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Part II: EMC Evolves Enterprise Data Protection with Enhancements

Storage I/O trends

This is the second part of a two-part series on recent EMC backup and data protection announcements. Read part I here.

What about the products, what’s new?

In addition to articulating their strategy for modernizing data protection (covered in part I here), EMC announced enhancements to Avamar, Data Domain, Mozy and Networker.

Data protection storage systems (e.g. Data Domain)

Building off of previously announced Backup Recovery Solutions (BRS) including Data Domain operating system storage software enhancements, EMC is adding more application and software integration along with new platform (systems) support.

Data Domain (e.g. Protection Storage) enhancements include:

  • Application integration with Oracle, SAP HANA for big data backup and archiving
  • New Data Domain protection storage system models
  • Data in place upgrades of storage controllers
  • Extended Retention now available on added models
  • SAP HANA Studio backup integration via NFS
  • Boost for Oracle RMAN, native SAP tools and replication integration
  • Support for backing up and protecting Oracle Exadata
  • SAP (non HANA) support both on SAP and Oracle

Data in place upgrades of controllers for 4200 series models on up (previously available on some larger models). This means that controllers can be upgraded with data remaining in place as opposed to a lengthy data migration.

Extended Retention facility is a zero cost license that enables more disk drive shelves to be attached to supported Data Domain systems. Thus there is a not a license fee, however you do pay for the storage shelves and drives to increase the available storage capacity. Note that this feature increases the storage capacity by adding more disk drives and does not increase the performance of the Data Domain system. Extended Retention has been available in the past however is now supported via more platform models. The extra storage capacity is essentially placed into a different tier that an archive policy can then migrate data into.

Boost for accelerating data movement to and from Data Domain systems is only available using Fibre Channel. When asked about FC over Ethernet (FCoE) or iSCSI EMC indicated its customers are not asking for this ability yet. This has me wondering if it is that the current customer focus is around FC, or if those customers are not yet ready for iSCSI or FCoE, or, if there were iSCSI or FCoE support, more customers would ask for it?

With the new Data Domain protection storage systems EMC is claiming up to:

  • 4x faster performance than earlier models
  • 10x more scalable and 3x more backup/archive streams
  • 38 percent lower cost per GB based on holding price points and applying improvements


EMC Data Domain data protection storage platform family


Data Domain supporting both backup and archive

Expanding Data Domain from backup to archive

EMC continues to evolve the Data Domain platform from just being a backup target platform with dedupe and replication to a multi-function, multi-role solution. In other words, one platform with many uses. This is an example of using one tool or technology for different purposes such as backup and archiving, however with separate polices. Here is a link to a video where I discuss using common tools for backup and archiving, however with separate polices. In the above figure EMC Data Domain is shown as being used for backup along with storage tiering and archiving (file, email, Sharepoint, content management and databases among other workloads).


EMC Data Domain supporting different functions and workloads

Also shown are various tools from other vendors such as Commvault Simpana that can be used as both a backup or archiving tool with Data Domain as a target. Likewise Dell products acquired via the Quest acquisition are shown along with those from IBM (e.g. Tivoli), FileTek among others. Note that if you are a competitor of EMC or simply a fan of other technology you might come to the conclusion that the above may not be different from others. Then again others who are not articulating their version or vision of something like the above figure probably should be also stating the obvious vs. arguing they did it first.

Data source integration (aka data protection software tools)

It seems like just yesterday that EMC acquired Avamar (2006) and NetWorker aka Legato (2003), not to mention Mozy (2007) or Dantz (Retrospect, since divested) in 2004. With the exception of Dantz (Retrospect) which is now back in the hands of its original developers, EMC continues to enhance and evolve Avamar, Mozy and NetWorker including with this announcement.

General Avamar 7 and Networker 8.1 enhancements include:

  • Deeper integration with primary storage and protection storage tiers
  • Optimization for VMware vSphere virtual server environments
  • Improved visibility and control for data protection of enterprise applications

Additional Avamar 7 enhancements include:

  • More Data Domain integration and leveraging as a repository (since Avamar 6)
  • NAS file systems with NDMP accelerator access (EMC Isilon & Celera, NetApp)
  • Data Domain Boost enhancements for faster backup / recovery
  • Application integration with IBM (DB2 and Notes), Microsoft (Exchange, Hyper-V images, Sharepoint, SQL Server), Oracle, SAP, Sybase, VMware images

Note that Avamar dat is still used mainly for ROBO and desktop, laptop type backup scenarios that do not yet support Data Domain. Also see Mozy enhancements below).

Avamar supports VMware vSphere virtual server environments using granular change block tracking (CBT) technology as well as image level backup and recovery with vSphere plugins. This includes an Instant Access recovery when images are stored on Data Domain storage.

Instant Access enables a VM that has been protected using Avamar image level technology on Data Domain to be booted via an NFS VMware Dat. VMware sees the VM and is able to power it on and boot directly from the Data Domain via the NFS Dat. Once the VM is active, it can be Storage vMotion to a production storage VMware Dat while active (e.g. running) for recovery on the fly capabilities.


Instant Access to a VM on Data Domain storage

EMC NetWorker 8.1 enhancements include:

  • Enhanced visibility and control for owners of data
  • Collaborative protection for Oracle environments
  • Synchronize backup and data protection between DBA and Backup admin’s
  • Oracle DBAs use native tools (e.g. RMAN)
  • Backup admin implements organizations SLA’s (e.g. using Networker)
  • Deeper integration with EMC primary storage (e.g. VMAX, VNX, etc)
  • Isilon integration support
  • Snapshot management (VMAX, VNX, RecoverPoint)
  • Automation and wizards for integration, discovery, simplified management
  • Policy-based management, fast recovery from snapshots
  • Integrating snapshots into and as part of data protection strategy. Note that this is more than basic snapshot management as there is also the ability to roll over a snapshot into a Data Domain protection storage tier.
  • Deeper integration with Data Domain protection storage tier
  • Data Domain Boost over Fibre Channel for faster backups and restores
  • Data Domain Virtual Synthetics to cut impact of full backups
  • Integration with Avamar for managing image level backup recovery (Avamar services embedded as part of NetWorker)
  • vSphere Web Client enabling self-service recovery of VMware images
  • Newly created VMs inherit backup polices automatically

Mozy is being positioned for enterprise remote office branch office (ROBO) or distributed private cloud where Avamar, NetWorker or Data Domain solutions are not as applicable. EMC has mentioned that they have over 800 enterprises using Mozy for desktop, laptop, ROBO and mobile data protection. Note that this is a different target market than the Mozy consumer product focused which also addresses smaller SMBs and SOHOs (Small Office Home Offices).

