NetApp and Syncsort have long been partners. They’ve kicked the relationship up a notch with this announcement since they’re offering an integrated solution via mutual distributors (Arrow and Avnet) and resellers.  How integrated is integrated?  Well, the actual packaging for each vendor’s component is separate; IT organizations procure NetApp FAS disk systems, NetApp Protection Pack software, and Syncsort BEX data protection software via a single distributor SKU.  The integration is more in how the solutions work together.  Syncsort BEX clients work with NetApp APIs to invoke SnapVault—to create point-in-time backup copies stored on another NetApp system.  The backup data path is BEX client direct to NetApp FAS storage, with no device server required.  There’s a BEX Master server on the network, but it serves as the central point of management, the policy engine, and the backup catalog.  Offsite copies can be facilitated by NetApp SnapMirror (which enables site-to-site mirroring) or physical tape.

The key benefit is simplicity and ease-of-use.  It’s also cost-effective—not only because it’s an integrated hardware/software solution, but because it includes replication to facilitate DR at no additional cost and has integrated deduplication to optimize network bandwidth and storage capacity.  The solution is designed to be cost competitive at 40% less than comparable EMC offerings.

Recovery is a big focus, too.  Recovery options range from catalog searchable snapshots, mountable snapshot images, and integrated virtual machine recovery as well as recovery from physical tape.   Syncsort’s secret weapon for server virtualization environments, such as VMware (EMC Avamar’s sweet spot), is its ability to provide P2V and V2V recovery via a bootable virtual machine based on any backup image.

The Syncsort-NetApp solution provides a boost to backup and recovery … and each company’s competitiveness.  Syncsort benefits from the heightened exposure to NetApp’s channel partners.  NetApp gains technology integration that complements its data protection portfolio, offering its clients a more full-featured solution.  And, the combined solution is compelling versus EMC’s portfolio.  Sounds like a win-win-win … for NetApp, Syncsort, and NSB customers.

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Veeam is taking advantage of VMware snaps to capture VM images and store them on the Veeam backup server’s datastore. The VM image can be Storage vMotioned to a production datastore or it can be replicated to a production datastore via Veeam’s own replication technology (this is a manual cut over … about 10 minutes of downtime).  Essentially, this is the ability to boot a VM directly from the backup copy without having to do a full restore.

Vizioncore offers something similar.  Its vRanger’s FlashRestore feature reduces recovery time for a VM image to seconds. Instead of waiting for the VM file to be copied from the backup repository to the recovery system over the network, the VM image can be booted directly from the vRanger Pro backup repository, making it immediately available.

Funny thing is, these solutions sound an awful lot like something Syncsort has had for years: BEX Instant Availability, which provides immediate recovery of critical applications and data without a need to transfer data.

Veeam vigorously defends that what it does is different … and Veeam’s right. One of the advantages of having VM image is the ease of manipulation and portability.  Syncsort uses raw device mapping (RDM) in physical compatibility mode to link VMFS volume to a raw LUN, which creates a virtual machine disk image file (.vmdk) pointing to the raw LUN. You can instantly recover the VM by mounting the data as a physical RDM, but you can’t Storage vMotion it back to production storage since Storage vMotion doesn’t support physical RDMs.

With the tolerance for downtime rapidly decreasing, it’s a sure bet that IT organizations are continually on the hunt for solutions that can help meet aggressive recovery objectives.  Veeam, Vizioncore, and Syncsort all support this objective.

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For many IT organizations, legacy backup and recovery solutions are no longer meeting availability and recovery needs.  They’re too costly or complex, or they’re eating up too much time and resources getting the job done.  Once-per-day file-level backup may be as archaic a concept as checking your e-mail inbox once per day—things are constantly changing and there’s a risk that you’ll miss something.

To minimize risk, IT organizations layer other technologies—snapshot and replication, for example—on top of backup.  That’s good for availability, but this approach adds more complexity, copies, and overhead.  And talk about redundancy … now you’ve got multiple copies of the same stuff, albeit used for different purposes.  Does that have to be case?

What if you could apply the principles of virtualization to this scenario?  Abstract the logical from the physical.  Break down the data protection silos and take physical assets and turn them into a pool of logical resources.  Improve utilization of resources and streamline management.  What if you could capture and maintain virtual copies of data and use a single copy for different purposes?

The potential exists to actually abandon backup in lieu of point-in-time virtual copies that can be captured, transferred, stored and recovered more efficiently.  This could cut the time it takes to execute backup processes (and recovery) and reduce network bandwidth and storage capacity requirements (and the associated costs) as well as drive better recovery time and recovery point objectives.  What?  Save time, save money, and deliver better results?

