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. Rather than using CDP in conjunction with sizing WAN network links for replication or disaster recovery, improving and reducing the costs associated with test and development and expediting eDiscoveries are other ways CDP can be used that are much more practical and help to transform CDP from a nice-to-have technology into one that becomes part of how organizations cost-effectively manage their business.

Common Sense and Toxic Management Do NOT Go Hand-in- Hand

This week I am taking my weekly recap blog on industry news and trends in a little different direction based on a conversation I had this past week with an IT Manager. Everyone knows the economy is bad, IT staffers are being laid off or taking pay cuts and management is scrutinizing every purchase but an experience I had this last week bordered on the edge of ridiculous.

I ran into a friend of mine who works (or rather, had worked) as an IT Manager at the headquarters for a large national company located here in Omaha. When I asked how things were going, he responded by saying that he had just parted ways with his company because he could not tolerate being classified by his company as a “Toxic Manager” despite saving his company millions of dollars over the last few years.

I’ve known this individual for years, had lunches with him on occasion and have even toured his data center. He ran a tight ship, kept his pulse on technology and sought to make the right decisions for his company’s data center. So when he told me he had been termed a “Toxic Manager” by his company’s HR department and that they had come to the “mutual” decision that he should leave, it floored me.

We went on to discuss some of the circumstances around how he came to be classified as a “Toxic IT Manager” and the “mutual” decision for him to leave. He explained there were two factors that contributed to him receiving that classification.

The first is he was seeking to reduce the amount of redundant products in his data center that provided no additional value. While he didn’t provide a lot of examples, one that he cited was that like many companies, his organization had been going through a series of data center consolidations over the last few years and he had inherited and eventually was managing 5 backup software products. So one initiative he embarked on was to get the number down to one to lower costs and simplify management. By the time he had left a week ago, he had the number of backup software products down to 2.

However he suspects that it was the fact that it was in how he was trying to manage the employees that he had inherited over the years during the consolidations that ultimately led to the problems he had with his employer and his eventual dismissal. More specifically, in the same way that he sought to bring the number of backup software products under control, he was also seeking to end some of the free-wheeling technology decisions that some of the employees that he inherited were making. He believed that it was his efforts to curtail their independence and their subsequent complaints to HR that eventually led to his departure.

In this respect, I feel both sympathy and empathy for him. IT people can be some of the smartest people of the world but also some of the most difficult to manage. He and I both agreed that creativity and new ideas are desperately needed in data centers but it has to be tempered with the reality that you are running mission-critical applications that require routine tasks such as backups, operating system patches and data migrations to be executed flawlessly.

The trouble that he ran into is that the same individuals who were the most creative were also the most free-wheeling and impatient. When running operations in a data center, creativity and the routine do not always mix well as creativity has to be tempered with the successful if unglamorous execution of the routine. This is where he ran into loggerheads with his employees. They did not agree with his stance that they could continue to act in an autonomous manner so they took their case to HR and his VP and it eventually led to him having to leave the company.

Now I am willing to concede there may be more to this story than what he is telling me but I am aware of at least a few other incidences where this has occurred in other companies in recent months. Smart but conservative individuals in IT management or architect positions that had made and were making sound technology decisions are being forced out of their companies under the guise of “Cost-cutting” or “Toxic Management”.

I cannot help but believe this will come back to bite these companies in the coming months and years and, with the growth of technologies like cloud computing and cloud storage, that these same companies will find themselves purchasing these types of services with these individuals that they dismissed at the helms of these companies in the years to come. I guess the upside is that while in the short term it will be difficult for these individuals and their families, the fact that they are out on their own now will likely lead to better opportunities for them later on.

Next week I will return to the normal focus of my weekly recap blogs where I take a look at industry events, news and rumors that catch my eye and ear. However I digressed this week because when I start to hear about good people being let go from companies even when they are saving money and making smart decsions, to me it is an indicator that the economy has probably hit bottom. Smart people with common sense and good work ethics stay busy and keep doing the things that turn the economy around, even if it is for other companies or their own company that give them the opportunity and freedom to do so. An Automated Disaster Recovery Solution is the Lynchpin to a Viable Business Continuity Plan

“Business Continuity” and “Disaster Recovery” are two aspects of IT and business planning and process management that no organization can afford to get wrong. So it is somewhat disconcerting that a recent article reports that the majority of businesses do not yet have a disaster recovery plan or business continuity process in place or, if they do, they do not regularly test it. But of greater concern is that many users still fail to understand the differences between business continuity and disaster recovery and how these processes should be individually implemented and managed.

The lack of understanding about these two processes was brought into focus by a recent blog that appeared on the Storage Monkeys’ website. The challenges that users face according to this blog is that vendors have a proclivity to refer to any type of IT mishap as a “disaster” and that once this occurs they need to begin a “disaster recovery” exercise using a “business continuity” solution. Mixing this terminology is resulting in users becoming confused about the two terms and even prompted the blogger to educate himself about the differences between “business continuity” and “disaster recovery”.

“Business continuity” and “disaster recovery” processes are related to one another but only in the sense that “disaster recovery” is a subset of “business continuity”. These two processes are summarized as following:

Business continuity (BC) is the ability for a business to continue all of its operations but especially its critical business functions even in the face of difficult circumstances such as a disaster. An important part of a business continuity plan is recovering and running your business operations at an alternate site. This includes not only DR but also things like how do I get my people there, where do they stay, how do I keep the facility secure, how do I handle communications, etc. In short, BC can be summarized by the following equation: “BC = IT infrastructure recovery + people + process“. A disaster recovery (DR) refers to the specific plans and processes that a business puts in motion when a disastrous event occurs be it a manmade (human error, terrorism, war) or natural (earthquake, flood, or hurricane) occurrence. DR is the “IT infrastructure recovery” component in the BC equation and depends on technologies like backup tapes, CDP, replication, etc. to recover at a remote site.

Here is where the confusion often arises. Replication software vendors routinely claim to offer business continuity solutions but replication software does not have anything to do with solving the people and process components of the BC equation. All replication software addresses is IT infrastructure recovery and maybe even more specifically application recovery.

However because so much of an organization’s total disaster recovery plan depends on recovering applications first, recovering applications quickly is critical to recovering the business as a whole. So whatever an organization can do to automate application recoveries when a disaster occurs can directly impact whether or not a business survives when a disaster strikes.

Granted, a business can never account for every possible disaster that might occur and put in place a solution that automates recoveries for every scenario. But a business can account for more disasters than it might think. Fires, floods, human errors, power outages and tornados are all examples of minor and major disasters that can be addresses partially or in whole addressed by putting in place a solution like InMage Systems Scout that can help businesses quickly recover should a disaster strike.

Understanding the differences between business continuity and disaster recovery is critical to quantifying where businesses are at in their recovery planning. But once businesses understand that disaster recoveries are a subset of business continuity and application recoveries are even a subset of disaster recovery, then it becomes critical for businesses to identify solutions that automate applications recoveries should a disaster actually occur. Solutions like InMage Systems Scout can serve as the lynchpin to delivering a viable business continuity plan for the entire organization and move them come closer to delivering on this ideal

One Service Provider Says Goodbye to FC Disk Drives And Hello to ATA for its Oracle Production Workloads

Storage system providers sometimes allege that ATA disk drive performance and reliability is no match for FC disk drives and ATA disk drives should certainly never be used in conjunction with enterprise applications such as Oracle databases. But when the cost of SATA come in at about half the price as FC disk drives, it behooves organizations to take a hard look to see if they can justify making the switch if it can be done without compromising the availability, performance and reliability of the data that it hosts.

ATA drives are breaking out of their initial deployments in disk-to-disk backups environments where FC disk drives are too costly. Through the implementation of FC-to-SATA bridges, ATA has emerged as a viable storage architecture alternative that can now support production applications. Of course, this may make sense when hosting file server data but is it still such a good idea when hosting production Oracle database applications on this tier of disk? In these situations, one has to balance the risk versus reward of how well these ATA disk drives will perform under these types of application loads. To get an answer, I turn to a recent interview that DCIG conducted with Anthony Tarone, Director of Service Operations for CEDAR Document Technologies, and what his experiences were when he made such a switch..

CEDAR Document Technologies requires a lot of I/O performance from its backend storage system. Daily it receives anywhere from a few MBs of data from its smaller customers to hundreds of GBs of data from its larger customers. Once it receives the data, it validates, extracts, transforms, loads, and generates another 10-20 GBs of data to produce and electronically deliver the various documents for its customers that they then archive.

Further, CEDAR supports a growing base of customers using secure single sign on (SSO) transactions, has about 140 million documents in Oracle, and often retains archives for customers for 6-8 years. In a nutshell, CEDAR had a lot of different transaction types and storage options to manage. This environment makes it an ideal candidate to evaluate the performance and reliability of ATA-based disk drives in a mission critical environment. The need for CEDAR to make a decision on ATA came to a head in 2007. It had been running its small customer base on 8TBs of direct attached storage plus some NFS for file sharing. However customer growth was pushing CEDAR beyond what its current infrastructure could support. After evaluating a variety of technologies and vendors, CEDAR made the investment in a 3PAR InServ storage system that supported a number of technologies, including ATA or “Nearline” drives.