EMC Mozy enhancements to be more enterprise grade:

  • Simplified management services and integration
  • Active Directory (AD) for Microsoft environments
  • New storage pools (multiple types of pools) vs. dedicated storage per client
  • Keyless activation for faster provisioning of backup clients

Note that EMC enhanced earlier this year Data Protection Advisor (DPA) with version 6.0.

What does this all mean?

Storage I/O trends

Data protection and backup discussions often focus around tape summit resources or cloud arguments, although this is changing. What is changing is growing awareness and discussion around how data protection storage mediums, systems and services are used along with the associated software management tools.

Some will say backup is broke often pointing a finger at a media or medium (e.g. tape and disk) about what is wrong. Granted in some environments the target medium (or media) destination is an easy culprit to point a finger to as the problem (e.g. the usual tape sucks or is dead) mantra. However, for many environments while there can be issues, it is more often than not the media, medium, device or target storage system that is broke, instead how it is being used or abused.

This means revisiting how tools are used along with media or storage systems allocated, used and retained with respect to different threat risk scenarios. After all, not everything is the same in the data center or information factory.

Thus modernizing data protection is more than swapping media or mediums including types of storage system from one to another. It is also more than swapping out one backup or data protection tool for another. Modernizing data protection means rethinking what different applications and data need to be protected against various threat risks.

Storage I/O trends

What this has to do with today’s announcement is that EMC is among others in the industry moving towards a holistic data protection modernizing thought model.

In my opinion what you are seeing out of EMC and some others is taking that step back and expanding the data protection conversation to revisit, rethink why, how, where, when and by whom applications and information get protected.

This announcement also ties into finding and removing costs vs. simply cutting cost at the cost of something elsewhere (e.g. service levels, performance, availability). In other words, finding and removing complexities or overhead associated with data protection while making it more effective.

Some closing points, thoughts and more links:

There is no such thing as a data or information recession
People and data are living longer while getting larger
Not everything is the same in the data center or information factory
Rethink data protection including when, why, how, where, with what and by whom
There is little data, big data, very big data and big fast data
Data protection modernization is more than playing buzzword bingo
Avoid using new technology in old ways
Data footprint reduction (DFR) can be help counter changing data life-cycle patterns
EMC continues to leverage Avamar while keeping Networker relevant
Data Domain evolving for both backup and archiving as an example of tool for multiple uses

Ok, nuff said (for now).

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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EMC Evolves Enterprise Data Protection with Enhancements (Part I)

Storage I/O trends

A couple of months ago at EMCworld there were announcements around ViPR, Pivotal along with trust and clouds among other topics. During the recent EMCworld event there were some questions among attendees what about backup and data protection announcements (or lack there of)?

Modernizing Data Protection

Today EMC announced enhancements to its Backup Recovery Solutions (BRS) portfolio (@EMCBackup) that continue to enable information and applications data protection modernizing including Avamar, Data Domain, Mozy and Networker.

Keep in mind you can’t go forward if you can’t go back, which means if you do not have good data protection to go to, you can’t go forward with your information.

EMC Modern Data Protection Announcements

As part of their Backup to the Future event, EMC announced the following:

  • New generation of data protection products and technologies
  • Data Domain systems: enhanced application integration for backup and archive
  • Data protection suite tools Avamar 7 and Networker 8.1
  • Enhanced Cloud backup capabilities for the Mozy service
  • Paradigm shift as part of data protection modernizing including revisiting why, when, where, how, with what and by whom data protection is accomplished.

What did EMC announce for data protection modernization?

While much of the EMC data protection announcement is around product, there is also the aspect of rethinking data protection. This means looking at data protection modernization beyond swapping out media (e.g. tape for disk, disk for cloud) or one backup software tool for another. Instead, revisiting why data protection needs to be accomplished, by whom, how to remove complexity and cost, enable agility and flexibility. This also means enabling data protection to be used or consumed as a service in traditional, virtual and private or hybrid cloud environments.

EMC uses as an example (what they refer to as Accidental Architecture) of how there are different group and areas of focus, along with silos associated with data protection. These groups span virtual, applications, database, server, storage among others.

The results are silos that need to be transformed in part using new technology in new ways, as well as addressing a barrier to IT convergence (people and processes). The theme behind EMC data protection strategy is to enable the needs and requirements of various groups (servers, applications, database, compliance, storage, BC and DR) while removing complexity.

Moving from Silos of data protection to a converged service enabled model

Three data protection and backup focus areas

This sets the stage for the three components for enabling a converged data protection model that can be consumed or used as a service in traditional, virtual and private cloud environments.


EMC three components of modernized data protection (EMC Future Backup)

The three main components (and their associated solutions) of EMC BRS strategy are:

  • Data management services: Policy and storage management, SLA, SLO, monitoring, discovery and analysis. This is where tools such as EMC Data Protection Advisor (aka via WysDM acquisition) fit among others for coordination or orchestration, setting and managing polices along with other activities.
  • Data source integration: Applications, Database, File systems, Operating System, Hypervisors and primary storage systems. This is where data movement tools such as Avamar and Networker among others fit along with interfaces to application tools such as Oracle RMAN.
  • Protection storage: Targets, destination storage system with media or mediums optimized for protecting and preserving data along with enabling data footprint reduction (DFR). DFR includes functionality such as compression and dedupe among others. Example of data protection storage is EMC Data Domain.

