Companies can then focus their most costly IT staff at the main office and automate backups in other locations. This also eliminates the need for media handling in those locations.
This is why deduplication and replication complement each other so nicely. Since deduplication first reduces the size of the data store, advanced replication solutions such as the Quantum DXi-Series only send changed blocks to the target. This can reduce costly network bandwidth requirements by a factor of 20.
"Sensitive data" can take many forms: bank account numbers, credit or debit card numbers, driver's license number, health information and social security numbers are all examples of information that most organizations have in their possession in one form or another.
Storing this type of data to tape as part of an organization's archiving or backup practices does not necessarily mean it has to encrypt this data. However, if it does not, it must account for all of the tapes and the data on them should the organization ever be subject to an audit or review of its tape management practices. Encrypting data can eliminate concerns about lost or stolen tapes.
Banks, brokerage firms, credit unions, doctors' and dentists' offices, hospitals and payment processing firms are subject to the rules issues by different federal regulatory agencies. The problem that emerges is that some of these agency regulations are defined as "required" and others as "addressable".
For instance, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is designed to protect patients' medical records and is applicable to health plans, doctors, hospitals and other health care providers. It has a specific guideline that mentions encryption (pg 29) but it only classifies encryption as "addressable". Specifically it says, "Implement a mechanism to encrypt electronic protected health information whenever deemed appropriate."
It is safe to say that any data that is ever outside of the control or has the potential to be outside of the control of these organizations should be encrypted. It is reasonable to assume storing data to tape would fall within these parameters and should therefore be encrypted.
The list of states that do not have civil penalties for the accidental, inadvertent or deliberate disclosure of sensitive data is now shorter than those that do. Missouri was the most recent state to join the many states (plus the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico) that require notification when security breaches involving personal information occur. This leaves only five states (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and South Dakota) that do not currently have laws on the books.When one looks at encryption from these different perspectives, it quickly becomes evident why an organization should encrypt its data stored to tape since it can eliminate much of the financial uncertainty and risk that exists with unencrypted data.
Even if an organization is located in one of these five exempt states, if it should happen to do business in any of the other states that do have these civil regulations, then it may still be subject to their laws regarding the management of the data that it possesses of the citizens of that state.
The risk that organizations run by not encrypting their data is substantial civil penalties imposed by the state in addition to whatever other legal costs they incur. For instance, the state of Alaska imposes a $500 civil penalty on an organization for each resident that was notified of a breach, up to $50,000.
Making the argument to encrypt data stored to tape compelling is that most states exempt organizations from needing to notify residents if the data on a tape that is lost, misplaced or stolen is encrypted.
The VMware ESX includes the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) feature which creates a snapshot of a VM so that the backup of a VM can occur using a backup server without incurring a performance penalty on the hosting ESX server. This eliminates the overhead associated with the backup. Microsoft Hyper-V is similar in that it also creates snapshots of either individual VMs or the entire Hyper-V server.
Unlike VMware, however, Hyper-V uses the Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) Writer found in Microsoft OSes which gives it a slight edge over VCB in Windows environments since it can create application consistent snapshots of virtualized Windows OSes. The backup of the snapshot is then accomplished in a manner like in a VCB environment by using a proxy server. (For further information on Hyper-V backups, a blog recently appeared on Microsoft's Technet website that examines this subject.)
While I can see Crump's point and agree that a great deal of innovation is occurring in disk libraries, I have heard enough customer stories and seen enough new technologies emerge to convince me that tape will outlive forecasts for its ultimate demise though its role is certainly going to change.
As anyone who follows the data protection space at any level probably knows, disk and deduplicating disk systems are on their way to replacing tape as the primary backup target in many shops. The most often cited reasons for this change include:
But why will tape survive, and possibly even thrive, in spite of these obvious benefits of using disk? Here are a few stories and tidbits of information that I have picked up over the last year as to why tape will continue on.
It turns out this individual had two data centers - a production data center in the New Orleans area and a DR site in the Houston area - and they were both hit by hurricanes within the space of a month and he had to shut down both of them at the same time. Thankfully he had copied all of his production data to tape so he could move it to yet a third data center and recover his production applications.
It is because of circumstances like this that companies like Quantum are hearing from conversations with its customers that tape continues to hold a strong role in disaster recovery and long term data retention in its customer accounts. Its customers are also seeing a growing role for managed, near-line archives of indexed, tiered file data.
The customer requirements associated with the emerging use models for tape are primarily about software. There are some needs around traditional hardware, but the most important needs are about data movement and data and media management. The ability to tune these elements together is key to creating a complete answer for the customer. You'll continue to see enhancements in drive technology and automation, but the big news going forward will be how tape library vendors use the drives and the automation - in conjunction with disk - to solve real customer needs and integrate them.
