About Restore

TSM and Deduplication: 4 Reasons Why TSM Deduplication Ratios Suffer

TSM presents unique deduplication challenges due to its progressive incremental backup strategy and architectural design. This contrasts with the traditional full/incremental model used by competing backup software vendors. The result is that TSM users will see smaller deduplication ratios than their counterparts using NetBackup, NetWorker or Data Protector. This post explores four key reasons why TSM is difficult to deduplicate.

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Lessons learned from the COPAN acquisition

The rumors of the demise of COPAN were rampant in late 2009. There was broad speculation that general operations had wound down and that the company was maintaining a skeletal staff. It was clear that COPAN’s end was near and the management team was scrambling for an exit strategy. Most people assumed that the recent silence from COPAN suggested that the company had not survived.

It was in the context of this situation that I saw a tweet last night about COPAN being acquired. The first questions were who and for how much and the tweet suggested that the answers were SGI and $2 million dollars respectively. Wow, what an amazing decline. COPAN raised $124 million dollars in multiple financing rounds and they exit the market at a $2 million valuation.

COPAN focused on MAID (massive array of idle disks). The technology allowed them to spin down unused disks to reduce the power and cooling requirements. The design included proprietary highly dense disk packaging that provided the densest storage in the industry, and actually required some datacenters to specially reinforce their flooring. They focused on $/GB and said that they offered the lowest in the industry both from an acquisition and operational cost standpoint. All of this sounded compelling from a marketing perspective, but the reality was different.

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Tuesday Humor

Comic courtesy of xkcd.com

Via Beth Pariseau from TechTarget.

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Protecting personal data

This blog primarily focuses on protecting corporate data, but I recently received a call from my father that reminded me of the criticality of protecting personal data. My father called expressing frustration that his laptop hard drive had failed and corrupted his data. Fortunately, he had backup copies of his most critical files on a USB stick; however, his email history and address book were not stored on the external device and were lost. I mention this story to remind you of the importance of personal data protection. What are you doing to backup your data?

There are many different approaches to protecting personal data. The two key concerns to consider are:

1. What happens if I lose the hard drive where my data is stored or experience a software problem such as a virus?
2. What happens if I suffer a more extreme data loss such as my house burning down?

Each question is critical, and the answer will vary depending on the data. For example, digital pictures of your family might have a different priority than your MP3 library. The former is irreplaceable and the latter is not. These priorities will impact the chosen data protection medium and methodology.

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My experience with social media and the Super Bowl

Last Sunday I thoroughly enjoyed watching the hard fought Super Bowl between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. It was a close game until the very end when the Saints made a critical interception. Interestingly, one of my lasting memories from the game relates to social media.

I watched the first half of the game with my friends with no thought of social media. The half time show was headlined by The Who, and as the band started, my first thought was, “these guys are unimpressive; I must tweet about it.” I retrieved my Blackberry, starting tweeting with SocialScope and engaged in a lively discussion with my twitter comrades about the merits of the band. As the second half started, the topic moved to the game and the performance of the two teams. It was great seeing a diverse range comments and perspectives.

In summary, my Twitter interactions improved my Super Bowl viewing experience. Some people are skeptical about the value of social media and this scenario is a microcosm of the benefits of the new medium. Where else can you create relationships with people with a common interest that transcends geographic boundaries? I continue to be impressed with the many smart people I meet on Twitter and suggest that my readers try it out. You can find my full Twitter profile here.

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The Demise of the NearStore VTL: A historical perspective

Rumors have been circulating for months about the demise of NetApp’s VTL offering. Today, Beth Pariseau from SearchDataBackup published the first public confirmation that development on the product has ceased. It is not a surprise, but makes for an interesting case study.

NetApp acquired VTL technology with their purchase of Alacritus for $11 million back in 2005. Alacritus provided a software only VTL solution that ran on a Linux platform. Their product specifications appeared impressive, but they had limited success in the US. Our partners in Asia saw them more frequently. For NetApp, the acquisition made sense because it represented a relatively cost-effective entry into the rapidly growing VTL market. However, as in most things, the difficulties were in the details.

NetApp’s core intellectual property is their ONTAP operating system and associated WAFL filesystem. These components provide the intelligence and value-added features of their arrays. The challenge for NetApp after acquiring Alacritus was the integration of the two technologies.

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Tale of the Tape: Musings on IBM’s 35TB Tape Announcement

A recent tweet by Chris Mellor from The Register caught my eye. He highlighted IBM’s recent development of a 35TB tape. Here are four articles on the topic:

Engadget

FUJIFILM Announcement

The Register Article

A blog post by Robin Harris at ZDnet

My thoughts

It is interesting to see IBM/Fuji driving tape development. With this announcement they have increased native tape capacity over 21x from LTO-5, the newest LTO offering. The dramatic density improvement will drive a continued decrease specification-based $/GB. However it also raises some new questions:

Performance

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Four Must Ask Questions About Metadata and Deduplication

When backing up data to a deduplication system, two types of data are generated. The first comprises objects being protected such as the Word documents, databases or Exchange message stores. These files will be deduplicated and for simplicity I will call this “object storage”. The second type of data generated is metadata. This is information that is used by the deduplication software to recognize redundancies and potentially re-hydrate data in the case of restoration. These two types of data are critical and are typically required for writing the data to the system and potentially reading data. Here are four key questions that you should ask about protecting metadata.

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Musings on the Spectra Logic T-Finity Announcement

Last week Spectra Logic unveiled the T-Finity, a new high-end tape library that is one of the largest and most scalable units in the industry.  The system can grow to 30,000 tape slots and 480 drives and it creates some interesting questions.

As data backup and recovery SLAs have become more stringent, end users have migrated rapidly to disk-based technologies.  Deduplication also adds value by reducing $/GB and required disk capacity although the technology can negatively impact backup and recovery performance.  These two trends have combined to reduce the requirements for physical tape and many tape vendors are seeing declining revenues.  This is not to say that tape is dead, it is very much in use and will be for the foreseeable future, but the use model has changed.  Physical tape is typically used for very long-term data archival where multi-year retention is not uncommon.

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Bye, bye EDL/DL3D 1500/3000, it was nice knowing you

The email below appeared in my inbox yesterday.  The EDL/DL3D 1500/3000 has officially been discontinued.  It was obvious from the moment EMC purchased Data Domain that the Quantum stuff was dead, but it took time for EMC to finally admit this.  The strongest statement came in Frank Slootman’s TechTarget interview.  Clearly the EMC/QTM relationship was a rocky one from the beginning and so the outcome is not surprising.

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