The InServ storage systems gave CEDAR greater processing capacity and easier scalability on the storage layer as well as new freedom to utilize 3PAR’s virtualization technology that distributed chunklets of data across its disks. Because of rapid growth and an unclear picture of future I/O loads with new customers and applications coming online, CEDAR opted for Nearline drives instead of the more expensive FC drives.

This may seem like a risky proposition to some but the decision was actually grounded in sound reasoning. The distributed nature of the 3PAR architecture provides wide- striping and improved I/O over a standard ATA-based array, log file write-performance that approaches the millisecond-range and the ability to plug in faster FC disks later as they needed proved to be a good decision for CEDAR. 3PAR calls such a solution “Nearline for Online,” that is the ability to run demanding primary storage applications on a cost-optimized (ATA-class) storage tier. Contributing to its decision to select 3PAR, other vendors were seeking firm performance and throughput estimates for array sizing that was difficult for CEDAR to provide and was unnecessary for the 3PAR configuration which touts an ability to handle unplanned growth and changing workloads. Also, another system would have locked CEDAR into an architecture that was not as flexible, distributed, or capable of handling a mix of ATA and FC drives without taking a performance hit.

As CEDAR’s customer base continues to grow, and it adds more disks to accommodate storage requirements, performance continues to get better as I/O is distributed across more disks. The point is that CEDAR was not been able to justify nor did it have a real need to pay for traditional FC disks which are 2 – 3X more expensive than the nearline drives. Instead it was able to implement a low cost hardware solution and still support Oracle which has enabled CEDAR to successfully continue to store over 140 million documents and service its customers in a timely manner.

At the end of the day, the combination of flexibility (and budget) pushed CEDAR towards 3PAR. Being a service provider, CEDAR is continually concerned with building in high availability for the services it provides at the best possible cost. With 3PAR, CEDAR has not had to purchase expensive FC disk, has not had a single outage since deployment 2 ½ years ago and, because of 3PARs technologies and virtualization platform, CEDAR has been able to use the ATA-class drives for all production services without negatively impacting performance, SLAs, or experiencing any risk of any sort; even to the extent of running high-performance Oracle databases.

Using 3PAR storage and its service and support, CEDAR is well positioned to continue adding new customers without fear of a breakdown in its storage infrastructure. The question of FC or ATA disk is now a moot point as 3PAR makes use of, and has for a while, a FC-to-SATA bridge that enables high-capacity ATA drives to be integrated into its storage arrays that provides customers like CEDAR a low-cost but highly available storage infrastructure for even the most demanding application loads. RELDATA Updates Private Storage Cloud Offering to Meet Emerging Needs of Midsize Businesses

It is commonly suspected that midsize organizations have the same priorities as their enterprise counterparts especially when it comes to managing their IT infrastructures. However a study released a few months ago removed whatever doubt may have existed as it revealed that the majority of midsize businesses place a premium on improving efficiency and increasing employee productivity. So today’s announcement from RELDATA that it is releasing a private storage cloud offering that addresses those exact concerns for these size businesses could not be more appropriately timed.

In early July, IBM released the results of a study that it commissioned the Opinion Research Corporation to conduct in the first half of 2009 that specifically targeted midsize businesses. One of the key findings that came out of this report was that 80% or more of the over 1700 midsize businesses surveyed cited improving efficiency and increasing employee productivity as key priorities.

Of course, knowing where to start to deliver on these two priorities is never easy, but a logical starting point for midsize businesses is simplifying their server and storage management. While many midsize businesses currently use direct-attached and network file servers to store their application server data that is expected to change in the next few years.

Midsize businesses everywhere are starting to adopt server virtualization for the administrative, hardware and power efficiencies and space savings that it can provide. However server virtualization also increases the likelihood of switching to a networked storage environment as some estimates put the attach rates of virtual servers to external storage as high as 70%.

Midsize businesses must be prepared to account for the complexities that networked storage can introduce. Already they may have few or no people dedicated to managing their current IT infrastructure or, if they do, they are a jack-of- all-trades administering everything – applications, desktops, network, servers and storage – which leaves them little or no time to learn the intricacies associated with storage networking.

This point is best illustrated by a conversation I recently had with an IT manager at theVMworld conference center earlier this month. He works for a regional bank in the Dallas, TX, area and we were discussing how he prioritizes his day. From his perspective, he said it is all about keeping the IT infrastructure running smoothly so IT operations appear invisible to the business.

While the “techie” side of him wants to delve into and learn about the “bells and whistles” that individual systems offer, the business side of him prevents that. He primarily looks for solutions that work as quickly as possible, with as little intervention on his part as possible. In other words, he just wants to “set it and forget about it”.

That’s why I see today’s announcement of the next-generation of the RELDATA 9240i OS – the RELvos 2.4 – as being significant for midsize businesses. RELDATA’s solutions have always unified block and file storage. When RELDATA released its first solutions in 2005, it in essence provided a private storage cloud before the term became popular by enabling organizations to either buy a complete storage hardware and software solution or to use RELDATA’s solution in conjunction with their existing storage assets.

Today’s announcement enhances RELDATA’s core functionality. RELvos 2.4, through its virtualized operating system, addresses specific concerns that midsize businesses will have as they virtualize their servers and look to attach networked storage to them. The RELvos OS offers three specific new benefits that will appeal to midsize businesses including:

Support of high availability (HA) via iSCSI bridging/mirroring. As midsize businesses move to networked storage, high availability is a primary feature they will want in the solution. Adding support for high availability via iSCSI bridging and mirroring removes concerns about network failures between the virtual server and the RELDATA storage appliance so that attached applications can continue to operate uninterrupted. Support for setting automatic expiration date for snapshots and clones. This feature actually provides two important benefits for midsize businesses. First, creating snapshots and clones can eliminate backup and recovery windows since these businesses can use these snapshots as the source for backups and recoveries. Second, setting automated expiration dates is important because it eliminates the hassle associated with deleting the snapshots and clones after they are created. Plus, the 9240i can then reclaim the storage used by these snapshots and clones. Storage task automation. Sometimes a feature is better late than never and I would put this feature in that category. Thankfully RELDATA included adaptive storage wizards in this release of the RELvos OS, as wizards can go a long way towards simplifying and automating the complex and often time-consuming tasks that storage management can become as well as making the adoption of networked storage more palatable to these businesses. Midsize businesses are actively looking for new ways to increase efficiencies and make their employees more productive and they stand to benefit greatly from server virtualization. However as they do, introducing networked storage will likely accompany the introduction of server virtualization into their environment. Further, it is now becoming the prevalent thought that deploying a private storage cloud is the best way to implement networked storage.

RELDATA is well positioned to help small businesses deliver on this objective. It provides midsize businesses a networked storage solution in the form of a private storage cloud that meet their current and future storage needs without putting an undue storage management burden on the business or creating new risks that they can not manage.

Symantec Brings RealTime CDP into NetBackup Data Management Fold

New corporate mandates for improved application availability are placing a new premium on software that can deliver centralized data management. These requirements call for software that can provide a central management console from which data management policies can be set and applied. Enterprise backup software is where many organizations are looking to deliver this functionality but for this to become a reality, features like archiving, continuous data protection (CDP), deduplication and support for disk-based backup targets must come under backup software’s purview.

The demand for backup software to function as the focal point for enterprise data management started some time ago. Over a year ago in July 2008, SearchDataBackup.com ran an article on how backup software was evolving to take on more data management tasks. It specifically pointed out that software vendors were integrating the management of separate products from their own portfolio as well as products from other companies under the umbrella of their flagship enterprise backup software products.

More recent articles have also commented on this growing corporate need for a more robust data management solution. Fred Moore, President ofHorison Information Strategies, recently said in an article, “No one knew then (20 years ago) that these distributed computing systems would one day be asked to do the work of a mainframe and to access as much data as their mainframe counterparts, if not more.” In that same article, he goes on to say, “… a non-mainframe equivalent of DFSMS (Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem) has become highly desirable and is now long overdue.”

While enterprise backup software may never reach the equivalent of DFSMS (and may never need to), software providers are supporting more features so they can all be managed by the software provider’s primary enterprise backup software product.

For instance, Symantec NetBackup has increased its integration with its Enterprise Vault (archiving) product line, added deduplication with its NetBackup PureDisk software and now supports disk-based backup targets with its OpenStorage API (OST). A particular area of focus in 2009 for NetBackup is heightening its integration with its NetBackup RealTime CDP software to better deliver on new corporate requirements for improved application availability. NetBackup RealTime is an appliance-based CDP solution intended for the protection of multiple hosts. Residing in corporate FC-SANs as a side-band appliance, it sits outside of the data path between application servers and their assigned storage to eliminate any possibilities of application disruption.

CDP in general and NetBackup RealTime specifically are capturing more attention in organizations because they eliminate the downtime associated with hardware failures or data corruptions. One of CDP’s principle benefits when obtained from a software provider is that it eliminates the need to have ‘like’ disk storage hardware for the secondary data store. Used in this manner, organizations can potentially use any tier of any storage hardware as a CDP target.