We now see similar types of innovation occurring in products like the Quantum DXi7500. It can already manage the movement of data from disk to tape and back again since not every company has a secondary location or second disk system to which it can replicate data. Already the DXi7500 works with enterprise data protection software such as EMC NetWorker and Symantec NetBackup which can track the movement of backed up data.
Even assuming all innovation in tape technology stopped today, I sincerely doubt companies would stop using tape. Evolutions in storage take years if not decades to occur (I am still aware of banks that use reel-to-reel tape systems and innovation in that technology ended eons ago). In addition, with the increasing focus on energy efficiency in data centers, tape is arguably the most efficient means for storing archive data that must be saved for compliance reasons, but may never see the light of day again. So to declare that tape is dead when innovation is occurring is just downright irresponsible.
Neither disk nor tape technologies, when viewed outside of the context of how companies are using them to solve problems, are very interesting of and by themselves. It is only when they solve real world problems and how companies utilize them in those capacities that companies perk up and take notice. So just because tape is no longer used as the primary target for backup doesn't mean that tape is dead, it just means that it is evolving to solve new sets of corporate problems. As those specific problems become better understood and documented, expect the products that support tape to experience similar forward movements in innovation.
]]>One of the more elaborately crafted illusions that deduplication vendors have created over the last few years is that deduplication appliances are simply a "plug-n-play" proposition. In one respect, this is true. Companies can often introduce a deduplication appliance into their backup environment without substantially changing their existing backup configurations. Where the slight of hand comes in is when it comes to the vendor appropriately sizing the deduplication appliance for the client's environment. If it is too small or undersized, companies end up with a deduplication appliance that does not perform as anticipated; if it is too large, companies end up with an oversized appliance that costs them too much money.
Quantum's recent November 19, 2008, announcement of the new DXi7500 Express addresses the initial concern of small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) - creating a "plug-n-play" experience with an enterprise caliber deduplication solution at a price point they can afford. The DXi7500 Express integrates the hardware and software needed for midrange environments and includes licenses for deduplication, VTL and NAS interfaces at an MSRP of $98,250. The solution then functions as a "turnkey" version of Quantum's enterprise class DXi7500 model so that SMEs can expeditiously deploy the DXi7500 Express into their environments.
The DXi7500 Express does differ from the DXi7500 in that it only provides adaptive deduplication (as opposed to policy-based deduplication) and support for up to 7 TB of deduplicated data. However the good news is that companies can upgrade a DXi7500 Express to a DXi7500 and still gain access to its higher capacities, full tape creation capabilities, replication and a full suite of management options without replacing it.
In terms of helping customers appropriately size the DXi7500 Express for their backup environment, Quantum had to do some innovation and make some changes on their side. Quantum has found that customers can fairly accurately estimate how many servers they own and how much data they backup, but customer estimates as to the rate of data change and annual data growth in their backup environments tend to err on the conservative side. Couple these errors with incomplete information on the backup methodologies they use for specific applications and how long they retain data creates a scenario where appropriately sizing a deduplication appliance for the customer environment becomes a roll of the dice.
So to help take some of the uncertainty out of this initial sizing exercise, Quantum now provides its resellers with a new QuikFit sizing program. This process is intended to help resellers gather needed information from their customers so they can more precisely size and configure deduplication appliances. Examples of customer information that resellers now gather include:
Responses from their customers are entered into an online form and then compared against a sizing tool that matches the customer's requirements to an appropriate size model of the Quantum's DXi-Series deduplication solutions. Quantum anticipates that the creation of this new online portal and accompanying sizing tool will enable its resellers to provide on-the-spot appliance sizing and rule of thumb prices for their clients.
Customers and vendors alike are discovering that the reality of implementing deduplication appliances rarely match the "plug-n-play" illusion that everyone wants to believe that deduplication appliances offer. However vendors are not giving up on trying to deliver on this ideal and SMEs and their resellers are starting to see some of the fruits of these efforts. The recent announcement of Quantum's DXi7500 Express and QuikFit program brings SMEs one step closer to seeing turnkey deduplication appliances delivered to their door and implemented in their backup environment with minimal setup and configuration required.
]]>Deduplication is rapidly becoming the new battleground in corporate backup and no technology vendor can afford not to enter this fray. Yet until recently, Dell, the world's third largest supplier of servers--and a leading supplier of data storage solutions - lacked any native disk-based backup appliance that was capable of deduplication. That changed earlier this month with its announcement that it will develop its own line of disk-based backup appliances that will use Quantum's software, of which deduplication and replication are primary features.
Dell's November 3, 2008, announcement parallels what a few other hardware vendors have done to date: build its own backup appliance with a separate vendor providing the key deduplication and replication technology. In Dell's case, its forthcoming system will be completely built according to its own hardware specifications and then leverage Quantum's deduplication and replication software.