Read more about product items announced and what this all means here in the second of this two-part series.

Ok, nuff said (for now).

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Thanks for viewing StorageIO content and top 2012 viewed posts

StorageIO industry trends cloud, virtualization and big data

2012 was a busy year (it was our 7th year in business) along with plenty of activity on StorageIOblog.com as well as on the various syndicate and other sites that pickup our content feed (https://storageioblog.com/RSSfull.xml).

Excluding traditional media venues, columns, articles, web casts and web site visits (StorageIO.com and StorageIO.TV), StorageIO generated content including posts and pod casts have reached over 50,000 views per month (and growing) across StorageIOblog.com and our partner or syndicated sites. Including both public and private, there were about four dozen in-person events and activities not counting attending conferences or vendor briefing sessions, along with plenty of industry commentary. On the twitter front, plenty of activity there as well closing in on 7,000 followers.

Thank you to everyone who have visited the sites where you will find StorageIO generated content, along with industry trends and perspective comments, articles, tips, webinars, live in person events and other activities.

In terms of what was popular on the StorageIOblog.com site, here are the top 20 viewed posts in alphabetical order.

Amazon cloud storage options enhanced with Glacier
Announcing SAS SANs for Dummies book, LSI edition
Are large storage arrays dead at the hands of SSD?
AWS (Amazon) storage gateway, first, second and third impressions
EMC VFCache respinning SSD and intelligent caching
Hard product vs. soft product
How much SSD do you need vs. want?
Oracle, Xsigo, VMware, Nicira, SDN and IOV: IO IO its off to work they go
Is SSD dead? No, however some vendors might be
IT and storage economics 101, supply and demand
More storage and IO metrics that matter
NAD recommends Oracle discontinue certain Exadata performance claims
New Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive (SSD and HDD)
PureSystems, something old, something new, something from big blue
Researchers and marketers dont agree on future of nand flash SSD
Should Everything Be Virtualized?
SSD, flash and DRAM, DejaVu or something new?
What is the best kind of IO? The one you do not have to do
Why FC and FCoE vendors get beat up over bandwidth?
Why SSD based arrays and storage appliances can be a good idea

Moving beyond the top twenty read posts on StorageIOblog.com site, the list quickly expands to include more popular posts around clouds, virtualization and data protection modernization (backup/restore, HA, BC, DR, archiving), general IT/ICT industry trends and related themes.

I would like to thank the current StorageIOblog.com site sponsors Solarwinds (management tools including response time monitoring for physical and virtual servers) and Veeam (VMware and Hyper-V virtual server backup and data protection management tools) for their support.

Thanks again to everyone for reading and following these and other posts as well as for your continued support, watch for more content on the above and other related and new topics or themes throughout 2013.

Btw, if you are into Facebook, you can give StorageIO a like at facebook.com/storageio (thanks in advance) along with viewing our newsletter here.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Congratulations Imation and Nexsan, are there any independent storage vendors left?

StorageIO industry trends cloud, virtualization and big data

Last week Imation, the company that is known for making CDs, DVDs, magnetic tape and in the past floppy disk (diskettes) bought Nexsan, a company known for the SATA and SAS storage products.

Imation is also (or should be) owns the TDK and Memorex names (remember is it real or is it Memorex? If not Google it). They also have had for several years removable hard disk drive (RHDD) products including the Odyssey (I am in the process of retiring mine), as well as partnership with the former ProStor for RDX and having acquired some of the assets of ProStor namely their RDX based InifiVault storage appliance. Imation has also been involved in some other things including USB and other forms of flash-based solid state devices (SSD), as well as a couple of years (2007) they launched cloud backup with DataGuard before cloud backup had become a popular buzzword topic.

Imation has also divested parts of its business over past several years including some medical related (X-ray stuff) to Kodak who occupies part of the headquarter building in Oakdale MN, or at least last time I looked when driving by there on way from the airport. They also divested their SAN lab with some of the staff going to Glasshouse and other pieces going to Lion bridge (an independent test lab company). Beyond traditional of data protection, backup/restore and archiving media or mediums from consumer to large-scale enterprise, Imation has also been involved in other areas involving recording. Imation also has done some other recent acquisitions around dedupe (Nine Technologies).

For its part, Nexsan has extended their portfolio from SATA and SAS products, AutoMaid Intelligent Power Management (IPM) which gives benefits of variable power and performance without the penalties of first generation MAID type products. Read more about IPM and related themes here, here and here. Nexsan also supports NAS and iSCSI solutions in addition to their archive and content or object storage focused Assureon product they bought a few years ago.

This is a good acquisition for both companies as it gives Imation a new set of products to sell into their existing accounts and channels. It also can leverage Nexsan’s channel and solution selling skills giving them (Nexsan) a bigger brand and large parent for credibility (not that they did not have that in the past).

Here are is a link to a piece done by Dave Raffo that includes some comments and perspectives from me. To say that the synergy here is about archiving or selling SSD or storage would be too easy and miss a bigger potential. That potential is Imation has been in the business of selling consumable accessories for protecting and preserving data. Notice I said consumable accessories which in the past has meant manufacturing consumable media (e.g. Floppy disks or discs, CD, DVDs, magnetic tapes) as well as partnering around flash and HDDs.

In many environments from small to large to super-sized cloud and service providers, some types of storage systems including some of those that Nexsan sells can be considered a consumable media or medium taking over the role that tape, CDs or DVDs have been used in the pat. Instead of using tape or CDs or DVDs to protect the HDDs and SSDs based data, HDD based solutions are being used for disk-to-disk (D2D) protection (part of modernizing data protection). D2D is being done as appliances, or in conjunction with cloud and object storage system software stacks such as OpenStack swift, Basho Riak CS, CloudStack, Cleversafe, Ceph, Caringo and a list of others, in addition to appliances such as EMC ATMOS among others than can support 3rd party storage device as consumable mediums. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a data or information recession, and people and data are living longer and getting larger, both for big data and little data.