NetBackup RealTime and its integration with NetBackup further distinguish RealTime from other CDP products in three important ways:

NetBackup RealTime works in conjunction with existing NetBackup agent. RealTime copies write I/Os as they occur and then leverages NBU’s existing integration with numerous applications (Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, etc.) to insert bookmarks into the writes that are then sent to the RealTime server. These bookmarks indicate points of application consistency without which organizations could not confidently recover applications back to specific points in time. When these bookmarks are used in conjunction with RealTime’s SAN-based architecture, it also becomes possible for organizations to achieve consistency for applications such as Microsoft SharePoint that may have instances on multiple physical or virtual servers.

NetBackup RealTime makes a mirror of the production volume and then updates the mirror as changes occur. Most other CDP products create an initial mirror of the production volume and then log or journal the write I/Os, only applying these logged changes when a recovery is needed. RealTime’s technique of applying writes to the production volume mirror is done to facilitate the types of recoveries that mission critical application need as their users almost always want the most recent copy of data. Using RealTime’s technique, application recoveries can occur almost instantaneously since these copies can be mounted and presented immediately to the application without waiting for the logged changes to be applied to the mirrored copy of the data.

The importance of this feature becomes more evident over time. Other CDP products can get slower as they require users to apply changes to the mirror. Conversely RealTime removes changes from the mirror which is less likely since users more frequently tend to want the latest moment in time for recovery. The fact that Symantec has several patents in this area also makes it more likely that RealTime will retain its competitive advantage.

NetBackup RealTime recoveries are centrally managed through NetBackup. Once RealTime is setup and configured (the setup and configuration are currently done via RealTime), NetBackup can assume the ongoing management of RealTime and the copies of data that it creates. In this way, organizations can recover applications and even set RealTime policies through the NetBackup management console.

Symantec typifies the advancements that data management providers have been made over the last few years by offering more data management capabilities through NetBackup’s integration with the snapshot feature offered by storage system providers, its own NetBackup PureDisk, and through new offerings such as OpenStorage API. Symantec’s heightened focus on developing NetBackup RealTime and integrating it with NetBackup now gives organizations a new option for recovering their mission critical applications in such a way that organizations can swiftly manage and perform recoveries and bring these applications back online though their common NetBackup management console.

Pliant Looks to Break Enterprise Storage Glass Ceiling with SSD Brick; Cloud Storage Encroaches on Server Virtualization

Solid State Disk (SSD) is showing up across the technology spectrum from consumer grade laptops and PCs to enterprise storage systems. But until this week it can be argued that there really was not an SSD drive that was ready to withstand the scrutiny that some mission-critical enterprise environments are certain to put it under. This week’s announcement from Pliant Technology may well be the proverbial brick that breaks this glass ceiling that has been preventing SSD from entering some enterprise environments.

This past Monday Pliant Technology announced its new Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) that has SSD technology at its core. However this is where the resemblance between it and other SSD products end.

Pliant specifically chose the name EFD as a means to create some segmentation between its SSD and competing products. Pliant’s intent is not to make the EFD all things to all companies. It’s intent is to create an SSD that is tailored to meet the requirements of enterprise environments be it their enterprise servers or storage systems. To do so, Pliant built a drive that used SSD technology at its foundation. However it then added its own secret sauce so it could deliver the enterprise performance and reliability characteristics so its solution could become a “set it and forget it” type of experience that enterprise applications expect and demand.

The “secret sauce” it uses is a custom ASIC that is managed by firmware it developed. Pliant Technology’s design team is comprised of former Fujitsu engineers accustomed to working with hard disk drives (HDDs) intended for enterprise applications and requirements so it knew a thing or two about what it needed to do to make SSD enterprise caliber.

After all, what makes today’s enterprise HDDs (Fibre Channel, SAS or SATA) so reliable is not the disk drive hardware. Rather it is the firmware that is built into the HDD that manages the idiosyncrasies that the hardware will display over time. In the same respect, SSD displays some of the same types of aberrant behaviors that HDDs do.

Pliant explained that it uses SLC NAND in its two Lightning EFD products, the Lightning LS 3.5 inch that is available in 300 and 150 GB capacities and the Lightning LB 2.5 inch LB that is available in a 150 GB capacity. Since data is packed so tightly into its EFD, it is possible that when one bit is read, the read may disturb an adjacent bit and cause it to accidently flip thereby compromising the integrity of the data. While bit flip is not fatal, it does need to be detected and flipped back. It is this type of behavior that Pliant’s firmware monitors, detects and then corrects.

Another way Pliant seeks to differentiate itself form competitors is that its EFD drives possess a SAS interface with dual ports that support full duplex. So not only should applications see a substantial leap forward in performance just by using an EFD versus a SAS or SATA HDD, but because the EFD can operate in full duplex mode, applications can use both ports to read and write from it at the same time further accelerating the performance characteristics.

The 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors with the SAS interface also have another benefit as well. SAS looks to become the primary backplane interconnect for many servers and storage systems to HDDs in 2010. By putting EFD in standard 2.5″ and 3.5″ form factors, it should help to accelerate the adoption of EFD in these systems since the EFD will look like and be managed as a SAS HDD.

Since Pliant just publicly announced these drives and came out of stealth mode itself, I would not look for Pliant’s EFD drives in any server or storage system much before the first quarter of 2010. It is customary to give any new technology a quarter or two to get all of the bugs out of the system as well as get some real world testing and solid referrals behind it. But once that is done, its Lightning EFD appears to be a prime example of a product coming to market at the right time to fill a niche at the high end of the storage market.

The other company I spent a few minutes of time with this week was Pivot3. While Pivot3 started out a few years with its VideoBank offering that functioned as an iSCSI storage offering customized for video surveillance solutions, it has since branched out to offer a cloud storage product. (I use the term “cloud storage” somewhat carefully when referring to its product since it can only scale to 12 nodes or about 140 TBs raw storage.)

In any case, what piqued my interest about Pivot3 was that at VMworld it announced it had enhanced its Serverless Computing platform to support integrated server virtualization on each node that is part of its storage cloud.

The reason Pivot3 did this is simple. It is the predominant iSCSI player in the video surveillance market and video surveillance is all about low cost. By enabling server virtualization on the individual storage nodes (each node only supports one virtual machine for now), it eliminates the need for external servers (virtual or otherwise) to host the video surveillance application which further reduces the cost of the video surveillance solution.

Those are my thoughts and observations on technologies that caught my eye this week. Have a good weekend and check in again next Friday as I should have some news to report about a company that has a new CEO.

Also I will be at the Bare Metal Data Conference in Nashville on October 8-9 and Storage Networking World the week after that in Phoenix. If you wish to catch up with me at either of these events, just drop me a note.

EchoStar Discovers that Images Matter in Email Too

DCIG has consistently stressed the need for good eDiscovery processes for electronically stored information (ESI). A steady stream of sanctions surrounding poor eDiscovery strategies is a consistent reminder that a lack of planning can be damaging to your case. A recent case,Ferron v. EchoStar Satellite, LLC., in one such reminder that images and links in emails can be subject to eDiscovery and that the failure to preserve them could be costly.

Although this case did not end in sanctions for EchoStar, it showed the need for email controls and archive technology that preserves email in its native form. Central to this case was an allegation of sending emails which conveyed a commercial advertisement and displayed the name and/or logo of Dish Network. This was alleged to be in violation of theOhio Consumer Sales Practice Act.

The Plaintiff sought sanctions for failure to preserve website links and images contained in messages. Paper copies of the messages were given in response to the subpoena due to the fact the Plaintiff did not establish the Defendants’ duty to preserve the images. The emails were provided on a CD-ROM and it was argued that the images were fully visible at the time of production. The Plaintiff contended that the unavailable images were the only evidence to establish that the contents of the emails violated the law.

This case seemed mismanaged in a lot of ways as it pertains to preservation and production of ESI, and rightfully it would appear sanctions were not granted. But, producing emails on a CD, not presenting metadata, and not preserving images is definitely not the norm and is a rare exception in today’s legal environment.

Companies should take the necessary steps to preserve email data, preserve the contents of the email and ensure that metadata is intact. Without the ability to show a solid history of email management, the risk of costly sanctions rises dramatically.

Technology such as Estorian LookingGlass provide the ability to archive, index, search, and provide a complete trail of e- mail messages necessary to answer an eDiscovery request. Some of its capabilities include:

Email is archived with the images in tact. LookingGlass provides a unique way of searching and displaying images. When the image you are looking for is identified, a simple mouse click of the image shows the complete email attached to the image. Search capabilities provide a complete email trail. Once the email is located that is tied to an image LookingGlass provides the ability to see all persons who received, sent, or deleted the email. Metadata is preserved. All metadata associated with the email is preserved, archived and available for display and/or presentation to meet eDiscovery mandates.

LookingGlass provides a powerful way for companies to sort through mountains of email and provide the ability to capture and search images within email. This is critical as the above case demonstrated.

Companies should not count on poorly framed eDiscovery requests to keep sanction possibilities at bay. Instead proactive planning, solid eDiscovery processes, and technology such as LookingGlass should be used to meet the complex circumstances surrounding today’s state and federal laws such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure(FRCP) and California’s Electronic Discovery Act.