One key area that makes this forthcoming Quantum-enabled Dell appliance truly unique is that Dell can more fully leverage its existing relationship with EMC. Like Dell, EMC's DL3D and 3D4000 disk libraries also utilize Quantum's software to perform deduplication as well as replication. This presumably will give companies the flexibility to choose from any of these three hardware providers and create a data protection solution that can deduplicate at multiple locations and replicate data between products from any of these vendors. So as Dell approaches enterprise accounts, it can offer companies a choice of different data protection solutions with a common deduplication foundation that allows broad replication compatibility.
But what makes this announcement of further interest is what it may mean for companies as they select backup appliances now and into the future. Currently when companies purchase a disk-based backup appliance, they are generally tied to that hardware vendor longer term since if they start to use that platform's deduplication or replication features, choosing another platform becomes more difficult. This puts them in a position where they need to purchase all of their hardware from a single vendor even if that vendor may not offer all of the configuration and support options that they may need for their different office locations.
The apparent decision of Quantum, EMC and Dell to cooperate by using common deduplication and replication software across platforms takes a great deal of uncertainty out of an end user's decision. Yes, companies can still purchase all of their disk-based backup solutions from one vendor if they so choose. But now they have the option to choose hardware configurations and support options from other vendors that may better match their particular needs. This especially holds true in enterprise organizations with remote and branch offices that may independently have existing relationships with Dell, EMC or Quantum and want to continue using those suppliers and resellers.
Most administrators are very loyal to a brand and may become even more so as they start to use a specific hardware platform's software features and get them installed and operational in their environments. But this cross-vendor approach to compatibility sets up the potential for a more open industry standard to deduplicate and replicate data which bodes well for the IT community as a whole.
]]>Gartner Group projects that 50% of data centers have insufficient power to meet their current needs and that by 2009 the costs associated with cooling data centers will become the second highest operating cost in 70% of data centers worldwide. It is no wonder that companies are clamoring for technologies that can immediately help them meet this immediate and pressing need by making their data centers more energy efficient.
This is part of the motivation behind the creation of the Green Grid consortium that is dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. As part of its efforts, it is giving a great deal of attention to deduplication and products like the Quantum DXi-Series that simultaneously solve the problems of data storage and protection while also creating greener data centers. Deduplication is one of the technologies that the consortium promotes because it can help companies reduce data center power consumption in two key ways:
To help companies document these energy savings, the Green Grid consortium provides metrics that measure their overall Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Efficiency (DCE). The PUE Metric takes Total Facility Power and divides it by the IT Equipment Power. So for example, if the PUE is 3.0, that means the datacenter power demand is three times greater than what is necessary to power the IT equipment. DCE is the reciprocal of PUE and tells you how much power IT equipment is consumed in the data center. These metrics are rapidly evolving into standard benchmarks that are being adopted by companies globally with the Data Center Code of Conduct in Europe providing proof that substantial changes to data centers are coming down the pike.
Higher energy costs and limited availability to power are not eliminating the other growing problem that companies face: the need to protect growing amounts of corporate data and keep it readily available and protected. Deduplicating disk systems such as the Quantum DXi-Series provide a balanced approach to managing tape backup and disk-based deduplication backup and storage. Quantum allows companies to have a viable solution that balances enterprises existing tape solutions, and address this three prong problem of higher energy costs, limited power availability and exploding data growth. Measuring power usage through standard metrics and using deduplication products not only reduces your datacenter storage footprint, but lays the foundation for companies to create more efficient datacenters that are better positioned to meet decrease energy demands, lower costs and put them in strong competitive position.
]]>While the price of bandwidth over WAN links has certainly dropped in recent years and there are more options available than ever before, it still is not free and not every site has the same type of WAN connection. If anything, when companies look to replicate backup data, they are looking to spend less money, not more, on managing backup data so the last thing they will want to do is add more WAN links or bandwidth just to replicate backup data. This makes it more important that companies not only deduplicate their backup data before it is replicated but only replicate the backup data that is not already at the target site.
One option that some disk-based libraries use to replicate data is moving blocks of deduplicated data in bursts. Using data bursts the system sends blocks of data to a target site without knowing if the blocks of data are needed at the target site or not. Since the data is deduplicated, it is quite possible that the data sent is not unique to the target system which can result in the target system needing to rededuplicate the data on the target system. This is inefficient since it causes overhead on the target system but more importantly, the replication consumes precious network bandwidth. This can result in the need for more expensive WAN links, incomplete replication jobs due to network congestion or disruptions in other network transmissions.