The big if in this acquisition which IMHO is a fair price for both parties based on realistic valuations is if they can collective execute on it. This means that Imation and Nexsan need to leverage each other’s strengths, address any weakness, close gaps and expand into each other’s markets, channels and sell the entire portfolio as opposed to becoming singular focused on a particular area tool or technology. If Imation can execute on this and Nexsan leverages their new parent, the result should be moving from the roughly $85M USD sales to $100M+ then $125M then $150M and so forth over the next couple of years.

Even if Imation keeps maintains revenues or a slight increase, which would also be a good deal for them, granted the industry pundits may not agree, so let us see where this is in a few years. However if Imation can grow the Nexsan business, then it would become a very good deal. Thus, IMHO the price valuation for the deal has the risk built into, something like when NetApp bought the Engenio business unit from LSI back in 2011 for about $480M USD. At that time, Engenio was doing about $705M USD in revenue and seen by many industry pundits as being on the decline, thus a lower valuation. For its part, NetApp, has been executing maintaining the revenue of that business unit with some expansion, thus their execution so far is being rewarding for taking the risk.

Let us see if Imation can do the same thing.

Now, does that mean that Nexsan was the last of the independent storage vendors left?

Hardly, after all there is still Xiotech, excuse me, Xio as they changed their name as part of a repackaging, relaunch and downsizing. There is DotHill who supplies partners such HP, or Dothills former partner supplier InfoTrend. If you are an Apple fan then you might know about Promise, if not, you should. Lets not forget about Data Direct Networks (DDN) that is still independent and at around $200M (give or take several million) in revenue, are very much still around.

How about Xyratex, sure they make the enclosures and appliances that many others use in their solutions, however they also have a storage solutions business focused on scale out, clustered and grid NAS based on Lustre. There are some others that I am drawing a blank on now (if you read this and are one of them, chime in) in addition to all the new or current generation of startups (you can chime in as well to let people know who you are to be bought).

There is still consolidation taking place, both of smaller vendors by mid-sized vendors, mid-sized vendors by big vendors, big vendors by mega vendors, and startups by established.

Again congratulations to both Imation and Nexsan, let us see who or what is next on the 2013 mergers and acquisition list, as well as who will join the where are they now club.

Disclosure: Nexsan has been a StorageIO client in the past; however, Imation has not been a client, although they have bought me lunch before here in the Stillwater, MN area.

With Imation having their own brand name and identity, not to mention TDK and Memorex, now I have to wonder will Nexsan be real or Memorex or something else? ;)

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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December 2012 StorageIO Update news letter

StorageIO News Letter Image
December 2012 News letter

Welcome to the December 2012 year end edition of the StorageIO Update news letter including a new format and added content.

You can get access to this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions.

Click on the following links to view the December 2012 edition as brief (short HTML sent via Email) version, or the full HTML or PDF versions.

Visit the news letter page to view previous editions of the StorageIO Update.

You can subscribe to the news letter by clicking here.

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO Update news letter, let me know your comments and feedback.

Nuff said for now

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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More modernizing data protection, virtualization and clouds with certainty

This is a follow-up to a recent post about modernizing data protection and doing more than simply swapping out media or mediums like flat tires on a car as well as part of the Quantum protecting data with certainty event series.

As part of a recent 15 city event series sponsored by Quantum (that was a disclosure btw ;) ) titled Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection that had a theme of strategies and technologies that will help you adapt to a changing IT environment I was asked to present a keynote at the events around Modernizing data protection for cloud, virtual and legacy environments (see earlier and related posts here and here).

Quantum data protection with certainty

Since late June (taking July and most of August off) and wrapping up last week, the event series has traveled to Boston, Chicago, Palo Alto, Houston, New York City, Cleveland, Raleigh, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Los Angeles, Mohegan Sun CT, St. Louis, Portland Oregon and King of Prussia (Philadelphia area).

The following are a series of posts via IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) that covered these events including commentary and perspectives from myself and others.

Data protection in the cloud, summary of the events
Practical solutions for data protection challenges
Big data’s new and old realities
Can you afford to gamble on data protection
Conversations in and around modernizing data protection
Can you afford not to use cloud based data protection

In addition to the themes in the above links, here are some more images, thoughts and perspectives from while being out and about at these and other events.

Datalink does your data center suck sign
While I was traveling saw this advertisement sign from Datalink (who is a Quantum partner that participated in some of the events) in a few different airports which is a variation of the Datadomain tape sucks attention getter. For those not familiar, that creature on the right is an oversized mosquito with the company logos on the lower left being Datalink, NetApp, Cisco and VMware.

goddess of data fertility
When in Atlanta for one of the events at the Morton’s in the Sun trust plaza, the above sculpture was in the lobby. Its real title is the goddess of fertility, however I’m going to refer to it as the goddess of data fertility, after all, there is no such thing as a data or information recession.

The world and storageio runs on dunkin donuts
Traveling while out and about is like a lot of things particular IT and data infrastructure related which is hurry up and wait. Not only does America Run on Dunkin, so to does StorageIO.

Use your imagination
When out and about, sometimes instead of looking up, or around, take a moment and look down and see what is under your feet, then let your imagination go for a moment about what it means. Ok, nuff of that, drink your coffee and let’s get back to things shall we.

Delta 757 and PW2037 or PW2040
Just like virtualization and clouds, airplanes need physical engines to power them which have to be energy-efficient and effective. This means being very reliable, good performance, fuel-efficient (e.g. a 757 on a 1,500 mile trip if full can be in the neighborhood of 65 plus miles per gallon per passenger with a low latency (e.g. fast trip). In this case, a Pratt and Whitney PW2037 (could be a PW2040 as Delta has a few of them) on a Delta 757 is seen powering this flight as it climbs out of LAX on a Friday morning after one of the event series session the evening before in LA.