As this case shows, email continues to be a huge risk and a consistent pain point for eDiscovery and without the ability to archive and present images in email it will no doubt lead to sanctions. So while this Defendant was fortunate it that it did not meet with any court sanctions, companies should not expect the same fortunes in their eDiscovery strategies as their luck will eventually run out.

A Half Million Dollars in Savings – Good; A Fully Supported Storage Solution – Priceless

At a time where vendors are positioning savings “guarantees” to draw attention to their storage offering, it is refreshing to see a storage user actually tout substantive savings just by switching to 3PAR. This was accomplished recently done by CEDAR Document Technologies who announced it saved a half a million dollars, improved performance, experienced a 5x increase in transaction volumes and avoided $250,000 in administrative costs just by switching to 3PAR’s InServ storage systems. But to find out just how things were going with CEDAR now that it had used 3PAR for awhile, DCIG checked it with its Director of Service Operations to see what other benefits it was deriving from its 3PAR storage systems.

CEDAR Document Technologies is a service provider of print and electronic customer communications–helping customers communicate better with their customers. In general, CEDAR takes customer data that would normally be taken to a print or mail shop and instead decomposes it into XML, reformats the data, enhances the XML with rules or additional elements, and then manages different delivery channels including postal mail, secure push, email, portal, text, etc. as well as manage the archival of these documents.

As CEDAR’s customer base began growing, not only in quantity of customers but in the amount of data being received on a nightly base, their current direct attached storage was unable to handle both the amount of data and the processing required. Small and legacy customers were not the issue; it was the new customers that began sending anywhere from 50-100GB of data.

CEDAR needed a new storage infrastructure that would continue to grow as the company took on these larger customers. 3PAR was heavily looked at and ultimately chosen because they were the only vendor that could through its virtualization layer supply storage that would continue to expand and provide the performance needed to meet CEDAR’s rapidly growing customer base as well as let them remain agile as their operating environment changed. Here’s what DCIG learned after talking with Anthony Tarone, Director of Service Operations for CEDAR document technologies.

DCIG: Can you first give us an idea of what your customer base looks like in relation to the amount of storage you purchased from 3PAR?

Tony: As a service provider CEDAR deals with lots of data. Our smaller customers may only send us a few MB a day which is somewhat unnoticeable in the grand scheme of things. However a mid-size customer may send us 10-20 GB of data per night which, after going through a multi-step workflow process, explodes out to 60-70 GB. Then our biggest customers may send us 50-100 GB of data per cycle which can see similar explosions in data growth.

Prior going to 3PAR, CEDAR used to process this data with direct attached storage and use NFS for file sharing. It was good for our smaller customers but we needed a new infrastructure for the new breed of customer we were acquiring to handle the greater processing capacity and scalability on the storage layer that their data loads created. Back then we only had 8TB of direct attached storage. Now, after rebuilding our entire infrastructure in a collocation site, we have 54TB in production and 24TB in development, all of which is 3PAR.

DCIG: How has the move to 3PAR impacted your total cost for a storage solution? We’ve read in the press release about the half million dollar reduction in total storage costs but how did you achieve this?

Tony: From a purchasing standpoint, the initial quotes we received from other vendors were well above and beyond what it cost for the 3PAR solution. Using 3PAR, we not only were able to get storage requirements but our corporate development, and QA environments as well.

Additionally we have not spent a penny on professional services with 3PAR, and it is not because we have not done anything. 3PAR’s support team is absolutely outstanding, especially their higher level support at corporate as well as their sales engineer here in Atlanta. If we ever have any questions, are trying something out, or have a problem we can, depending on his availability, count on our local SE to pop over, have some lunch with us, check our configuration, maybe consult with top level support teams, and get us an answer.

3PAR does this all from a good customer service standpoint and they’re not hitting us with a quote for professional services every 15 minutes. Further, as a service provider our main goal is to first build in availability throughout our infrastructure; with 3PAR we have not had a single issue or outage since deployment 2 ½ years ago. This is priceless.

DCIG: It sounds like a lot of your cost savings came from the upfront purchase of the unit as well as decreased support costs. What about performance and the need to manage all that storage?

Tony: That’s exactly right. I’m not getting hit with professional service fees. As far as management goes, we’ve been able to manage the storage with our current staff. I haven’t had to hire a SAN administrator or any dedicated staff because 3PARs tools are easy enough to manage that we’ve been able to do everything with very little training from our SE.

The performance has been exceptional and even improving as we add more customers because of the way 3PAR spreads chunklets out across disks to the point where I still haven’t been able to justify or have a real need to pay for fiber channel disk which are vastly more expensive then the ones we have now. Because of 3PAR’s technologies and virtualization, I’ve been able to use their Nearline fiber channel ATA drives (FATA) and serial ATA drives (SATA) for all of my production services without impacting performance, SLAs, or creating any real risk of any sort.

DCIG: That brings up an interesting point. You took a risk where many data centers would have opted for the higher priced regular FC drives. Have you noticed any increase in costs or service problems associated with the nearline drives you selected? Aren’t they supposed to fail more often?

Tony: The drives have actually been quite nice. 3PAR support can proactively detect when a drive is failing and coordinates everything. 3PAR moves data off of the offending magazine, schedules someone (usually the next day) to come out and replace the magazine, and then redistributes the data back over it. The drives haven’t been an issue at all. Best of all there isn’t a fee for the disk swap. That is all part of the annual support, and it’s my understanding that as long as we keep it under support 3PAR will keep changing disks out. The whole process has been very seamless, painless, and literally a non-event for me.

DCIG: Have you done any upgrades to your existing system and have the upgrades gone as anticipated? Also, have you performed any dynamic upgrades?

Tony: We’ve done some upgrades although I’m more old-school and usually only do those within my dedicated maintenance window; I just try to be safe. In fact we have an upgrade coming up where we will be cross connecting all of our redundant power which used to be on a single power plant.

3PAR is a part of that because we have a 30AMP hardwired into our 3PAR unit. We’ll be working with 3PAR on the maintenance window. Our local 3PAR SE (support engineer) will coordinate 3PAR activities so that when we unplug it they’ll be checking it out, getting some alerts from our system, and managing the process. 3PAR has always been completely accommodating to our schedule by either having their people onsite or on the phone with us. They have never forced us to fit into their schedule.

DCIG Final Thoughts: Purchasing a storage solution is more complicated than just answering questions about capacity and up-front costs. Organizations need to take a hard look at what their problems are, investigate competing solutions, identify the benefits and understand other hidden storage system costs, such as maintenance, support and the timeliness of responses to customer questions. After talking with CEDAR, it became quite clear that 3PAR saves money and delivers a better storage solution which is always good. However 3PAR’s continuing willingness to step up to the plate and provide exceptional ongoing customer service and support makes CEDAR’S decision to select 3PAR over competing solutions appear priceless.

67% Performance Boost and WORM Functionality Highlight Latest NEC HYDRAstor Software Release

The NEC HYDRAstor grid storage platform is best described as one that can evolve and grow on an as-needed basis while introducing newer technologies as they become available. Today’s announcement continues to reinforce this compelling value proposition that the HYDRAstor platform delivers. In today’s software release NEC improves HYDRAstor’s performance, adds in-flight encryption to its replication feature and extends its support of application-aware deduplication to Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC NetWorker all at no extra charge to HYDRAstor users.

Ever since the HYDRAstor was first released, its grid storage architecture has served as an example of how easy a storage system can be to manage and grow assuming it is designed with today’s user requirements in mind. Today’s new release is no exception to that as the new software extends or improves upon HYDRAstor’s capabilities in three main areas:

1. Up to 67% performance boost. This performance boost is based solely on doing a software upgrade for the HYDRAstor with no requirements for additional hardware or new license fees. Prior to this release each HYDRAstor Accelerator Node provided up to 300 MB/sec. By simply upgrading the HYDRAstor software, performance will jump up to 500 MB/sec per Accelerator Node or 1000 MB/sec for a standard two Accelerator Node configuration. This translates into faster backups as each node is able to process the data inline quicker.

What is also of note is that these new performance numbers are published for general applications and do not assume a scenario that is only applicable for a very specific application with a rare configuration as other storage vendors tend to do. This means more users can achieve the published performance numbers, and users with high duplicate data rates in their backup streams could see even higher performance numbers that what NEC is publishing.

2. New encryption and chargeback capabilities. One of the tenets of NEC’s design of the HYDRAstor is that core software functional improvements that most customers need should be made available to both existing and new HYDRAstor customers at no additional charge. Today’s release continues that trend as it has added in-flight encryption of replicated data as well as a new storage chargeback capability.

Simplified in-flight encryption of data. More enterprise organizations are looking to protect their remote offices as well as replicate data in their main data center to a secondary site. But as they do so they want to ensure that the data is encrypted while in- flight so it cannot be used for nefarious purposes in the event it is intercepted or compromised.

To accommodate this request that NEC has received from many of its customers, NEC has added an encryption feature to the HYDRAstor software base, which first encrypts data before it goes over the wire and then decrypts it on the other side so it can be read. This inline encryption can be enabled or disabled at a file system granularity and is available as a free enhancement for all Accelerator Nodes that have licensed HYDRAstor’s RepliGrid WAN-optimized replication.

