product it wants to trade-in for a credit toward the purchase of a new Overland system. The reseller then will take care of the rest by validating the eligibility of the trade-in, and once approved, will pass on the savings to the customer. One aspect of the program that Overland is emphasizing is its intent to make this easy for both customers and resellers. Initially, Overland had considered constructing a matrix of which products would be eligible for “Cash for Junkers” program but quickly realized that this would become too complex to implement and administer. So to avoid the same headaches that the Federal government ran into with its recent “Cash for Clunkers” program,Overland elected to make this an “honor” system. While the intent is to be flexible in the administration of the program, not every device will qualify. One of the main prerequisites for trade-in is it must be of an equal type. For instance, if a company wants to trade-up to a new tape library, then it must trade in a tape library. The same principle holds for a disk storage device. In other words, customers should not expect to trade in a tape drive or an externally attached hard disk drive and receive a large trade-in credit. For customers who have legacy tape libraries or disk storage devices, however, the savings offered is generous. Customers can see savings of up to $7,000 off the purchase of Overland’s next-generation NEO4000E tape library and up to a $500 credit toward the purchase of any of Snap Server rack-mountable 1U products. A complete list of the available savings can be found in a FAQ document on the Overland website. Companies are still struggling with purchasing decisions as economic uncertainty continues to pervade, so it’s nice to see storage providers such as Overland Storage have not forgotten about these challenges. Overland’s “Cash for Junkers” program makes it easier for SMBs to justify the replacement of their tape or disk storage devices now, so they do not have to worry about putting their steadily growing pools of data at risk. The fact that Overland has made this trade-in program about as easy as it possible for customers is an attractive benefit. CDP’s Most Compelling Use Cases May Have Little or Nothing to do with Data Protection About a month ago I wrote a blog that examined four (4) reasons that continuous data protection (CDP) technology is starting to gain some momentum among end users. However among these four reasons that I listed, there are other more compelling reasons for organizations to adopt CDP. Because even though CDP is typically viewed, positioned and explained in the context of backup and recovery, this may ultimately be the wrong way to view this technology. The reasons for using CDP for data protection and recovery are pretty well documented. There are no gaps in your data protection. You eliminate backup windows. You can do any point-in-time recoveries. You can do roll forward and roll back recoveries. You can extend the same high levels of data protection and recovery to more of your applications as opposed to just reserving it for your most expensive, mission critical application servers. These are all valid reasons for using CDP. But viewing CDP strictly in this context ignores an often overlooked truth. In all of the years that I worked as a system administrator, I maybe did 20 – 30 recoveries during that entire time and, at most, maybe 20% of them truly required the recovery capabilities that CDP offers. This is not to say that it would not have been nice to have CDP’s functionality the other 80% of the time or even all of the time. It would have been great! However using CDP strictly in the context of backup and recovery may not demonstrate the cost savings that are necessary for companies to take funds budgeted for backup and recovery and re-allocate them for CDP. The good news is that three emerging use cases for CDP that have little or nothing to do with backup and recovery can make the business case for CDP so compelling that organizations may not even need budgeted monies for backup and recovery to pay for CDP. These new use cases for CDP include: Measure data change rates in applications. This may seem like a quirky way to justify the deployment of CDP but I have talked to more than one organization that is now using CDP for this exact reason. More organizations than ever are looking to implement off-site disaster recoveries but to effectively use replication, they have to send data over a WAN link to the target site. Here’s where the problem comes in. It is difficult to find a tool that quickly and easily quantifies how much your data is changing, when it is changing and how much of it is changing over a 24 hour period so you can properly size your WAN link. Daily incremental backups at best give you an estimate of how much data has changed over a 24 hour period but may provide little insight into what data has changed, when it is changing or how frequently it is changing. This is where CDP software can help. One of its little known features is that it can measure how much data is changing, how fast it is changing and even when it is changing. For example, NetBackup RealTime includes a free Advisor add-on that can help users make these types of assessments. It tracks changes on individual application servers so organizations can measure data change rates and then appropriately size their WAN links so they are large enough to handle peak loads during the day without making them too large. Maximize utilization of existing storage while minimizing new purchases. I brought out in my last blog that companies can use CDP snapshots for test and development but there is also another cost saving at work here as well. Maximizing storage utilization does not just mean achieving 80 – 90% utilization rates on storage. It can also mean using the same storage for multiple purposes without making more copies of the data on other storage. Organizations can present and use the disk behind the CDP solution for more than just recoveries; they can actually run test and development applications right on the disk that the CDP solution front ends. One of Symantec’s internal test and development team uses its RealTime product in this exact way. Since Symantec is also looking to reduce its own storage costs, it found that it could avoid spending money on additional storage by presenting RealTime snapshot images of its production data to its test and development applications. Expedite non-disruptive eDiscoveries. Recently I spoke to a system administrator that was dealing with multiple concurrent eDiscovery requests which were consuming precious resources on his production servers. CDP can help here as well. By presenting CDP snapshots to the server doing the eDiscovery, the searches can occur faster and without disrupting the production application. Further, if information is found that is germane to the eDiscovery, organizations are now in a better position to retain that snapshot or back it up to tape for longer term retention. CDP can address an organization’s data protection and recovery problems in ways that are simply not possible using backup software. However this use case alone may be insufficient to make a business case for CDP and may not even turn out to be the best justification for deploying CDP.

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