Ambulance waiting at casino
Not sure what to make out of this image, however it was taken while walking into the Mohegan Sun casino where we did one of the dinner events at the Michael Jordan restaraunt

David Chapa of Quantum in bank vault
Here is an image from one of the events in this series which is a restaurant in Cleveland where the vault is a dinning room. No that is not a banker, well perhaps a data protection banker, it is the one and only (@davidchapa) David Chapa aka the Chief Technology Evangelist (CTE) of Quantum, check out his blog here.

Just before landing in portland
Nice view just before landing in Portland Oregon where that evenings topic was as you might have guessed, data protection modernization, clouds and virtualization. Don’t be scared, be ready, learn and find concerns to overcome them to have certainty with data protection in cloud, virtual and physical environments.
Teamwork
Cloud, virtualization and data protection modernization is a shared responsibility requiring team work and cooperation between service or solution provider and the user or consumer. If the customer or consumer of a service is using the right tools, technologies, best practices and having had done their homework for applicable levels of services with SLAs and SLOs, then a service provider with good capabilities should be in harmony with each other. Of course having the right technologies and tools for the task at hand is also important.
Underground hallway connecting LAX terminals, path to the clouds
Moving your data to the cloud or a virtualized environment should not feel like a walk down a long hallway, that is assuming you have done your homework, that the service is safe and secure, well taken care of, there should be less of concerns. Now if that is a dark, dirty, dingy, dilapidated dungeon like hallway, then you just might be on the highway to hell vs. stairway to heaven or clouds ;).

clouds along california coastline
There continues to be barriers to cloud adoption and deployment for data protection among other users.

Unlike the mountain ranges inland from the LA area coastline causing a barrier for the marine layer clouds rolling further inland, many IT related barriers can be overcome. The key to overcoming cloud concerns and barriers is identifying and understanding what they are so that resolutions, solutions, best practices, tools or work around’s can be developed or put into place.

The world and storageio runs on dunkin donuts
Hmm, breakfast of champions and road warriors, Dunkin Donuts aka DD, not to be confused with DDUP the former ticker symbol of Datadomain.

Tiered coffee
In the spirit of not treating everything the same, have different technology or tools to meet various needs or requirements, it only makes sense that there are various hot beverage options including hot water for tea, regular and decaffeinated coffee. Hmm, tiered hot beverages?


On the lighter side, things including technology of all type will and do break, even with maintenance, so having a standby plan, or support service to call can come in handy. In this case the vehicle on the right did not hit the garage door that came off of its tracks due to wear and tear as I was preparing to leave for one of the data protection events. Note to self, consider going from bi-annual garage door preventive maintenance to annual service check-up.

Some salesman talking on phone in a quiet zone

While not part of or pertaining to data protection, clouds, virtualization, storage or data infrastructure topics, the above photo was taken while in a quiet section of an airport lounge waiting for a flight to one of the events. This falls in the class of a picture is worth a thousand words category as the sign just to the left of the sales person talking loudly on his cell phone about his big successful customer call says Quiet Zone with symbol of no cell phone conversations.

How do I know the guy was not talking about clouds, virtualization, data infrastructure or storage related topics? Simple, his conversation was so loud me and everybody else in the lounge could hear the details of the customer conversation as it was being relayed back to sales management.

Note to those involved in sales or customer related topics, be careful of your conversations in public and pseudo public places including airports, airport lounges, airplanes, trains, planes, hotel lobbies and other places, you never know who you will be broadcasting to.

Here is a link to a summary of the events along with common questions, thoughts and perspectives.

Quantum data protection with certainty

Thanks to everyone who participated in the events including attendees, as well as Quantum and their partners for sponsoring this event series, look forward to see you while out and about at some future event or venue.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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Amazon cloud storage options enhanced with Glacier

StorageIO industry trend for storage IO

In case you missed it, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has enhanced their cloud services (Elastic Cloud Compute or EC2) along with storage offerings. These include Relational Database Service (RDS), DynamoDB, Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Simple Storage Service (S3). Enhancements include new functionality along with availability or reliability in the wake of recent events (outages or service disruptions). Earlier this year AWS announced their Cloud Storage Gateway solution that you can read an analysis here. More recently AWS announced provisioned IOPS among other enhancements (see AWS whats new page here).

Amazon Web Services logo

Before announcing Glacier, options for Amazon storage services relied on general purpose S3, or EBS with other Amazon services. S3 has provided users the ability to select different availability zones (e.g. geographical regions where data is stored) along with level of reliability for different price points for their applications or services being offered.

Note that AWS S3 flexibility lends itself to individuals or organizations using it for various purposes. This ranges from storing backup or file sharing data to being used as a target for other cloud services. S3 pricing options vary depending on which availability zones you select as well as if standard or reduced redundancy. As its name implies, reduced redundancy trades lower availability recovery time objective (RTO) in exchange for lower cost per given amount of space capacity.

AWS has now announced a new class or tier of storage service called Glacier, which as its name implies moves very slow and capable of supporting large amounts of data. In other words, targeting inactive or seldom accessed data where emphasis is on ultra-low cost in exchange for a longer RTO. In exchange for an RTO that AWS is stating that it can be measured in hours, your monthly storage cost can be as low as 1 cent per GByte or about 12 cents per year per GByte plus any extra fees (See here).

Here is a note that I received from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team:

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,
We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Amazon Glacier – a secure, reliable and extremely low cost storage service designed for data archiving and backup. Amazon Glacier is designed for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to keep for future reference. Examples include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably and durably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB/month. As with all Amazon Web Services, you pay only for what you use, and there are no up-front expenses or long-term commitments.

Amazon Glacier is:

  • Low cost– Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, irrespective of how much data you store.
  • Secure – Amazon Glacier supports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetrix-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.
  • Durable– Amazon Glacier is designed to give average annual durability of 99.999999999% for each item stored.
  • Flexible -Amazon Glacier scales to meet your growing and often unpredictable storage requirements. There is no limit to the amount of data you can store in the service.
  • Simple– Amazon Glacier allows you to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, and makes long term data archiving especially simple. You no longer need to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection and repair, or time-consuming hardware migrations.
  • Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can use AWS Import/Export to accelerate moving large amounts of data into Amazon Glacier using portable storage devices for transport. In the coming months, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) plans to introduce an option that will allow you to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using data lifecycle policies.

