About Restore

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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Click for larger view – Comic courtesy of xkcd.com

Via Beth Pariseau from TechTarget.

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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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.

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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