Storage charge back enforcement with file system-based quotas. Storage charge back was another feature requested by NEC’s customers that were seeking to designate different quotas for different file systems or applications so they could manage the entire HYDRAstor storage pool. This new feature should help organizations better respond to today’s tough economic conditions by first helping them understand the storage consumption of individual applications, departments or business units, and then charging them accordingly.

3. Enhancement of existing HYDRAstor functionality: Increased flexibility in resiliency depth settings. The HYDRAstor has always offered the flexibility to increase or decrease the resiliency of its system. Now organizations can dial the resiliency level up or down at the file system level. Using this enhanced feature, users can assign a particular application to a specific file system and based upon the importance of the application and its data, adjust its protection up or down.

This feature becomes very handy as many scratch, reference, or test data can now be assigned to HYDRAstor file systems that have a lower level of resiliency and lower overhead while the data associated with critical application data can be dialed up to meet their higher protection requirements.

Capacity on Demand. More organizations are looking to deploy disk-based backup into remote offices but need to justify the cost. To accommodate these organizations, NEC is providing new smaller models that can start at lower levels of capacity and price but still get all of NEC’s software features. NEC is also making it possible to expand the logical storage capacity of the HYDRAstor system at a later time via a software license, without requiring the addition of any hardware components. Extending application-aware deduplication. NEC announced application-aware deduplication in June 2009. This feature interrogates data as it comes in from a particular application (such as backup or archive software) and determines whether or not the data is a duplicate after it filters away metadata that the application has injected into the data payload.

In its first release of application-aware deduplication, HYDRAstor supported CommVault® Simpana® and Symantec NetBackup, but this release adds application-aware support for Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and EMC NetWorker.

Another significant feature that NEC added with this software release is HYDRAlock WORM (Write Once Read Many) support, which can be licensed separately. With HYDRAstor’s implementation of WORM, users can configure individual file systems with different policies for different applications to automatically secure files so they cannot be deleted or altered. Similar to the licensing model used for RepliGrid, HYDRAstor’s WAN-optimized replication, the new HYDRAlock WORM functionality can be licensed on a per Accelerator Node basis so the customer only pays for the part of the system that needs it.

HYDRAstor’s beauty is that organizations can scale it as they need, get the features they need as they need them (through software updates such as are found in this release) and not have to worry about some painful, pending storage migration because of HYDRAstor’s grid storage architecture. Economically and safely keeping information on disk for longer periods of time without the hassles associated with storage system upgrades are now the keys for organizations to getting more value and reducing their spending on storage, and NEC continues to deliver on these key areas.

As organizations continue to manage data, it does not make much sense for them to continually spend monies for features and enhancements that should be part of a product’s natural evolution. The NEC HYDRAstor is part of this new trend. It adds new features and enhancements such as application-aware deduplication, more granular setting for data resiliency, reduct ions in up-front storage costs, in-flight encryption, and performance boost free of charge. These new features further position the NEC HYDRAstor as the platform of choice for archive and backup data by providing more value, more capabilities, and more efficiency while still keeping organizational costs associated with managing the data under control.

Give a Tweet About Backup and Take Home a Prize

I normally reserve news about industry giveaways and freebies for inclusion in my weekly recap blog that appears on Fridays but I am making an exception this week. It was brought to my attention yesterday that Symantec is running a “Cash for Captions” contest that ends this Friday. All you need to do to enter is first follow a specific Symantec Twitter feed and then enter a tweet with a creative caption for the following cartoon. Winners will be awarded gift certificates to Best Buy with the grand prize winner being awarded $2500.

Tweets will be judged by noted backup expect Curtis W Preston with the Finalists announced via Twitter on September 22 and the winners on September 25. To get all of the rules about how to enter, follow this link. Good luck! SharePoint Staking Its Claim as the Next eDiscovery Pain Point

When businesses think of Microsoft, it is not just Windows, Office or Internet Explorer that comes to mind. Increasingly it’s SharePoint that they identify as one of Microsoft’s most compelling solutions. Using a drive letter path for document collaboration is no longer practical in this day and age and SharePoint is now the tool to which many organizations turn to fill their collaboration needs. So while SharePoint fills this new need for many organizations, what is not so obvious to them is how to manage SharePoint so they can search, find and deliver relevant documents in a timely manner if faced with an eDiscovery request.

A recent New York Times article illustrates the dramatic rise in SharePoint’s market penetration as it now has over 17,000 customer installs and over $1 billion in revenue. This cements the claims that SharePoint is now one of Microsoft’s flagship product and is fast achieving the same type of broad corporate acceptance that its Windows, Office and Exchange products already have. So as SharePoint continues its ascent and companies increasingly use SharePoint to store and manage documents, it creates new eDiscovery complexities for which organizations need to account.

When an eDiscovery request or legal hold for electronically stored information (ESI) is presented to an organization, it becomes painfully obvious that documents germane to the legal action are scattered across its network. While email is always an area of immediate attention, much progress has already occurred in that arena. Now SharePoint is staking its claim as the new corporate eDiscovery pain point. Therefore it is imperative that organizations come to grips with this issue and learn how to manage their SharePoint repository.

Archiving is often viewed as invaluable when it comes to eDiscovery for its ability to store unstructured data in a structured manner and make it searchable. This technique has worked well for email and it only stands to reason that the time has time to archive data within SharePoint’s repositories as well.

However as organizations look to do that, using software that archives and centrally manages data for all of their unstructured and semi-structured data stores becomes more important to implement to meet constantly emerging corporate eDiscovery, legal and search requests. The value that using tools like Symantec’s Enterprise Vault provides include:

Acts as a central repository. Archiving data from multiple unstructured and semi-structured data stores that may include email, file stores, instant messaging, SharePoint and even other data sources is invaluable when it comes to performing eDiscoveries. Software such as Enterprise Vault further helps in this initiative by structuring the data so it is easier to perform eDiscoveries since metadata is created and preserved across all of these different data types. Eases retention policy management. Enterprise Vault provides a means for deletion of documents. Being able to ensure that documents are deleted in a timely manner so as to show a routine maintenance of your information system is critical for “safe harbor” in an eDiscovery case. Often it is difficult to ensure and enforce the timely deletion of documents as mandated by company policy. Enterprise Vault deletes documents based on defined retention policies thus ensuring routine maintenance is performed and policy enforcement is carried out. Put a legal hold across content sources. Organizations should have the flexibility to put legal holds on content no matter what the data’s source is (file server, instant messaging, email etc.) Using multiple archiving tools or disparate management policies makes this difficult to implement and enforce. Organizations that use software such as Enterprise Vault ease the management of multiple data sources since it manages documents within a central repository. This ensures legal holds are consistently done across all relevant documents without fear of missing important and relevant documents.

SharePoint is gaining momentum as a corporate collaboration tool at an exponential pace but history shows once again that no matter where data is stored, proper management of it does not occur by accident. SharePoint provides organizations with many advantages but it also creates new data management issues for which they need to account as no companies get a free pass any longer at either the state or federal level when important and relevant ESI are not held or presented in a court case.

Courts are becoming intolerant of eDiscovery missteps or mistakes and fines and penalties can be crippling to a company’s case and/or bottom line. Only through the use of products such as Symantec’s Enterprise Vault can companies be assured documents critical to an eDiscovery request can be searched and managed for legal hold obligations.

Archiving continues to serve email well but eDiscovery is now going beyond traditional email and needs to extend its reach into new storage repositories like SharePoint. So it only makes sense for organization to leverage products like Enterprise Vault that can take what it has learned with email archive to the next level and provide organizations a common, centralized way to manage and search data across all of their archived data stores. Deciphering Application Metadata is Data Deduplication’s Next Frontier

Dedupe is an easy concept to grasp. At its most basic level it reduces storage requirements and touts the improvement in backup and recovery times. It seems as if it is a “win-win” scenario and, for the most part, it is. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that dedupe is still in its infancy and is being continually fine-tuned and changed. This should keep us from becoming lackadaisical in our perception of this technology and how it is still in its early stages.

ADMAD: Application-Driven Metadata Aware De-duplication Archival Storage System, a paper co-written by multiple authors from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and the University of Minnesota, reinforces this belief. It states in regards to dedupe that, “There are still research challenges in current approaches and storage systems, such as: how to chunk the files more efficiently and better leverage potential similarity and identity among dedicated applications.”

We would encourage many of our readers to go ahead and read the above mentioned paper. It specifically proposes Application-Driven Metadata Aware De-duplication (ADMAD) as an option to interrogate metadata information at the application layer to identify and dynamically define meaningful data chunks to maximize the effect of the dedupe process.

The problems that introducing application awareness into deduplication solves can be succinctly summarized.Every backup application inserts its own metadata into the backup data stream so that it knows how to manage the data. But this can result in problems later on if the target device ingesting the data does not understand this metadata as it deduplicates the data.

The first time the target chops up the data may be completely different than the second time if the deduplicating target cannot decipher it. It is quite conceivable that even though the incoming data in the second stream has not changed, the application sending the chunk of data to the target may tag it differently just because of how the application chooses to manipulate the data. In other words, the data is the same but the tag is different. Yet because this tag now resides inside the chunk of data instead of where the target is looking for it, the data will not be optimally deduplicated.

