Categories
General

Pondering Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Currently the twittersphere and blogosphere is actively discussing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).  The conversation was triggered by a post by Hu Yoshida from HDS, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

One of the most interesting responses was this one by Nigel Poulton where he explains the infrastructure required for FCoE.  He goes into great detail highlighting the lossless nature of FCoE and the required hardware and cabling.  The key takeaway is that FCoE is not iSCSI; it does not use generic 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE) hardware.  You will need different cabling and advanced switches to meet the more stringent demands of FCoE.

Categories
Deduplication

Global Deduplication Explained

W. Curtis Preston recently authored an article on Searchstorage.com.au explaining global deduplication.  This is an important topic which frequently causes confusion.  Curtis does a good job explaining the technology and what it means to end users and  I recommend the article.

A quick summary is that global deduplication means that a common deduplication repository is shared by multiple nodes in a system.  In these environments, a customer can backup their data to any node on a system and it will be deduplicated against related data.  This provides improved ease of use and scalability.

Categories
Deduplication

Deduplication 2.0

The folks over at the Online Storage Optimization blog recently wrote a post entitled Get Ready for Dedupe 2.0 where they outline their vision for the future of deduplication.  I read the post and was amazed at the similarity between their views and SEPATON’s core VTL architecture. I thought that it would be useful to address each of their points and indicate how they apply to SEPATON’s DeltaScale Architecture.

Categories
Marketing

Marketing Odds and Ends

It has been a particularly busy week here at SEPATON HQ with limited blogging time.  Instead of a technology oriented post, I thought that I would highlight some marketing items from this week.

Upcoming speaking event
I will be speaking at the Storage Decisions Deduplication Seminar this Tuesday, 8/25 in Hartford, CT.  This free event is open to end users and W. Curtis Preston will be speaking as well.  If you are in the area, visit this URL for registration and location information.

University of New Hampshire press release and case study
SEPATON issued a press release on August 19 highlighting UNH and their deployment of an S2100-ES2 with DeltaStor technology.  UNH is an example of a customer who experienced the challenges with physical tape that I addressed in Streaming LTO-5 and The Fallacy of Faster Tape. The customer struggled to stream his tape drives and did not want to multiplex because of the impact on recovery times.  The SEPATON solution enabled him to dramatically accelerate backups and recoveries and prevented shoe-shining.  Download the case study to read more.

InfoStor article
InfoStor recently posted openBench Lab’s review of SEPATON’s S2100-ES2 with DeltaStor deduplication. openBench tested an S2100-ES2 and DeltaStor with virtual server backups and provide a detailed analysis of the performance and reduction ratios.  The full report will be available on our website shortly and I will update this post with a link when available.

Categories
Backup D2D Deduplication Restore Virtual Tape

Streaming LTO-5

Chris Mellor (twitter:@Chris_Mellor) recently posted an article over at The Register about LTO-5 entitled Is LTO-5 the last harrah for tape?.  He makes an interesting point about the future of LTO and whether LTO-5 will be the last generation of the technology.  Most of the comments on the article disagree with Chris’s opinion.

I believe that there is another major issue with LTO-5 that must be addressed.  The challenge with LTO (and most other tape technologies) is its limited ability to throttle performance.  Users must carefully manage their environment to ensure that they stream their drives or else backup performance will decline dramatically.  As drives become faster, the challenge of optimizing your environment for the technology becomes more difficult.  You can read more about this in my blog post entitled The Fallacy of Faster Tape.

Categories
Deduplication Restore

CommVault and Forward Referencing

I was recently reading this document from CommVault that highlights their deduplication technology and was surprised by their use of the term “forward referencing”. Forward referencing is a common term in deduplication with a generally agreed upon definition. CommVault appears to have redefined the word and promoted their version as a feature.  This is confusing and possibly misleading because a reader might not realize that the definition of “forward referencing” in this document is completely different from the one  everywhere else in the industry.

Categories
General

Was EMC’s acquisition of Data Domain a sign of desperation?

A blogger over at Seeking Alpha makes this case.  He argues that EMC must make acquisitions for growth and that the excessive price paid for Data Domain deal is a sign of desperation.

To summarize the post, the author suggests that the growth in EMC’s core storage business is slowing and that they must look for ways to accelerate growth.  The blogger believes that EMC will pursue an M&A strategy to remedy the situation and thinks that the Data Domain  acquisition is a sign of desperation because of the excessively high price paid and the limited revenue and profit contribution.  The author illustrates his point with numerous charts and graphs.

What do you think?

Categories
Deduplication Virtual Tape

When is a node not a node?

One of the things that irks me is when press/analysts/vendors compare a competitor’s solution to a one node SEPATON solution.  SEPATON’s VTL as well as our DeltaStor deduplication and DeltaRemote replication products rely on our DeltaScale™ architecture which is designed around the concept of grid scalability.  The grid allows us to scale dynamically and transparently across multiple independent nodes.  This is very different from competing solutions that rely on a monolithic server approach.

Categories
Deduplication

NetApp and Quantum: Why an acquisition would be difficult

A couple of weeks ago, Robin Harris at Storagemojo blogged that he thought it would be a smart move for NetApp to acquire Quantum. I do not agree and think that a Quantum (QTM) and NetApp combination would create major competitive and business challenges and would not be successful in the long-term.

Categories
Marketing

AboutRestore Nomination and Musings on a Virtual Tradeshow

First, AboutRestore.com was recently nominated as a top storage vendor blog over at StorageMonkeys, and there is an open vote to decide the winner. Here is a link to the voting page and I encourage my readers to participate.

Second, I attended the Storage Decisions Data Deduplication Virtual Tradeshow a couple of weeks ago. The last time I attended a virtual trade show was about a year ago and it was interesting to revisit this medium.