In a check and forward data replication scenario such as is used by disk libraries like the Quantum DXi-Series, it functions as follows:
Using a check and forward data replication system such as is found the Quantum DXi-Series, data that is deduplicated at the source site is not necessarily replicated unless the block of deduplicated data is also unique to the target system. This saves valuable bandwidth and avoids the need for the target system to rededuplicate the data which enables companies to dedicate more of these resources to other operational tasks.
Replication technology is rapidly becoming viewed as a requirement when implementing deduplication but network bandwidth can become a stumbling block when looking to replicate data off-site. However by identifying disk-based systems that use a check and forward data replication methodology, you increase the odds you can use your available bandwidth without impacting your current environment or impacting other applications that use these WAN links
]]>Companies do not consciously make decisions to lose money, lose customers, or hurt shareholder value, but if they are not taking the proactive data security step of encrypting your data at rest on backup tapes that is exactly what they are doing. Companies are quickly finding out that taking the proper steps to encrypt data at rest is much cheaper than the alternative. Consider:
In addition to the intangible costs of lost customers and damaged corporate reputations, state and federal governments are stepping into the arena and bringing tangible costs into the equation. Ever since California's SB 1386 went into effect in 2003, it has set the precedent for data breach notification laws and most other states have now followed California's lead with Iowa recently becoming the 43rd state to pass a data breach law. The federal government also has several bills pending such as the Leahy-Specter Bill and a competing bill introduced by Sen. Feinstein. Therefore it stands to reason that if federal and state governments are taking this issue seriously that tape encryption is an issue your company cannot afford to ignore.
Under California's SB 1386, as with most of state notification laws, "safe harbor" is given to notifying customers if data on missing backup tapes is shown to be encrypted. On the flip side, if a company cannot show customers' data was encrypted and personally identifiable customer information was stored on a lost, misplaced or stolen tape, then chances are a company will be required to notify those affected customers. Even worse, if a company cannot ascertain which customers were affected, then it might be subject to notifying each and every customer.
So, why have so many states given safe harbor to encryption? Currently, it is the best option in protecting your customers from identity theft. Encryption is quite simply taking plain text and making it unreadable to anybody who does not have the proper key to decipher the text with proper key control is a critical factor in your data protection strategy. In forthcoming blog entries, we'll take a closer look at the encryption capabilities of the latest Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape technology as well as Quantum's centralized key management approach called Encryption Key Manager (Q-EKM) in terms of how they addresses immediate corporate concerns about both tape encryption and proper key management so companies can satisfy these emerging legal and financial concerns.
]]>The enterprise data center continues to evolve, driven by ever-growing amounts of data and new demands for data availability - local and remote. These demands are driving companies to identify alternatives to existing data protection methods with deduplicating disk-based storage systems, such as Quantum's DXi Series, becoming a preferred backup target. However deduplicating data is only half the equation. To fully deliver on enterprise data protection, companies need efficient, cost-effective options so they can move this deduplicated data off-site for long term compliance and disaster recovery, or centralize and consolidate data from remote offices.
To achieve this, companies either need to copy data from disk to tape or replicate it from one disk-based system to another. It is this second option that is catching the attention of more companies. Technologies like Symantec's NetBackup Open Storage Option are making it easier for companies to centrally manage replication between two different disk-based storage systems while deduplication reduces the amount of data that companies need to store. This data reduction process enables customers to replicate their data over bandwidth-constrained corporate LANs and WANs.
Used in this context, it becomes obvious that the topics of replication and deduplication are not separate topics or one-off conversations, they are now part of the same discussion. The key to delivering on this functionality is quantifying how well these two technologies work with one another. However that is invariably dependent upon the strengths of the disk-based storage system to manage its deduplication and replication features.
Deduplicating and replicating all backup data isn't always the right answer for every company and, as companies move forward with disk-based data protection, they need to step back to evaluate how to best implement these complementary technologies. Here are some key areas companies need to consider as they start to look to incorporate deduplication and replication into their overall data protection strategy:
Deduplication and replication are now part of the total data protection equation but companies cannot assume "1+1=2" where these two technologies are concerned. There are numerous factors to consider as companies develop their overall data protection strategy, and treating deduplication and replication as two separate topics is simply out of the question. In upcoming blog entries, we'll take a closer look at how companies can address these specific questions.
]]>Today's announcements from Quantum indicate that it is committed to making these ongoing, continual and incremental changes to its product lines (hardware and software) in order to meet current and future customer demands. Enhancements to its Vision global system management software indicate that Quantum recognizes that companies intend to support and manage both disk and tape as part of their backup storage infrastructure long term. The other announcement that the DXi7500 will now start with support for 9 TBs of capacity is indicative of Quantum's awareness that for it to compete in some customer accounts, the DXI7500 needed a smaller initial storage capacity footprint.