Deduplicating storage systems like the NEC HYDRAstor may not be doing everything as prescribed by ADMAD, but they are making progress in this important area of incorporating application awareness within deduplication algorithms. About three months ago, NEC announced the addition of application awareness deduplication into its HYDRAstor grid storage platform. The HYDRAstor can now optimize deduplicated data more efficiently for specific applications by analyzing incoming data streams and filtering application level metadata to eliminate the negative impact that metadata has on data deduplication ratios.

HYDRAstor, after an application type has been associated with a file system, will automatically filter the metadata away from the backup data payload which lets its data deduplication process work exclusively on the incoming data. Since different applications have their own metadata that they insert into the data stream to manage ‘their’ data, once that metadata is split out with corresponding offsets it is stored independently to ensure the data is reconstituted in its original form during reads and helps insure much higher deduplication rates can be achieved. With its initial implementation of application-aware deduplication, HYDRAstor deployed solutions for CommVault® Simpana® and Symantec NetBackup with early results showing impressive gains in data deduplication ratios for both of these applications.

NEC has seen a 2-3x improvement in data deduplication ratios for CommVault for a full weekly backup cycle consisting of one full backup, followed by six incremental backups, and then another full backup. When implemented within a customer’s environment the CommVault solution actually resulted in over 4x improvements in the deduplication ratio, when compared to deduplicating data generically/agnostically, over a span of 4 weeks which represented the customer’s retention period.

Realize that your mileage may vary as data patterns in organizations vary. However the ADMAD study suggest that gains of 50% or more in data deduplication ratios can be achieved when stripping out metadata as compared to using application- agnostic deduplication approaches. The fact that the HYDRAstor showed such notable gains reinforces the conclusions of the ADMAD study and it stands to reason that organizations should expect to see similar improvements in their deduplication ratios when using the HYDRAstor in their environments in conjunction with either of these two backup software platforms.

The inclusion of application-aware data deduplication in the HYDRAstor is a smart move on NEC’s part. Not only is it a competitive differentiator but current and new HYDRAstor customers get this feature for free as part of the base code that is installed on their HYDRAstor. Such gains in data reduction ratios coupled with its increased ability to show more value only make it logical for NEC to look to expand the number of backup software applications that will support this feature going forward as it should prove to be a factor that organizations look at when deciding between NEC and a competing product. Texas Memory Systems Bought Who? Shortage of Credit Inhibits New Construction of Data Centers

This being a short work week due to the upcoming Labor Day weekend, there was less going in the storage industry than normal. Of course, even the technology industry has to catch its breath from time to time and this week was probably one of those weeks coming on the heels of VMworld last week. That said, there were a few conversations I had with end-users and tidbits of news that came out that caught my attention and merited mention in my weekly recap blog.

One specific item that caught my attention was anarticle posted earlier this week on SearchStorage.com‘s site regarding Texas Memory Systems’ acquisition of Incipient’s storage virtualization intellectual property. Being fairly familiar with Incipient’s technology and having talked to a few of its early customers off-the-record, I thought its technology was sound. However like every storage vendor regardless of its size, a pure network-based storage virtualization play has remained a tough sell, especially in enterprise environments where Incipient played.

While many enterprise customers (including myself) like the network storage virtualization story and its value proposition, the difficulty is putting your trust in a single solution through which all of mission critical storage I/O runs and then convincing application owners to do the same. While I am convinced not introducing storage virtualization into the network in some form has resulted in much of the complexity that exists now, I am also convinced that most organizations would rather have that complexity than trust networked storage virtualization solutions.

However the question becomes willTexas Memory Systems actually be able to do anything useful with Incipient’s technology? This is where I think it gets a little hazy. I disagree with Beth Pariseu’s comparison in her article where she compares Incipient’s technology to IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC). Architecturally Incipient is more like EMC’s Invista technology which interacts with a Cisco Storage Services Module (SSM) that is available for any Cisco 9500 FC Director.

The issue as I see it is how does acquiring Incipient’s intellectual property really help Texas Memory Systems? Even if they are planning to partner with Cisco in some way in the near future, I still don’t see enterprise environments selecting Texas Memory System’s recycled version of Incipient’s storage virtualization software over existing solutions. In any case, this acquisition strikes me as a bad move on the part of Texas Memory Systems when it would seem there are better options available to them.

While on the topic of data centers, I had an interesting conversation with an individual on my return trip to Omaha last week coming back from VMworld. This individual is the regional sales manager for a company that sells electrical components into data centers and he had been in California planning the construction of a number of data centers in that state.

However the issue these companies were running into was their inability to obtain credit to fund the building of these data centers. This surprised me a bit since I regularly hear that California is running out of power and that there is not enough to go around. He said that is not the case at all, at least where his clients are looking to build data centers. Right now the larger issue is that they cannot obtain credit which is inhibiting their ability to start construction on new data centers.

My final thoughts for this week are around the company Atempo and whether or not it is about to be acquired and by whom. While I was at VMworld I caught wind of a rumor that Acronis was about to acquire Atempo and that the deal was pretty far advanced. I checked with a number of sources including Atempo’s CEO and none of them, including the CEO, was not aware of any such dealings. He did say that an IDC analyst had incorrectly tweeted a few weeks ago that HP was acquiring Atempo but issued a correction to that tweet. He also said that Acronis and Atempo have had some discussion in the past about working together but nothing along the lines of Acronis acquiring Atempo. Still, it makes one wonder. These are two rumors in a relatively short amount of time about Atempo and sometimes where there is smoke, there is fire.

Have a good weekend and say a small prayer for all of those affected by 9/11 eight years ago today and those in the military still fighting the battle overseas.

California’s New State Law Raises eDiscovery Stakes; Costs Poised to Skyrocket

“As California goes, so goes the nation” is a phrase that I have heard before and it immediately came to mind when I read that Governor Schwarzenegger had signed California Assembly Bill 5, otherwise known as Chapter 5 – Electronic Discovery Act Signed into law on June 29th, 2009, what makes this law significant is that it expands upon the verbiage used in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). So for organizations already worrying about the FRCP, take heed because the Electronic Discovery Act takes eDiscovery to yet another level.

Any time California passes a law, especially as it pertains to eDiscovery, the rest of the nation needs to pay attention. California previously set the stage for the nationwide adoption of data breach notification laws with its passage of SB1386 in September, 2002. Since that law went into effect, nearly all states have since followed suit with their own data breach laws (only 5 states have NOT passed similar laws) as well as the federal government.

Organizations that have failed to act and put in place pro- active eDiscovery processes are starting to pay the consequences. The recently published, “2009 Mid-year Update on eDiscovery“, highlights that sanctions in eDiscovery cases against organizations have doubled since 2008. It is important to note the statistic that sanctions were considered in half of every case involving eDiscovery and that they were awarded in 36% of these cases.

This statistic should be a wake up call to all organizations. Clearly many organizations’ eDiscovery efforts are still in the primitive stages and now that most states have passed their own eDiscovery laws and California is coming back for round 2, new risks and ultimately new sanctions are poised to strike yet again.

Some notable points of interest in the Electronic Discovery Act:

The California law differs from the FRCP in how it approaches data in “a reasonably useable form”. If your company is subject to an eDiscovery request, the burden will be upon you to provide the information in a reasonably useable form. This is a big departure from FRCP. This new wording could lead to a large expense for a company as definitions of a “reasonably, useable form” are worked out. Expands eDiscovery beyond inspection and copying to include testing or sampling of ESI. This act expands existing eDiscovery procedures and demands that can be made for inspection of ESI to include copying, testing or sampling of ESI.It also allows for a party to demand that another party of someone acting on that party’s behalf, to inspect, copy, test, or sample ESI in the possession, custody, or control of the party when an eDiscovery demand is made. Parties that fail to produce ESI pursuant to a discovery request may face monetary sanctions. This sets a new precedent that organizations must now consider. Before they mostly just had to contend with costs at the federal level. Now the state of California has the power to levy monetary sanctions as well Sanctions are prohibited if failure to produce ESI is due to routine, good faith business operations. I consider this California’s version of the safe harbor provision, but as with FRCP, safe harbor can be elusive as evidenced by the aforementioned statistics on sanctions.

There is much more to this act, including more notable departures from the language of the FRCP. Overall this is a detailed act with new risks and eDiscovery considerations that now impact organizations if they end up in the California state court. Like all risks, it all boils down to costs but the big question organizations have to answer is, “What is the cost of complying versus doing nothing and taking a reactive approach to an eDiscovery to deal with it only if and when it hits you?” This is the big question when it comes to this bill as there are several cost shifting areas for companies to consider which is an aspect that I will tackle in a future blog post. The main question that will need to be answered is how will costs be shifted as part of a discovery notice? There has been precedent in California for cost shifting, inToshiba v. Superior Ct., but questions still remain if this will continue to be the rule.

It should come as no surprise that eDiscovery is moving front and center at the state level. State courts are not immune to eDiscovery problems posed by electronic documents and shifting evidentiary requirements are caused from ever increasing amounts of ESI.California is no different and it is simply seeking to try to limit the costs of eDiscovery in disputes. But as the FRCP has shown this is much easier said than done.

