About Restore

The latest scary backup story comes from a firm called Danger that makes the Sidekick PDA/phone. The Sidekick stores the majority of its data in a central data center and the data is loaded each time to the phone is restarted. The idea is that the data center provides protection if you lose your phone. A good idea, right?  Well yes, assuming that Danger adequately protects its customers’ data.

A number of outlets are reporting that Danger suffered a catastrophic data loss and all users’ data has been lost. I checked with a family friend who confirmed that her Sidekick was down for a week and is now finally working as a phone, but her data is inaccessible.  This is unacceptable; Sidekick users paid a monthly fee for this service and Danger should have maintained reasonable precautions to protect their customers data.  Clearly this is a bad situation for everyone, and lessons to be learned by all.

Here are some key takeaways from this event.

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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.

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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.

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W. Curtis Preston recently blogged about The Rehydration Myth. In his post he discusses how restore performance on deduplicated data declines because of the method used to reassemble the fragmented deduplicated data on disk. He also addresses the ways various technologies attempt to overcome these issues, including disk caching, forward referencing (used by SEPATON’s DeltaStor technology) and built-in defrag. In this post I wanted to discuss the last option because it is a widely-used approach for inline deduplication that has some little-known pitfalls.

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One of the questions I often get asked is “how do your products compare to Data Domain’s?” In my opinion, we really don’t compare because we play in different market segments. Data Domain’s strength is in the low-end of the market, think SMB/SME while SEPATON plays in the enterprise segment. These two segments have very different needs, which are reflected in the fundamentally different architectures of the SEPATON and Data Domain products. Here are some of the key differences to consider.
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W. Curtis Preston recently wrote an article on the state of physical tape for SearchDataBackup. He talks about the technologies that backup software vendors have created technology to more effectively stream tape drives. As I posted before, if you cannot stream your tape drives, their performance will decline dramatically.

In enterprise environments, performance is the key driver of data protection. You must ensure that you can backup and recover massive amounts of data in prescribed windows, and tape’s inconsistent performance and complex manageability makes it difficult as a primary backup target. This fact can also make tape a challenging solution in small environments.

The problem with tape drive streaming is a common one and Preston agrees that it is the key reason for adopting disk-based backup technologies. Our customers typically see a dramatic improvement in performance with SEPATON’s VTL solutions since they are no longer limited by the streaming requirements of tape.

Even with new disk and deduplication technologies, most customers are still using tape today and will do so into the future. However, tape will likely be used more for archiving than for secondary storage.  Deduplication enables longer retention, but most customers are probably not going to retain more than a year online. Tape is a good medium for deep archive where you store data for years, but is complex and costly as a target for enterprise backup.

Scott from EMC posted about the EMC DL3D 4000 today. He was responding to some questions by W. Curtis Preston regarding the product and GA. I am not going to go into detail about the post, but wanted to clarify one point. He says:

Restores from this [undeduplicated data] pool can be accomplished at up to 1,600 MB/s. Far faster than pretty much any other solution available today, from anybody. At 6 TB an hour, that is certainly much faster than any deduplication solution.
(Text in brackets added by me for clarification)

As recently discussed in this post, SEPATON restores data at up to 3,000 MB/sec (11.0 TB/hr) both with deduplication enabled and disabled. Scott insinuates that only EMC is capable of the performance he mentions and I wanted to clarify for the record that SEPATON is almost twice as fast as the fastest EMC system.

Scott from EMC has challenged SEPATON’s advertised performance for backup, deduplication, and restore. As industry analyst, W. Curtis Preston so succinctly put it, “do you really want to start a ‘we have better performance than you’ blog war with one of the products that has clustered dedupe?” However, I wanted to clarify the situation in this post.

Let me answer the questions specifically:

1. The performance data you refer to with the link in his post three words in is both four months old, and actually no data at all.

SEPATON customers want to know how much data they can backup and deduplicate in a given day. That is what is important in a real life usage of the product. The answer is 25 TB per day per node. If a customer has five nodes and a twenty-four hour day, that’s 125 TB of data backed up and deduplicated. This information has been true and accurate for four months and is still true today.
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In this post, I highlighted SEPATON’s S2100-ES2 performance both with and without deduplication enabled. In a comment, I had also indicated that we would be adding additional performance information to our website and collateral and  am happy to report that the update is complete.  You can find our deduplication performance numbers on multiple different locations on SEPATON’s website including:

The DeltaStor Datasheet
DeltaStor Page

These documents now highlight per node deduplication performance of 25 TB per node per day.

Happy New Year!

The SEPATON S2100-ES2 was designed for speed. Our solution is based around the concept of a unified appliance which provides one GUI for managing and monitoring all embedded hardware. We also automate the disk provisioning and configuration to provide consistent scalability and performance. The result is an appliance that can easily be managed by an administrator who understands tape and wants to avoid the traditional complexities of disk.

Our performance is quite simple to understand. We use a grid architecture which means that all nodes can see all storage and can access the same deduplication repository; you can backup and restore from any node. Today we support five nodes with DeltaStor while the VTL supports 16. We will be adding support for larger node counts in the near future. Each node provides an additional 2.2 TB/hr ingest and 25 TB/day deduplication performance. The appliance deduplicates data concurrently that means that backups and dedupe occur simultaneously with no performance impact. Let’s look at the actual numbers.

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