Amazon Glacier is currently available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), EU-West (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Japan) Regions.

A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to setup Amazon Glacier. You can learn more by visiting the Amazon Glacier detail page, reading Jeff Barrs blog post, or joining our September 19th webinar.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

StorageIO industry trend for storage IO

What is AWS Glacier?

Glacier is low-cost for lower performance (e.g. access time) storage suited to data applications including archiving, inactive or idle data that you are not in a hurry to retrieve. Pay as you go pricing that can be as low as $0.01 USD per GByte per month (and other optional fees may apply, see here) depending on availability zone. Availability zone or regions include US West coast (Oregon or Northern California), US East Coast (Northern Virginia), Europe (Ireland) and Asia (Tokyo).

Amazon Web Services logo

Now what is understood should have to be discussed, however just to be safe, pity the fool who complains about signing up for AWS Glacier due to its penny per month per GByte cost and it being too slow for their iTunes or videos as you know its going to happen. Likewise, you know that some creative vendor or their surrogate is going to try to show a miss-match of AWS Glacier vs. their faster service that caters to a different usage model; it is just a matter of time.

StorageIO industry trend for storage IO

Lets be clear, Glacier is designed for low-cost, high-capacity, slow access of infrequently accessed data such as an archive or other items. This means that you will be more than disappointed if you try to stream a video, or access a document or photo from Glacier as you would from S3 or EBS or any other cloud service. The reason being is that Glacier is designed with the premise of low-cost, high-capacity, high availability at the cost of slow access time or performance. How slow? AWS states that you may have to wait several hours to reach your data when needed, however that is the tradeoff. If you need faster access, pay more or find a different class and tier of storage service to meet that need, perhaps for those with the real need for speed, AWS SSD capabilities ;).

Here is a link to a good post over at Planforcloud.com comparing Glacier vs. S3, which is like comparing apples and oranges; however, it helps to put things into context.

Amazon Web Services logo

In terms of functionality, Glacier security includes secure socket layer (SSL), advanced encryption standard (AES) 256 (256-bit encryption keys) data at rest encryption along with AWS identify and access management (IAM) policies.

Persistent storage designed for 99.999999999% durability with data automatically placed in different facilities on multiple devices for redundancy when data is ingested or uploaded. Self-healing is accomplished with automatic background data integrity checks and repair.

Scale and flexibility are bound by the size of your budget or credit card spending limit along with what availability zones and other options you choose. Integration with other AWS services including Import/Export where you can ship large amounts of data to Amazon using different media and mediums. Note that AWS has also made a statement of direction (SOD) that S3 will be enhanced to seamless move data in and out of Glacier using data policies.

Part of stretching budgets for organizations of all size is to avoid treating all data and applications the same (key theme of data protection modernization). This means classifying and addressing how and where different applications and data are placed on various types of servers, storage along with revisiting modernizing data protection.

While the low-cost of Amazon Glacier is an attention getter, I am looking for more than just the lowest cost, which means I am also looking for reliability, security among other things to gain and keep confidence in my cloud storage services providers. As an example, a few years ago I switched from one cloud backup provider to another not based on cost, rather functionality and ability to leverage the service more extensively. In fact, I could switch back to the other provider and save money on the monthly bills; however I would end up paying more in lost time, productivity and other costs.

StorageIO industry trend for storage IO

What do I see as the barrier to AWS Glacier adoption?

Simple, getting vendors and other service providers to enhance their products or services to leverage the new AWS Glacier storage category. This means backup/restore, BC and DR vendors ranging from Amazon (e.g. releasing S3 to Glacier automated policy based migration), Commvault, Dell (via their acquisitions of Appassure and Quest), EMC (Avamar, Networker and other tools), HP, IBM/Tivoli, Jungledisk/Rackspace, NetApp, Symantec and others, not to mention cloud gateway providers will need to add support for this new capabilities, along with those from other providers.

As an Amazon EC2 and S3 customer, it is great to see Amazon continue to expand their cloud compute, storage, networking and application service offerings. I look forward to actually trying out Amazon Glacier for storing encrypted archive or inactive data to compliment what I am doing. Since I am not using the Amazon Cloud Storage Gateway, I am looking into how I can use Rackspace Jungledisk to manage an Amazon Glacier repository similar to how it manages my S3 stores.

Some more related reading:
Only you can prevent cloud data loss
Data protection modernization, more than swapping out media
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the NetFlix Fix?
AWS (Amazon) storage gateway, first, second and third impressions

As of now, it looks like I will have to wait for either Jungledisk adds native support as they do today for managing my S3 storage pool today, or, the automated policy based movement between S3 and Glacier is transparently enabled.

Ok, nuff said for now

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

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Only you can prevent cloud data loss

Storage I/O trends

Some of you might remember the saying from Smokey the bear, only you can prevent forest fires and for those who do not know about that, click on the image below.

The reason I bring this up is that while cloud providers are responsible (see the cloud blame game) is that it is also up to the user or consumer to take some ownership and responsibility.

Similar to vendor lock-in, the only one who can allow vendor lock in is the customer, granted a vendor can help influence the customer.

The same theme applies to public clouds and cloud storage providers in that there is responsibility of providers along with government and industry regulations to help protect consumers or users. However, there is also the shared responsibility of the user and consumer to make informed decisions.

What is your perspective on who is responsible for cloud data protection?

Ok, nuff said for now

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

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Spring (May) 2012 StorageIO news letter

StorageIO News Letter Image
Spring (May) 2012 News letter

Welcome to the Spring (May) 2012 edition of the Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO) news letter. This follows the Fall (December) 2011 edition.

You can get access to this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions.

Click on the following links to view the Spring May 2012 edition as an HTML or PDF or, to go to the news letter page to view previous editions.

You can subscribe to the news letter by clicking here.

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO newsletter, let me know your comments and feedback.