It is no secret that disk is fast becoming the primary target for corporate backups while tape often remains the preferred method for storing and keeping data long term. Yet what companies may lack as they transition from only tape to both disk and tape in their backup environment is the means to effectively manage backup data across these two types of media. If backup data is stored on disk, companies need to track information like total utilized capacity, deduplication ratios, throughput and data growth rates. When the backup data is stored to tape, additional information about where tape cartridges are located, how full they are and how the tape library is performing is also needed.
Quantum's Vision software has provided a single point-of-management for some time for Quantum's DXi disk-based backup systems and Scalar tape libraries but lacked insight into deduplication and replication trends within that customer environment. However as deduplication becomes more prominent in customer backup environments, customers want and need to track how well deduplication on its DXi Series is performing.
In this latest software release, Vision now captures more information about how well the DXi Series' deduplicates data by giving administrators insight into how efficiently it deduplicates the data (deduplication ratios) over time, how well it performs (i.e. how fast the DXi deduplicates data) and includes analysis and reporting tools that help administrators make more informed decisions about data they should - and should not - deduplicate.
The other half of today's announcement that the entry point for the DXi7500 now begins at 9 TB also reflects a similar sort of incremental forward step for Quantum's DXi7500 product line. Prior to today's announcement, the DXi7500 started at 18 TB usable capacity while Quantum's midrange DXi5500 topped out at about 11 TBs. This left a fairly sizeable hole in Quantum's disk-based backup system product portfolio which its competitors could potentially exploit for deals starting in the 10 - 20 TB range. By lowering the DXi7500's entry point to 9 TB, Quantum can now not only compete in accounts that need backup solutions in this range, it provide these potential clients with a more scalable architecture and more options for performing deduplication than any of its competitors currently can provide.
Full-featured disk-based backup solutions do not happen by accident or overnight - they are a series of incremental improvements in response to customer requests as customers become more educated and understand their own backup environments better. These recent enhancements to Quantum's hardware and software products reflect that Quantum's customers have every intention of using disk as backup target but are throwing neither money nor caution to the wind. By starting with a smaller disk capacity footprint on the DXi7500 and monitoring deduplication ratios using its Vision software, customers can now accomplish both of these objectives.
]]>One of the important benefits of tape emulation, or VTL technology, is that backup software sees the disk as tape with which backup software has enjoyed a long partnership. However some of the key problems that companies face after the backup to a disk-as-disk system is completed include:
Data protection vendors are working to meet these challenges though it is only now that companies are starting to see the results of these behind-the-scenes efforts. One such initiative is Symantec's NetBackup OpenStorage API that Symantec announced back in November 2006. Its purpose: provide customers with more flexibility in managing backup data stored on disk-based backup solutions.
When Symantec announced its OpenStorage API, it envisioned treating "disk as disk" so companies could take full advantage of the options that new disk-based storage systems afforded them. Specific features that the adoption of the OpenStorage API on these system would enable included granting NetBackup permission to manage replication between storage systems as well as the copying of data from disk to tape (on disk-based storage system that supported this feature).
The upside for disk-based backup providers like Quantum is that the NetBackup OpenStorage API provided them a base line to develop code as it developed replication and disk-to-tape copy features for its disk-based storage systems. By coding to the standards detailed in Symantec's NetBackup OpenStorage API, Quantum would have the assurance that any company using NetBackup could backup to its DXi Series disk systems and manage its replication and disk-to-tape copy features without the NetBackup catalog loosing track of what data resides where.
This brings us to today. Though Symantec made this announcement over 18 months ago, only now are we starting to see some of the fruits of its OpenStorage API announcement. During the recent Symantec Vision Conference, Quantum did a live demonstration of the integration between its DXi7500 enterprise disk-based backup system and NetBackup 6.5. Using the OpenStorage API plug-in, and including key management capabilities through NetBackup. Ultimately, this development will allow users to manage duplicate backup images on multiple DXi systems as well as copy data from disk to tape using the DXi7500. The management, cataloging, and tracking of data that is moved or copied by the DXi7500 are completely controlled by NetBackup regardless if the DXi7500 moves data from system to system or off to to tape.
When Quantum announced its new DXi7500, it took aim at the enterprise data center by offering expanded features, such as a policy-based de-duplication methodology, simple scalability and high availability. However enterprise companies still need to centrally manage and track their backup data and many still turn to Symantec NetBackup to perform this task. In fact, according to Quantum, it has tens of thousands of NetBackup customers using its disk and tape systems. So now that this integration between these two technology is nearing completion, companies can jointly use NetBackup and Quantum's OpenStorage API software option to take another step forward in centralizing the management of their backup data regardless of where the data resides or on what type of media.