Companies will need to ensure their eDiscovery strategy not only covers FRCP but also complies with differing state laws.New technology such asEstorian’s LookingGlass will increasingly be needed to ensure ESI such as email can be produced in a reasonably usable form.

Much legal wrangling lies ahead as sides argue over wording, meaning and intent of this law with a lot of information forthcoming as it relates to costs and interpretation.But, there is no doubt that other states will almost certainly follow in California’s footsteps and tackle eDiscovery in their own court systems.As this occurs, the costs and painful consequences for those organizations with inadequate eDiscovery strategies are poised to skyrocket. The Real Benefits that an SMB can Expect to Glean from Server Virtualization

Most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have limited IT budgets so when it comes to storing data and reducing costs and complexity they must do so wisely. Further, most have few or no IT personnel so they also need technology solutions that they can deploy and scale easily without requiring inordinate amounts of time to manage. Server virtualization is now increasingly viewed as a good fit for SMBs and with the new emphasis that VMware put on reaching out to SMBs at last week’s VMworld, it is more important than ever for SMBs to quantify what benefits they can expect to glean from server virtualization before deploying it.

Working as both an IT administrator and as a consultant to a number of small businesses in the Pittsburgh, PA, area I get to see both the pros and cons of server virtualization. For the most part, server virtualization provides tangible benefits to SMBs with these being the main ones that I observe:

Reduced Costs

The first thing that every SMB is always attracted to is the reduced costs associated with server virtualization. In physical environments, every application needs its own physical server so there is the upfront cost plus there are other hidden costs associated with managing servers. Since server virtualization reduces the amount of physical hardware to manage, upfront capital expenses are immediately reduced.

Server virtualization also reduces ongoing operational costs. Internal components such as hard disks, network interface cards, and memory cards may go bad or require upgrading while power costs for many physical servers can quietly add up over time. Server virtualization again minimizes these costs.

Even using external storage which is common in virtual server deployments can cut costs. Rather than putting two or more disks in each server, using platforms like the Iomega StorCenter™ ix4-200d NAS appliance reduces the amount of spinning disk need which in turn contributes to better controlling an SMB’s heating and cooling costs.

Improved Efficiency of IT Personnel

SMBs may only have one dedicated IT support person so maintaining five or more physical servers as part of their day-to-day administration activities can be very hectic. Application support, database maintenance and hardware and software upgrades are all part of their daily job responsibilities. Further, this lone IT support person is typically pulled in many directions (changing backup tapes, fixing PCs, sitting in meetings, etc.) so this individual has trouble getting to their real job of caring for the server infrastructure which keeps the business running.

Server virtualization platforms reduce some of their daily chaos by reducing the number of physical servers that they need to manage. Instead of managing five or more servers, they may now only need to manage one or two. Then, as new applications come in, they no longer have to purchase new server hardware to support each application.

Rather the individual can create a new virtual machine on their existing physical server minutes instead of hours through the use of virtual machine templates in VMware. Also the time it takes to install Microsoft Office across an organization can be done in days or maybe even hours instead of weeks. This can be accomplished by using those same templates except that instead of deploying a server a desktop template is used. Shared Storage Pool

Internal storage on servers is a pain to manage and upgrade. There can be too much storage capacity on one, not enough storage capacity on the other and no way to effectively share the excess storage capacity between the two.

Moving to a virtualized server environment changes this situation. The majority of virtual server implementations use external shared storage (up to 70% according to some estimates) since it makes storage management easier to accomplish.

SMBs are clearly taking full advantage of this trend. A recent IDC report found that even in this tough economy, external storage systems in the low end (0 – $14,999 range) registered a nearly 10% increase in year-over-year growth in 2009.

In that vein, DCIG advises SMBs to give preference to the new Iomega ix4-200d. Not only does the ix4-200d meet SMB price constraints and provide ample storage capacity, it is currently the only device in this price range (the ix4-200d starts at less than $700) to be fully certified for VMware virtual server environments.

Improved Availability

Consolidating all of your physical servers onto one virtualized server can be akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket but that does not need to be the case. SMB can actually improve application availability through better server hardware and the combined use of the Iomega ix4-200d and VMware’s vMotion technology.

Because SMBs need fewer servers, the physical servers that they deploy to host the virtualized servers can have more redundant parts for improved server availability. Also, by using the ix4-200d and VMware’s vMotion technology, SMBs can optionally deploy a second physical server that they can use for application failover in the event of a catastrophic server failover. In either case, the improved availability of hardware and applications combines to improve the availability and effectiveness of the IT support person as the individual no longer needs to operate in crisis mode to manage the SMB’s servers.

Virtualizing your server environment can be an intimidating proposition but having done it myself for the organization I support as well as helping some SMBs in their efforts, the benefits of server virtualization clearly outweigh negatives. Not only can SMBs reduce their capital and operational costs but it also helps improve the efficiency and availability of your server and storage hardware, the applications that they host and helps to make your IT support personnel more productive for those SMBs lucky enough to have them in their environment.

Possibilities not Cost Savings Becoming VMware’s New Focus; It’s Time to Think about iPhone Virtualization and Following the Moon

There are two questions that I am frequently asked when I attend a technology conference. The first is, “What is the big news?” and the second is, “Is there any technology that really captured your attention?” In yesterday’s blog, I answered the second question as to why I think the use of virtual appliances is going to become the new standard for backing up and recovering virtual machines. However today I want to answer the first question as to what was the big news that came out of VMworld 2009. In my view, it was clearly that the emphasis has moved from why organizations need to virtualize their environments to what new possibilities that a fully virtualized (aka cloud) environment creates.

Virtualization creates new ways of thinking the enterprise that were never really viable before but are now openly discussed and were, in a number of cases, actually demonstrated on stage at VMworld as either being currently in production or in testing. For example:

Reductions in red tape. The only reason I even make this point is that enterprise organizations spend so much time trying to make sure that they make no mistakes when it comes to IT that they make the biggest mistake of all: they spend so much time managing IT processes that nothing gets done.

Maritz (VMware’s CEO) made the comment during his opening keynote on Tuesday that he has encountered organizations where they have to get 10 signatures in order to purchase an application server. That struck a nerve with me as I clearly recall the days from my last position where it could take that many signatures and a couple of weeks just to make simple changes in my environment. Purchasing a new server, installing it and then getting it fully configured took much longer (typically months) to complete it.

Using server virtualization, new VMs can be created and applications deployed in minutes. Granted, this flexibility can and does create new problems such as virtual machine sprawl but simple processes can be put in place to address these issues. Further, I suspect new technologies are already under development that can address this issue should it become a problem.

Virtualization of mobile device OSes. VMware believes that cell phones are arguably the next desktop and may well become one of the principal ways that employees access corporate networks. Of course, the issue with using mobile devices (cell phones included) to access corporate networks is that they are difficult to manage and present new security risks.

The solution VMware proposes is to virtualize mobile devices like the iPhone so iPhone applications can run on one VM on the cell phone while corporate applications run on another. In this way, organizations can create and deploy VMs on employee’s mobile devices so individuals can either securely access corporate networks or run their own personal iPhone applications.

“Follow the moon” data center operations. This is an interesting twist on current “Follow the sun” call centers operations that are located around the globe so support personnel can work during daylight hours. The “Follow the moon” approach takes a different tack. Since power demands (and costs) can drop at night, move your virtualized data center to a part of the globe that is in the dark to take advantage of lower power costs during night time hours. While no one is apparently actually doing anything like this and it is probably a stretch at this stage in virtualization’s evolution to suggest anyone can successfully accomplish this, it does make for interesting conversation.

Continuing to optimizing power savings. This is a more realistic application of how companies can continue to save on power even after they virtualize their environment. A new feature that the combination of VMware vSphere, vCenter and vMotion makes possible is the ability to monitor the performance of each vSphere host. If the activity of its hosted VMs drop below a certain level on a number of physical vSphere hosts such that one vSphere host can support all of the VMs on the other hosts, policies can be created so that VMs are vMotioned to one physical vSphere host. Then the other physical hosts can be powered down until there is once again a need for their processing power when they can again be powered on.

So are companies actually going to do all of these things that virtualization in general and VMware specifically can deliver? That is unlikely. But what virtualization does do is make more of this outside of the box thinking possible.This will lead to new innovations and better ways of conducting business and managing enterprise infrastructures. This is the mindset that organizations need to adopt if they hope to realize all of the benefits that virtualization can ultimately deliver so they can remain competitive in the newly virtualized world which is rapidly emerging.

The Best Approach to Virtual Machine Backups – Period

I arrived home from VMworld 2009 last night after spending much of the flight reflecting on what I learned, the conversations that I had and the technologies that I had a chance to view. However at every conference there is usually one technology that piques my interest and this one was no different as I had a chance to do a deeper dive into one company’s method of doing virtual machine backup while at the show. What made this technology transcend other virtual machine backup approaches is that it is by far the most scalable, easiest to implement and simplest to manage that I have yet encountered.

Before I let the cat out of the bag and describe who offers this technology and what it does, here are what I consider the principle issues with the backup of virtual machines that exist today that any current backup approach does a completely adequate job of addressing.