Nuff said for now

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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If March 31st is backup day, dont be fooled with restore on April 1st

With March 31st as world backup day, hopefully some will keep recovery and restoration in mind to not be fooled on April 1st.

Lost data

When it comes to protecting data, it may not be a headline news disaster such as earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane or act of man, rather something as simply accidentally overwriting a file, not to mention virus or other more likely to occur problems. Depending upon who you ask, some will say backup or saving data is more important while others will standby that it is recovery or restoration that matter. Without one the other is not practical, they need each other and both need to be done as well as tested to make sure they work.

Just the other day I needed to restore a file that I accidentally overwrote and as luck would have it, my local bad copy had also just overwrote my local backup. However I was able to go and pull an earlier version from my cloud provider which gave a good opportunity to test and try some different things. In the course of testing, I did find some things that have since been updated as well as found some things to optimize for the future.

Destroyed data

My opinion is that if not used properly including ignoring best practices, any form of data storage medium or media as well as software could result or be blamed for data loss. For some people they have lost data as a result of using cloud storage services just as other people have lost data or access to information on other storage mediums and solutions. For example, data has been lost on cloud, tape, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), Solid State Devices (SSD), Hybrid HDDs (HHDD), RAID and non RAID, local and remote and even optical based storage systems large and small. In some cases, there have been errors or problems with the medium or media, in other cases storage systems have lost access to, or lost data due to hardware, firmware, software, or configuration including due to human error among other issues.

Now is the time to start thinking about modernizing data protection, and that means more than simply swapping out media. Data protection modernization the past several years has been focused on treating the symptoms of downstream problems at the target or destination. This has involved swapping out or moving media around, applying data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques downstream to give near term tactical relief as has been the cause with backup, restore, BC and DR for many years. The focus is starting to expand to how to discuss the source of the problem with is an expanding data footprint upstream or at the source using different data footprint reduction tools and techniques. This also means using different metrics including keeping performance and response time in perspective as part of reduction rates vs. ratios while leveraging different techniques and tools from the data footprint reduction tool box. In other words, its time to stop swapping out media like changing tires that keep going flat on a car, find and fix the problem, change the way data is protected (and when) to cut the impact down stream.

Here is a link to a free download of chapter 5 (Data Protection: Backup/Restore and Business Continuance / Disaster Recovery) from my new book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press).

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage NetworkingIntel Recommended Reading List

Additional related links to read more and sources of information:

Choosing the Right Local/Cloud Hybrid Backup for SMBs
E2E Awareness and insight for IT environments
Poll: What Do You Think of IT Clouds?
Convergence: People, Processes, Policies and Products
What do VARs and Clouds as well as MSPs have in common?
Industry adoption vs. industry deployment, is there a difference?
Cloud conversations: Loss of data access vs. data loss
Clouds and Data Loss: Time for CDP (Commonsense Data Protection)?
Clouds are like Electricity: Dont be scared
Wit and wisdom for BC and DR
Criteria for choosing the right business continuity or disaster recovery consultant
Local and Cloud Hybrid Backup for SMBs
Is cloud disaster recovery appropriate for SMBs?
Laptop data protection: A major headache with many cures
Disaster recovery in the cloud explained
Backup in the cloud: Large enterprises wary, others climbing on board
Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011)
Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy

Take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and check to see if your backups and data protection are working, as well as make sure to test restoration and recovery to avoid an April fools type surprise. One last thing, you might want to check out the data storage prayer while you are at it.

Ok, nuff said for now.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

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My Server and Storage IO holiday break projects

Happy new years!

Following up from a flurry of posts in the closing days of 2011 including industry trends perspective predictions for 2012 and 2013, top blog posts from 2011, top all time posts, along with a couple of other items here and here, its time to get back to 2012 activity. Also if you missed it, here is the Fall (December) 2011 StorageIO news letter.

Actually I have been busy working on some other projects the past several weeks most of which are NDA so not much else can be said about them, however there are some other things I’m working on that will show themselves in the weeks and months to come. Here is a link to a webinar and live chat that I did the first week of January on CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and how it can be applied to many different environments.

But lets take a step back for a moment and let me share with you some of the things I did or started during the holiday break between christmas and the new years.

Like many others, I found time to relax and get away from normal work activities during the recent holiday season.

However like many of you that may also be techniques or geeks or wanna be geeks at heart, I could not get away from server, storage, IO, networking, data protection, video and other things completely. I used some time to discuss a few projects that I had wanted to do or that I had started before the holidays and here is a synopsis.

Increased storage capacity on a DVR by about 5x In order to get this to work, I modified a 3.5 enclosure with a power supply to accept a 2.5 1.5TB SATA HDD with an eSATA connection, the easy part was then attaching it to the external eSATA port on my DVR. The hard part was then waiting for the DVR to reconfigure and start recording information again. Also as part of upgrading the external storage on the DVR was to get the media share option to do more than basic things leveraging audio and video real-time trans coding using the Tversity software along with various codecs on a media server.

Another project involved upgrading a 500GB HHDD to a 750GB HHDD and did some testing Shortly before the holidays I received a new 750GB Seagate Momentus XT II HHDD to compare to my exiting 500GB previous generation model. I have been using the 750GB HHDD for over a month now and it is amazing to see so much space in a laptop that also has good performance. Some follow-up activities are to go back and analyze some performance data that I collected before and after the upgrade. This includes both workload simulation of reads, writes, random, sequential of different IO size as well as comparing Windows startup and shutdown speed and impact to build on what I did last summer (see this post). More on these in the not so distance future.

Speaking of clouds, I had a chance to do some more testing with my Amazon EC2 and EBS accounts in addition to cleaning up my S3 pool in addition to my other cloud backup and storage providers accounts. This also involved refining some data protection backup/restore and archive frequency and retention settings. In addition to refinements for cloud based backup, I’m also in the process of transitioning from Imation Odyssey Removable Hard Disk Drives (RHDD) too much larger capacity 2.5 portable RHDDs that are used for offsite bulk copies. Part of the migration includes seeing that end of year master or gold backups and archives were made and safely secured elsewhere in addition to having data sent to the cloud.