]]>The problem that enterprise companies face is how do they best manage data once it is backed up to disk? This may seem like an intuitive question for enterprise companies to ask at the outset before purchasing a disk-based solution but this happens less frequently than one may think.
Look at this from the perspective in which most enterprise companies find themselves. The pain that backup has caused has been so acute for so long that just the mere prospect of quickly solving it can lead to an uninformed buying decision.
Unfortunately, buying a disk-based backup solution is just like buying anything else: If you purchase it without fully examining what your backup environment looks like and how the disk-based backup solution will fit into it, it may not end up being the best decision for your environment. This is relevant because the problems that can surface when using disk-based backup can become just as acute as using tape is now.
One specific area of concern that enterprise companies especially need to consider prior to implementing is the management of data backed up in remote and branch offices (ROBOs). Issues that can arise in these circumstances include:
It's when one starts to put all of these pieces together (disk-based backup, deduplication, replication, ROBOs and tape) and view them from an enterprise perspective that the backup picture once again gets much more convoluted. In these cases, enterprise companies need to think more strategically about what disk-based backup solution they introduce. While they may correctly assume that any disk-based backup solution will improve backup times, the list of solutions that can address the new problems that disk-based backup creates becomes very short, very fast.
Enterprise companies with ROBOs that are starting to ask thesequestions should consider Quantum's DXi series of disk-based backup solutions: the DXi3500, DXi5500 and DXi7500. While I will more directly address the aforementioned issues in forthcoming blog entries, here are three of the DXi's key value propositions to consider now:
Disk-based backup is "the" right solution for companies to bring in to address their current backup problems but not every disk-based backup solution is right for every company. No where does this statement hold truer than in enterprise companies that have ROBOs, multiple backup software products and different application recovery requirements.
Enterprise companies may be in a rush to bring resolution to their age-old problem of backup pain by using disk-based backup. However the complexities and questions that they need to answer prior to implementing disk-based backup go well beyond just faster, successful backups. Rather, companies need to think about how they will manage data after it is successfully backed up and, in this respect, Quantum's DXi series brings a compelling solution to the table.
]]>Now that this agreement is out in the open, the real question becomes what does Quantum hope to gain from this relationship? On the surface, it appears this agreement puts EMC and Quantum at loggerheads in the rapidly growing space of deduplication. While EMC and Quantum will use different hardware, the software that drives their respective disk systems will be based on Quantum's technology. In this respect, much of the functionality found in the software will be the same, including the policy-based deduplication I detailed in an earlier blog, though Quantum is putting more emphasis on features such as direct tape creation given its continued focus on integration of disk and tape resources within the enterprise.
The stage for this announcement was actually set some time ago. Quantum's current relationship with EMC was cultivated through a long-standing relationship in which EMC would resell ADIC tape libraries. It was this channel collaboration which helped to lay the groundwork for this week's deduplication announcement.
EMC's adoption of Quantum's deduplication software first and foremost validates Quantum's deduplication technology and lends credibility to it longer term. While Quantum believes that the deduplication software behind its DXi platform is solid, on a larger scale the company has struggled somewhat to gain traction and mindshare in the deduplication space. So having EMC put Quantum's deduplication software through its paces against other competitors and then select it provides Quantum with some needed validation around its deduplication approach.
Partnering with EMC also should help Quantum prosper over the long haul. Deduplication is hot right now and, in many respects, a "green field" opportunity (it is estimated that less than 10% of businesses have implemented some form of disk-based backup with deduplication). But Quantum questions whether vendors that rely strictly on deduplication can continue to meet customers' needs longer term.
Quantum does not see deduplication becoming a standard, per se, as there will always be some different technology approaches that will work better in certain customer environments. However customers want some assurance that the deduplication technology they select will be well-supported into the future. EMC offering Quantum's deduplication technology should help reassure customers that Quantum's form of deduplication will achieve broad market acceptance now and into the future.
In terms of competing against EMC in customer accounts, Quantum does not necessarily foresee that as an issue either. Quantum does not anticipate crossing paths on a regular basis with EMC when selling these systems and, in those circumstances when it does occur, they will work that out on a case-by-case basis. Quantum makes the point that if EMC and Quantum had anticipated fighting tooth and nail in the general market place, this deal probably never would have happened. So the fact that they both signed off on this agreement indicates their mutual desire to work together.
The new relationship, or maybe better termed "renewed" relationship, between EMC and Quantum gives Quantum's deduplication technology the immediate credibility that it was seeking. EMC is one of the giants, if not "THE" giant in disk-based storage systems and incorporating Quantum's deduplication into its systems gives EMC a deduplication software platform that it can use to scale across the enterprise. By signing this agreement, EMC has made a significant bet on Quantum's deduplication approach and indicates that it believes that Quantum has its deduplication house in order. Now all Quantum needs to do is execute.