Sounds too good to be true, right?  Well, not for a few of Actifio’s early adopters who have had a Howard Beale moment or two.  Actifio has a handful of customers with its technology in place and they are claiming big benefits.   Skeptics (and especially those who are “mad as hell”) should hear them out.

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We’re still in the early phases of deduplication adoption, with less than 40% of respondents to ESG data protection research having deployed the technology in backup environments.  Of these, ESG’s research found that adopters of deduplication selected a mix of hardware and software deployment approaches: 40% implement it in backup software, 26% in backup hardware (appliance or disk storage system), and 34% in a combination of hardware and software.

Deduplication as a feature of software solutions may be less expensive, but there could be more time and technical acumen required for installation, configuration, and performance tuning, and any hardware necessary to create a whole solution will need to be acquired. Appliance-based solutions are pre-assembled with all of the required components, offering end-users a more plug-and-play installation and configuration experience, and since they are purpose-built they may deliver better performance. One drawback to hardware appliances is that they may underutilize system resources since purchases are typically made to accommodate future growth.

Organizations with fewer production servers and less capacity tend to favor software-only approaches while those with more production servers and capacity take a hybrid approach, applying hardware to some workloads and software to others.

Both adopter and planned adopter respondents ranked cost, ease of installation/use, and impact on backup/recovery performance as the top three purchase criteria for deduplication.  Interestingly, dedupe buyers using hardware-only approaches were influenced most in their decision by a relationship with an existing vendor.  I wonder if that will be the case with Symantec’s appliance approach.

What’s your preference and why?

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StorWize provides real-time data compression technology to help clients reduce physical storage requirements.  Prime use cases for the technology include files, databases, and virtual machine disk files where capacity growth is an issue and compression can make an impact—without having a performance impact.  Reducing the footprint of data reduces the footprint of storage infrastructure and lowers associated management and environmental costs.

IT organizations using any solution in IBM’s NAS portfolio (N-series and SONAS) will benefit from the active data compression, as will IBM’s DB2 database customers.  However, the StorWize technology is not limited to IBM-only technology; StorWize clients have been using it with non-IBM NAS solutions (HP, EMC, NetApp) and non-IBM databases (Informix).

The StorWize technology is additive to IBM’s data reduction/capacity optimization offerings.  IBM acquired Diligent and its ProtecTIER deduplication technology for backup storage a little over two years ago, and IBM introduced deduplication in backup/recovery/archive solution Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) in 2009. Actually, deduplication and compression are complementary.  When used together, capacity optimization is amplified.  StorWize compresses the data stored in real-time to achieve optimization, while data deduplication works to eliminate multiple copies of the same data.

For example, if StorWize is used with NetApp Deduplication in a primary environment, the combined solution offers real-time compression with block-level data deduplication as a post-process. Theoretically, if StorWize was able to achieve even a 10:1 compression ratio and NetApp Deduplication achieved a 10:1 deduplication ratio, the combined capacity optimization would be 100:1.  The same would apply for StorWize primary storage optimization combined with any secondary storage deduplication solution or single-instance archive solution—capacity savings for “downstream” storage would be improved significantly.

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So how does the acquisition benefit Dell?  Dell sells storage systems for primary and backup data, and wants to provide features that lower data management costs for end-users.  But where does the Ocarina technology fit considering Dell’s existing partnerships with CommVault (Simpana on PowerVault DL systems), EMC (resell Data Domain) and Symantec (Backup Exec on PowerVault DL systems)?  What’s the relationship between data deduplicated on primary storage and data deduplicated in backup processes?

In an earlier post, I discussed the benefits of deduplicating “upstream”—as close to the source of data as possible with solutions from the likes of Exar, GreenBytes, NetApp, Permabit, and StorWize.  One of the theories is that data can be backed up in its optimized state—that is, without having to be “rehydrated” or “reinflated” to its non-optimized format for backup processes.  This would enable an end-to-end deduplication strategy for data.  Not quite sure how this plays out with some of the primary deduplication solutions, including Ocarina.

With this gotcha in mind, it would, therefore, make sense that Dell would need deduplication for primary data and other solutions (CommVault, EMC and Symantec) for backup data.  The technologies from these different vendors could be complementary.  I don’t know how efficient a story that is for Dell customers …  it’s definitely a wrinkle Dell will have to iron out as it brings Ocarina-optimized storage to market and positions it versus other capacity optimization technologies in its portfolio.

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ESG research respondents ranked “improving disaster recovery capabilities” as #1 for data protection spending priorities in 2010.  In another study of all IT spending priorities for 2010, “business continuity and disaster recovery programs” ranked eighth, while, within virtualization priorities, “making use of virtual machine replication for DR” ranked #4.