Backup agents. The traditional backup software technique requires the deployment of agents that do either full or incremental backups of all of the data on the VM. The problem with this approach is that it introduces additional overhead on the underlying physical machines’s CPU and network connections. Disk-based Targets. The appeal of using devices is that they can speed up backups and deduplicate the backup data. The issue is that they do little or nothing to reduce the amount of data processed on the server or sent over the network. Deduplicating backup agents. Using this approach, data is deduplicated on the VM before it is sent to the target which reduces overhead on the physical server’s CPU and network connections. However the issue that arises here is that it still requires an agent on each VM and requires the backup software to perform the recovery. VCB Backups. Using VMware’s native VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) feature, a snapshot is taken of each VM which can then be backed up. This moves the load associated with the backup off of the host but requires organizations to create proxy servers that can mount and backup these snapshots plus they may need to use external storage so the proxy server can mount these snapshots. Further, the scalability of this solution becomes questionable. Backups of 10 or 20 snapshots in a backup window is usually not a problem. Try to backup hundreds and thousands of VM snapshots using a proxy server and the situation becomes untenable. Agentless backups. Agentless backup was, until yesterday, in my mind the best approach that I had encountered to deliver on the backup of virtual machines. It discovered VMs by communicating with either the VMware ESX server or vCenter, getting a list of VMs on each VMware physical host and then backing up each individual VM. The two main drawbacks that I saw were that it required the backup software to do the recovery and, as the amount of data to backup grew, it could scale but the backend storage system which executed the backups and kept all of the data tended to become more complex to manage.

The new technology that I saw takes many of these current issues associated with virtual machine backups off of the table. The company and product to which I am specifically referring is PHD Virtual and its esXpress backup software. While I have briefly covered esXpress in a past blog when I wrote about its inclusion on Quantum’s DXi7500 systems, I did not know much about the history of esXpress or the details of how it worked. But as luck would have it, PHD Virtual was at VMworld so I connected with them just before I left yesterday and am glad I did.

Here are the two specific features of esXpress that caught my eye:

Creates virtual appliances. This is one of its two notable features that caught my eye. It creates virtual appliances on each physical VMware ESX or vSphere host that then does the backups. This is significant in at least six ways that are enumerated below. (While there are more I, for the sake of space, opted not to go into them.)

First, it does not require agents on each individual VM so all that is required to deploy it is the creation of a new virtual appliance on the ESX physical host. According to the PHD engineer I spoke to, creating a virtual appliance can be done in as little as 5 minutes and in less than an hour even if done by a novice. Second, it can still do block and/or file level backups of each VM on that host. This is now done without the need to install an agent on each VM or a restart of individual VMs. Third, there is no dependency on VCB. This removes the requirement to use external storage on which VM snapshots reside as well as the need to create proxy servers that would mount the snapshots and backup this data. Fourth, as it does each backup, it deduplicates and compresses the data. This allows organizations to realistically achieve 20:1 or greater deduplication rates plus it minimizes the CPU and network overhead on the underlying physical server since backups complete faster and there is less data to transmit over the network. Fifth, the virtual appliance is only active while it is performing backups. Using VMware’s scheduler, the virtual appliance is turned on when it is time for backups to begin. Once the backups of the VMs on that physical host are complete, it shuts down until it is the time for backups to begin again so server resources are not consumed during the day. Sixth, it scales. Whether you are running one physical ESX server or a thousand, it scales because it only backs up the data on the server on which it is running. It sends this data to another server which holds it for recovery. Organizations can then even optionally replicate this directory to another server for DR purposes and, if I understood them correctly, any server can serve as a backup target for any other server.

Requires no backup software to do the recovery. This was the other major feature that caught my eye. As it backs up data, the data is stored in such a format that it can immediately be presented to another physical server and run as a VM with minimal or no recovery time without requiring someone to first interface with the backup software to recover it.

The way esXpress is architected represents a significant step forward in how virtual machine backups are done. It addresses nearly all of the technical and management concerns currently associated with the backup and recovery of virtual machines and can be swiftly implemented in either small business environments or in the largest enterprises with minimal disruption or training.

While I still have a few questions as to how it handles massively large deduplicated data stores and how it delivers consistent images for the recovery of database applications, I suspect that it offers workarounds to these issues. I simply ran out of time to ask them about them since I was needed to leave to catch my flight home.

Here’s the bottom line about this technology –WOW ! In my opinion, every backup vendor is going to have to adopt this method for the backup of virtual machines because it is so powerful. I fully expect that this company will be acquired very soon because it is a quick fix to VM backups at either the small business or the enterprise level. (And it did not hurt that their personnel on site said that they fully expected to be acquired soon because a number of larger vendors interested in their technology were sniffing around their booth.) But regardless of whether or not PHD is acquired, expect every major backup vendor to come up with their own variation of what esXpress does because they will soon be at a competitive disadvantage in VMware environments if they fail to deliver a similar offering.

Backup Software Upgrades are a Good First Step to Solving your Virtual Backup Problems

A recent Enterprise Systems article reported on the results of a recent SHARE survey of about 400 IT professionals. It revealed that nearly 70% of these users had virtualized some or all of their servers, 50% of their storage infrastructure and some are even starting down the path of virtualizing their desktop and network infrastructures. But what is notably absent in this article is any discussion around data protection in these newly virtualized infrastructures.

It is no secret that virtualization is transforming how organizations do everything from managing their applications to introducing new strategies such as cloud computing into their environment. While they may not implement all of these changes immediately and may only implement some of them over time, organizations can at least entertain new ways of managing their infrastructure that were never before possible.

However there are some aspects of managing a virtualized environment that are immediately transformed once an organization implements virtualization. One such area is backup and recovery.

In other blogs I’ve discussed some of the hazards of failing to properly consider the backup infrastructure as an organization virtualizes its environment. Immediate problems an organization may experience using traditional agent-based backup approaches include overloading the virtualized server’s CPU as backup jobs run andcongesting the host server’s network connections as data is sent out to either disk or tape.

Aggravating the situation, while backup jobs run they can impact applications executing on other virtual machines running on that same physical server. In so doing, an organization essentially backs itself into a situation where it has to do something since its current backups in its newly virtualized environment are failing or at least performing in a less than optimal manner.

So what options do organizations have available to them? A lot of them are looking at new disk-based deduplication solutions as a means to expedite backups. Still others are looking at redoing their entire backup design by replacing it with an alternative solution.

However before taking such measures, steps that are more practical for an organization to take are to simply upgrade its current backup software and start using ordinary disk as a backup target. In the last few years newer versions of backup software have added a number of features that can alleviate the pain associated with backing up and recovering a virtualized environment (though they require disk as a backup target to realize these benefits).

However this option is only viable if an organization is running the right version of backup software with the right features. To address this, there are three key features that an organization should look for in a backup software upgrade of its existing software that can tip it off as to whether or not it will solve its new backup problems in its virtualized environment.

Server virtualization integration. Another method that backup software upgrades are taking to protect virtualized environments is through integrating with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) or Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Using this technique, the backup software can automatically issue a command to the virtual server to take a live snapshot of the virtual machine (VM) running on the ESX server orHyper-V environment without disrupting the virtual server environment and without scripting any of the backup process. An integrated backup software like Backup Exec or NetBackup also ensures there is minimal I/O impact to the virtual server environment and also allows for support of unlimited guest machines with a single agent. Granular Virtual Server Recovery. Make sure you can easily restore files and folders inside a guest machine along with an entire guest or host environment. With integrated backup software, the benefits of file-level and image-level recovery are delivered from a single- pass VCB or VSS image-level backup–it’s no longer necessary to perform separate guest level back- and file-level backups in order to recover a single file within a virtual disk image. Individual files can be recovered directly from an image-level backup within the Backup Exec console Deduplication. The word is getting out amongst knowledgeable IT consultants that using software-based deduplication that is part of the backup software client works well. Products such as the latest version of Symantec NetBackup with its PureDisk option provide a better way to protect your virtual infrastructure without negatively impacting the host server. Since many applications that are virtualized only experience marginal changes throughout the day and the need to recover these back to a specific point in time is less of a requirement, consultants are telling me that using deduplication is a great way to effectively protect one’s data doing daily backups. This functionality will also be available in the next release of Backup Exec later this year.

As this SHARE survey uncovered, every day more organizations are virtualizing more of their data center infrastructures and, as they do, they are discovering that they can think about and manage their applications in entirely new ways. But organizations need to exercise some caution and take their time in how they re-think the management of some applications while how to manage other applications need to be re-thought almost immediately. Backup and recovery is definitely one of those applications that will demand their immediate attention as they virtualize their infrastructure.

The good news is that organizations may not have to request additional funds to redesign their backup infrastructure to meet these new needs since backup software upgrades are many times part of their annual budgets. While they will definitely have to introduce disk into their backup scheme to take advantage of these new backup software features, high capacity disk-based storage systems suitable for backup targets are now relatively inexpensive or they can even use legacy, unused systems. In either case, leveraging new features found in backup software upgrades are a logical first step for organizations to take, may solve current backup problems and save them the time and expense of overhauling their backup infrastructure.