]]>In a previous blog entry, I took a look at some of the challenges created by deduplicating and replicating backup data from remote offices to a home office and then restoring it again at the remote office. In this blog entry, I'll examine how the architecture of Quantum's DXi backup portfolio addresses these specific challenges by offering greater flexibility with more deduplication choices.
One of the more agonizing decisions that some companies face when looking to implement the same deduplication scheme across the enterprise is quantifying which version of deduplication to use: inline or post-processing. From a purist's viewpoint, inline (deduplicating data as it is ingested) is sometimes viewed as the best approach since data is deduplicated immediately as it is ingested. However scaling an inline deduplication architecture to satisfy enterprise ingest throughput levels (500 Mbps or greater) during peak backup times becomes problematic at best. In environments where these high ingest levels exist, post-processing (deduplicating the data after it is stored to disk) is generally viewed as the best approach.
Quantum's implementation of deduplication across its DXi products takes a unique approach in this respect. Rather than placing its DXi family firmly in either the "inline" or "post-processing" camps, the DXi3500/5500 appliances use Quantum's adaptive approach to deduplicate data as the data is ingested while the new DXi7500 offers a choice of deduplication approaches based on user policies. This strategy allows users to match specific deduplication approached with different backup jobs to maximize both performance and disk resource utilization.
Let's first take a high level look at how Quantum's DXi3500 and DXi5500 appliances deduplicate data using its "Adaptive" deduplication:
The Adaptive deduplication process is available on all of Quantum's DXi products but, depending on which model a customer is using, the choices that a customer has available to it differ. For instance, the DXi3500 and DXi5500 appliances only offer adaptive deduplication and deduplication is always enabled whereas using the DXi7500 system companies can configure deduplication as "Adaptive," "Fully Deferred" or simply turn deduplication off based on each backup job's requirements.
Quantum gave the DXi7500 these additional options since it is intended for deployment in enterprise environments that may need to satisfy short backup windows; backups that contain a high percentage of new data where deduplication is less effective; the requirement for the fast creation of new tapes exists; or when rapid restores are needed.
However that is only part of the story. Each of Quantum's DXi products also supports the creation of logical partitions. The DXi3500 can support up to 8 partitions; the DXi5500 can support up to 16 partitions and the DXi7500 can support up to 64 partitions. Each partitions companies can configure as either NAS or as a virtual tape library (VTL).
Using this option, remote offices can configure partitions for their specific backup environment. If attaching a partition to a LAN, the remote office can configure it as a NAS to facilitate LAN-based backups. However if a remote office happens to have an iSCSI SAN in place, companies can configure another partition as a VTL for improved backup performance. The good news is that regardless of how the partition is configured or how many partitions exist, all of the data is globally deduplicated across all of the partitions on the DXi. (This is only the first step in Quantum's end-to-end de-duplication and replication strategy which I'll dissect further in an upcoming blog.)
The DXi7500 also supports all of these configuration options for partitions plus it offers one more deduplication option - "fully deferred". Using fully deferred deduplication on specific partitions, companies can deploy the DXi7500 in high performance backup environments since companies can direct backups to the "fully deferred" or post-processing partition. These different deduplication options on the DXi7500 coupled with the availability of partitions on all of its models give companies a number of powerful new approaches to deduplicate and replicate data across the enterprise.
In a future blog entry, I'll examine more deeply how the DXi family achieves a form of global deduplication and what options they offer to replicate deduplicated data between appliances located at remote offices, central data centers and disaster recovery sites.
]]>Though Quantum announced the DXi7500 some time ago, today marks general availability of the DXi7500 that it views as meeting today's enterprise concerns. There are a number of features that Quantum includes within the DXi7500 to scale into the enterprise including:
One of the more innovative features of the DXi7500 is its adaptive approach to deduplication. It appears that when Quantum was looking at how to best approach deduplication for the enterprise, it did not to take sides in the "inline" versus "post- processing" deduplication debate and instead gave the customer the flexibility to choose which approach best suits their needs.
This is particularly valuable to companies that have a mix of backup jobs with both low and high performance characteristics and that need more than one alternative when deduplicating backup data. Other products only offer one choice for deduplicating data - "inline" or "post-processing" - but not both. Using Quantum's adaptive deduplication approach, however, companies can match the form of deduplication to the characteristics of their backup job or even the nature of the data contained in the backup jobs. Configured this way, the DXi7500 can match the deduplication approach to the requirements of specific backup jobs.
Matching the deduplication approach to the type of backup job, or even data within the backup job, delivers faster ingest speeds during the backup window. However, because the DXi7500 also gives companies the option to create partitions and assign specific deduplication methods to these partitions, companies can designate which partitions use what specific type of deduplication. In those circumstances where companies expect moving backup data to tape immediately or backups contain a high percentage of new data, companies can take advantage of its "fully deferred" deduplication policy that postpones the deduplication until the backup is fully complete.