In a 1:1 P2P scenario, DR assets are mostly dormant, consuming valuable IT resources (staff, data center footprint, power/cooling, and added CAPEX for infrastructure costs).  The expense of maintaining DR assets often becomes the limiting factor in what applications and data are protected. And, if my organization doesn’t have a second site or data center to use as a target for my clone, a DR strategy can’t get off the ground at all.

Enter virtualization.

Clearly, IT organizations are seeing the benefits of taking advantage of P2V and V2V DR scenarios.  These approaches greatly reduce the cost and complexity associated with DR infrastructure.  Virtualization reduces the cost of hardware at a secondary site and eliminates resource consumption.  The portability of virtual machines also means that failback can occur to the original location or to a new one—to a virtual machine or a physical system with dissimilar hardware.

Enter the cloud.

Nowhere to replicate to?  Amazon is a good destination.  “Rentable” compute (EC2) and storage (S3) for use as a DR target are readily available with a credit card.  Provision what you need, when you need it.

Double-Take Software can facilitate the process.  The company offers continuous host-level replication of physical or virtual machines to a secondary host—located in the same data center or to a WAN-connected site (including the cloud).  Double-Take Cloud delivers real-time replication between source system and a Double-Take Cloud Repository hosted at Amazon.

Why is this a big deal?  Tremendous cost savings.  With an approximate cost of $100 per server per month, the vendor claims 88% savings in DR TCO with Double-Take Cloud over a more traditional DR scenario.

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What ESG’s research reveals is a mixed outlook for VTLs: there is widespread use of and ongoing interest in VTL technology; however, the technology may simply fill niche requirements for select organizations.  Results of surveying over 500 IT professionals revealed VTL deployments are a function of data volume and organizations’ reliance on physical tape.  Companies with multi-terabytes of data to back up daily require high-performance solutions—such as VTL—in order to meet backup windows, and VTL has higher appeal to those organizations leveraging both disk and tape.

Most IT organizations (80%) are using disk as the initial on-site backup target.  Retention time on disk in D2D2T strategies has been extended from one week (66%) in 2008 to one month or more (68%) in 2010.  The latter number jumps to 80% for VTL users in 2010.  This is likely fueled by the availability of deduplication: more VTL users employ deduplication than those organizations that back up to other forms of disk targets.

VTLs will likely face mounting pressure from competing disk backup targets that are perceived as more cost-effective.  However, organizations with retention mandates requiring physical tape, and data volume that prevents IT from meeting backup windows are likely to find relief in VTL technology.

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IBM has its flagship TSM and TSM FastBack backup and recovery software in the Tivoli software group, its ProtecTIER disk backup target in its tape hardware division, and its online backup service in the BCRS group.  There doesn’t seem to be much coordination between these functional groups.  Similarly, HP has its Data Protector software in its Software group, its VLS and D2D backup targets in its Storage Works Division, and an online backup solution in the HP Services area.  Then there’s EMC, which has a focused BRS unit handling its Networker and Avamar backup software, as well as its Data Domain and EDL disk targets.  But the company maintains RecoverPoint CDP and replication, and Mozy online backup in organizations external to BRS (and until it recently divested itself of the technology, it had Retrospect in yet another division). Except for HP, the rationale for the way these products are overseen may have resulted from acquisition strategies, and they exist as disjointed efforts due to lack of integration.  And, as could be expected in such large companies, all of these vendors’ primary storage systems are maintained in organizations unrelated to data protection.

NetApp, on the other hand, has a more integrated approach.  Its data protection portfolio resides organizationally together; development, sales, and marketing efforts are coordinated; and positioning to clients is more unified.  This lack of organizational silos is an improvement over its competitors.  To NetApp clients, prospects, and channel partners, the result could be more clarity around the total offering, as well as more efficiency—both in the way the technology operates to protect and store data, and in operational overhead in managing the solution.  As more organizations pursue consolidation efforts and seek greater efficiency, this distinction has to become evident.

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I started having intermittent issues with my laptop last week.  It’s been in service for about four years, so my anxiety rises when anything weird starts to occur.  Luckily, I am confident with data protection.  ESG centralizes documents in Microsoft SharePoint, has standard backup processes, and I have access to DropBox for random PC files I need to store in the cloud.  My productivity was disrupted while my system was repaired (Thanks, Dan!), but the inconvenience was nothing compared to what it could have been had I not had backup copies of my data.

Coincidentally, I received a package from Acronis that was pretty compelling—especially given my circumstances.  Acronis just released their new hard drive monitoring software, Acronis Drive Monitor, which detects and reports on indicators of disk health. This can deliver advance warning that a hard drive is going to fail—enough time to back up any critical data and seek repairs.  And the good news?  It’s a free download: http://www.acronis.com/adm.

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