Category: Backup

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Backup General

Perspectives on Quest Acquiring BakBone

About four months ago, I published a blog post discussing the future of dedicated VMware backup solutions.  The post ignited a bigger discussion and included additional blog entries from W. Curtis Preston, me, Jon Toigo, Virtual Tacit, Veeam and Quest software.  I strongly encourage readers to review the differing perspectives in each post.

I mention all of the above to provide context to Quest’s acquisition of BakBone.  For those who are unfamiliar, BakBone is a backup software provider that plays in the low end of the market.  They position their product, NetVault, as a full service backup application that includes traditional backup, CDP and deduplication.  They have had limited success in the US and Japan appears to be their strongest market.  Their technology was spun-off from AT&T labs.  (As an aside, CommVault was also a spin-off from AT&T Labs.  Those lab guys must have been doing some amazing backup stuff!)

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Backup

Data Protection Reporting: A Survey

I had dinner last night with a company that makes backup reporting software.  They have great technology, and the discussion made me think about the reporting market.

As my readers know, I believe that data protection is critical.  Companies must ensure that backup and recovery operations are completed in a timely and effective manner or they are at risk for an outage.  The idea of reporting on the efficacy of backup and recovery operations is a critical component of understanding whether data is protected.  Clearly all backup applications embed some level of reporting to provide this information, but is it enough?

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Backup

CDP data protection and VMware backup: A response

W. Curtis Preston recently posted a blog entry in response to my earlier post entitled Will dedicated VMware protection solutions go the way of CDP. Curtis clearly had strong opinions on the issue and his thorough write-up is appreciated.  I think that there is a disconnect here and wanted to clarify my thoughts.

I agree with Curtis’s detailed analysis of CDP technology, but my point was simply that three years ago CDP was hot.  Regardless of whether, there were 5 or 5,000 customers, the technology was the talk of the industry.  At the time, new CDP vendors were frequently appearing and existing companies were trying to position their solutions as “CDP-like”.  The hype machine was in full motion and it spanned the industry.

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Backup General

The challenge of data growth

One of the biggest challenges with data protection is managing growth.  Some of the common factors that drive increasing capacity requirements include:

  • Intrinsic growth – Growth inherent in the environment as users create new data.
  • New applications – Companies implement new applications to meet changing business requirements.  These solutions could replace existing technologies or could be net new additions.  Either way, they often generate more data to protect and retain.
  • New data types – In today’s multimedia-centric world, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of audio, video and image files being created and protected. These files are much larger and more difficult to compress than traditional content.
  • Merger & Acquisition – As M&A activities occur, the acquiring entity must expand their IT infrastructure to absorb the acquired systems and processes.

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Backup

Will dedicated VMware protection solutions go the way of CDP?

I previously posted a survey highlighting the different methods of protecting VMware environments.  The responses suggested that host-based backup is the predominant approach.  The least popular choice was “Dedicated VMware backup application (Veeam, Vizioncore, etc..)”.  These solutions exclusively protect virtual environments and they remind me of continuous data protection (CDP) technologies from the past.

Three years ago, CDP was hot.  It was a major industry buzzword and several companies were founded focusing exclusively on technologies that claimed to enable CDP functionality.  CDP enabled instantaneous backup, recovery and roll-back of critical data and some predicted that it would replace traditional data protection.  CDP upstarts made voluminous statements about the technology and the future, but they had miniscule installed bases particularly when compared to the traditional backup application vendors.  The challenge for the CDP providers was convincing end users to replace or augment existing backup infrastructures.  This was a challenge since end users had substantial investments in backup software, hardware and knowledge.  Although CDP provided customer value, it was only practical as a complementary solution to traditional backup and CDP functionality should have been embedded in existing backup applications.  As a result, most dedicated CDP companies were either bought or went away, and we now see backup ISVs including CDP functionality.

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Backup Restore

Agent-based VMware Backups

My last blog post contained a poll asking visitors about their primary VMware backup methodology.  The survey listed the common approaches to protecting virtualized environments including traditional agent-based,  VCB/VADP, dedicated VMware backup application, snapshots and doing nothing.  The results suggest that that the agent-based approach is most commonly used.  I anticipate that end users will migrate to backup methodologies that support VMware’s VADP functionality, but believe that there will always be a subset of people who rely on the agent-based approach. When implementing the agent-based approach, you should consider the following:

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Backup

Poll: VMware backup methodology

Server virtualization is a very powerful technology that can improve the economics of the datacenter.  However, it also creates new challenges for data protection.  VMware’s Vsphere API for Data Protection (VADP) improves the situation, but there still are multiple backup and recovery options.  Which do you use?

My primary backup methodology for virtualized servers is:

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Backup D2D Restore

Boost vendor lock-in

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the benefits of Symantec’s Open Storage Technology (OST). The technology enables accelerated disk-to-disk backups (D2D) primarily over IP connections and additional value-added features. Last week, EMC responded with their announcement of BOOST for NetWorker. Insiders have told me that the BOOST architecture is essentially the same as OST although the go-to-market strategy is very different. Of course a major difference is that OST has been shipping for over 3 years and BOOST will not be available until sometime in the second half of 2010.

As discussed previously, EMC/Data Domain was unable to create a true global deduplication solution so were forced to use OST to do the heavy lifting. Ironically, they could only support Symantec NetBackup and BackupExec with the new feature because NetWorker did not offer an advanced D2D interface. The BOOST announcement addressed the issues, but raises new questions. Specifically, BOOST is positioned as an EMC only solution, and it is unclear if the API will be shared with other vendors. In my opinion, this creates a challenge for EMC/Data Domain and NetWorker. Let’s look at how the situation impacts a variety of interested parties.

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Backup Restore

Data protection storage and business value

George Crump posted an article over on Network Computing discussing why storage is different for data protection. He makes a number of points regarding the benefits of using a storage appliance approach versus a software-only model, and for the most part, I agree with his analysis. However, there is an important point missing.

The software-only model relies on a generic software stack that can use any hardware or storage platform. This extreme flexibility also creates extreme headaches. The software provider or ISV cannot certify every hardware and environment combination and so the customer is responsible for installing, qualifying and testing their system. Initial setup can be difficult, but support can be even harder.

What happens if the product is not performing? The support complexities become difficult. Do you call your software ISV, your storage vendor, your SAN provider, your HBA vendor? There are a myriad of different hardware pieces at play and the challenge becomes how to diagnose and resolve any product issues. This is less of a problem in small environments with simple needs, and rapidly becomes an issue as data sizes grow.

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Backup Restore

Pondering VPLEX and backup

The Twittersphere was abuzz yesterday with EMC’s announcement of VPLEX. For those of you who missed it, VPLEX is a storage virtualization and caching solution that presents block storage over long distances. The initial release only supports data center and metro distances with a future of continental and global reach. The announcement struck me as yet another flavor of storage virtualization which is already offered by many vendors, and got me thinking about protecting VPLEX data.

Traditional data protection architectures revolve around the concept of a master backup server supporting slave media servers and clients. The master server owns the entire backup environment and tells each server when and where to backup. The model is mature and works well in today’s datacenters where servers are static and technologies like VMotion move VM’s to new servers within the confines of the datacenter. However, the concept of global VMotion can break this model.

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