Quantum also looks to give companies a compelling reason to use the DXi7500 as the target for receiving replicating data from DXi3500s and DXi5500s as well as using the DXi7500 as a foundation in building a company's disaster recovery (DR) strategy. By deploying DXi3500s or DXi5500s at remote offices, companies can replicate data from these appliances back to a central DXi7500 in their primary data center. Once the data is replicated and centrally stored on the DXi7500, companies can then optionally place a DXi7500 at their disaster recovery site and then replicate data from the DXi7500 in their home office to this secondary site.
The DXi7500 also provides a mechanism to copy data to removable media (tape) for those companies that do not plan to replicate data to a remote site or have long term archiving or compliance requirements. The DXi7500 can either use its own software to copy data from disk on tape or companies can optionally use Symantec's NetBackup 6.5 that recognizes the DXi7500 and can manage the migration of data from disk to tape.
Of course, a final prerequisite when positioning a storage system like the DXi7500 at the enterprise core is to address enterprise concerns about high availability and reliability. The DXi7500 provides dual RAID controllers, dual redundant power and cooling, and hot replaceable components. Dual-node DXi7500 systems eliminate all single points of failure by using dual DXi controllers, active-active failover for all hardware, and cluster-aware software components that fail-over as needed.
Quantum is one of the first deduplication vendors to make the jump from the midrange market with its DXi3500 and DXi5500 backup appliances into the enterprise space with its DXi7500. On the surface, Quantum appears to have put all of the features into the DXi7500 in order to succeed: a highly available and reliable system, careful navigation of the deduplication debate through adaptive and fully deferred duplication and the use of the same replication software across its midrange and enterprise appliances.
This should work in Quantum's favor near and long term. Despite the fact that the Quantum is somewhat late to market with an enterprise level deduplication system, deduplication is still just getting started, not tailing off. By introducing one of the first core-to-edge global deduplication and replication schemes in the market, Quantum should find ample opportunities for companies that are eagerly looking for a single vendor to meet all of their disk-based data protection and disaster recovery needs.
]]>Bringing backup data from remote and branch offices back to a home office is a particularly thorny problem that enterprises continue to face. Directly sending nightly full, incremental or differential backup jobs over a wide area network (WAN) connection back to the home office can saturate the WAN link and cause backups to exceed backup windows and result in failed backups. However the current procedure of backing up data to disk or tape at the remote site perpetuates the problem of how to most efficiently and securely transmit backup data back to the home office or disaster recovery site.
Placing disk-based backup appliances with data deduplication technology at the remote or branch office can be a good first step towards resolving this problem. Bt placing these appliances at the remote site companies keep backup traffic on their local LAN and off of the corporate WAN and backups complete more quickly and within the backup window. Further, the deduplication feature reduces the amount of backup data stored on the appliance so it can keep more data for longer periods of time.
Still, adding disk-based backup and deduplication to remote sites doesn't solve the challenge of consolidating business data within the core data center (home office) or ensuring all corporate data is secure for disaster recovery/business continuance purposes. In this case, one needs to ensure that the offering provides software that replicates data from the remote office back to the central office.
For companies with only one remote office or that just need to replicate data to a disaster recovery site, a number of appliances provide replication to like appliances at the remote site. Since the data is deduplicated before it is replicated, the amount of data that needs to be replicated from the remote office to the home office is minimized and only net new data needs to be replicated back to the target site. This also lessens the network bandwidth requirements and administrators can configure the replication to occur during periods of low network activity.
The difficulty that arises is when companies have multiple or global remote offices and each has a deduplicating backup appliance. If the deduplicating backup appliance only supports a one-to-one replication configuration, the company may need to purchase enough backup deduplicating appliances for the home office to match the number of deduplicating appliances that they have in the remote offices. This approach is very costly, consumes additional data center resources (power, cooling and floor space) and quickly becomes management intensive, especially in remote offices without adequate IT support.
Companies in these situations need to identify vendors that offer a data deduplication architecture that supports a many-to-one replication model and that can also globally deduplicate the data once it receives the data from the remote sites. By supporting a many-to-one configuration, companies only need one deduplicating backup appliance to receive the data from all of its remote sites. The global deduplication feature is needed since it can further reduce the amount of data that companies need to transmit and store on the deduplicating backup appliance at the home office.
This is the architecture that Quantum has adopted for its DXi3500 and DXi5500 appliances and its scalable DXi7500 system to facilitate the deduplication, replication and optimal storage of backup data across an enterprise. In the next blog entry, I'll take a look at how Quantum's DXi-Series supports this architecture and what configuration options this platform provides.
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