Another project involved doing some more testing and simulations with my SSD along with more windows boot and shutdown tests mentioned above. More on these results in a future post.

Sometime (actually not very much) was also spent adding some new shares to my Iomega IX4 NAS which is filling up so I also did some more research on what I will upgrade or replace it with. While Iomega has been great (knock on wood), Synology is also looking interesting as a future solution however keeping my options open for now. Right now I’m leaning towards keeping the IX4 and adding another NAS filer using the two for different purposes.

Some other server, storage and IO projects also included upgrading some networking components, and to finish decommissioning old drives making them secure for safe disposal when the time comes.

I also was able to spend time on non tech items including outside enjoying the nice weather, cutting up some fallen trees and roasting them on a bonfire among other things.

Tree cleanupOn break

roasting logswalking on frozen water

Ok, nuff said for now, time to get back to work.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

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The blame game: Does cloud storage result in data loss?

I recently came across a piece by Carl Brooks over at IT Tech News Daily that caught my eye, title was Cloud Storage Often Results in Data Loss. The piece has an effective title (good for search engine: SEO optimization) as it stood out from many others I saw on that particular day.

Industry Trend: Cloud storage

What caught my eye on Carls piece is that it reads as if the facts based on a quick survey point to clouds resulting in data loss, as opposed to being an opinion that some cloud usage can result in data loss.

Data loss

My opinion is that if not used properly including ignoring best practices, any form of data storage medium or media could result or be blamed for data loss. For some people they have lost data as a result of using cloud storage services just as other people have lost data or access to information on other storage mediums and solutions. For example, data has been lost on tape, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), Solid State Devices (SSD), Hybrid HDDs (HHDD), RAID and non RAID, local and remote and even optical based storage systems large and small. In some cases, there have been errors or problems with the medium or media, in other cases storage systems have lost access to, or lost data due to hardware, firmware, software, or configuration including due to human error among other issues.

Data loss

Technology failure: Not if, rather when and how to decrease impact
Any technology regardless of what it is or who it is from along with its architecture design and implementation can fail. It is not if, rather when and how gracefully along with what safeguards to decrease the impact, in addition to containing or isolating faults differentiates various products or solutions. How they automatically repair and self heal to keep running or support accessibility and maintain data integrity are important as is how those options are used. Granted a failure may not be technology related per say, rather something associated with human intervention, configuration, change management (or lack thereof) along with accidental or intentional activities.

Walking the talk
I have used public cloud storage services for several years including SaaS and AaaS as well as IaaS (See more XaaS here) and knock on wood, have not lost any data yet, loss of access sure, however not data being lost.

I follow my advice and best practices when selecting cloud providers looking for good value, service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs) over low cost or for free services.

In the several years of using cloud based storage and services there has been some loss of access, however no loss of data. Those service disruptions or loss of access to data and services ranged from a few minutes to a little over an hour. In those scenarios, if I could not have waited for cloud storage to become accessible, I could have accessed a local copy if it were available.

Had a major disruption occurred where it would have been several days before I could gain access to that information, or if it were actually lost, I have a data insurance policy. That data insurance policy is part of my business continuance (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) strategy. My BC and DR strategy is a multi layered approach combining local, offline and offsite as along with online cloud data protection and archiving.

Assuming my cloud storage service could get data back to a given point (RPO) in a given amount of time (RTO), I have some options. One option is to wait for the service or information to become available again assuming a local copy is no longer valid or available. Another option is to start restoration from a master gold copy and then roll forward changes from the cloud services as that information becomes available. In other words, I am using cloud storage as another resource that is for both protecting what is local, as well as complimenting how I locally protect things.

Minimize or cut data loss or loss of access
Anything important should be protected locally and remotely meaning leveraging cloud and a master or gold backup copy.

To cut the cost of protecting information, I also leverage archives, which mean not all data gets protected the same. Important data is protected more often reducing RPO exposure and speed up RTO during restoration. Other data that is not as important is protected, however on a different frequency with other retention cycles, in other words, tiered data protection. By implementing tiered data protection, best practices, and various technologies including data footprint reduction (DFR) such as archive, compression, dedupe in addition to local disk to disk (D2D), disk to disk to cloud (D2D2C), along with routine copies to offline media (removable HDDs or RHDDs) that go offsite,  Im able to stretch my data protection budget further. Not only is my data protection budget stretched further, I have more options to speed up RTO and better detail for recovery and enhanced RPOs.

If you are looking to avoid losing data, or loss of access, it is a simple equation in no particular order:

  • Strategy and design
  • Best practices and processes
  • Various technologies
  • Quality products
  • Robust service delivery
  • Configuration and implementation
  • SLO and SLA management metrics
  • People skill set and knowledge
  • Usage guidelines or terms of service (ToS)

Unfortunately, clouds like other technologies or solutions get a bad reputation or blamed when something goes wrong. Sometimes it is the technology or service that fails, other times it is a combination of errors that resulted in loss of access or lost data. With clouds as has been the case with other storage mediums and systems in the past, when something goes wrong and if it has been hyped, chances are it will become a target for blame or finger pointing vs. determining what went wrong so that it does not occur again. For example cloud storage has been hyped as easy to use, don’t worry, just put your data there, you can get out of the business of managing storage as the cloud will do that magically for you behind the scenes.

The reality is that while cloud storage solutions can offload functions, someone is still responsible for making decisions on its usage and configuration that impact availability. What separates various providers is their ability to design in best practices, isolate and contain faults quickly, have resiliency integrated as part of a solution along with various SLAs aligned to what the service level you are expecting in an easy to use manner.

Does that mean the more you pay the more reliable and resilient a solution should be?
No, not necessarily, as there can still be risks including how the solution is used.

Does that mean low cost or for free solutions have the most risk?
No, not necessarily as it comes down to how you use or design around those options. In other words, while cloud storage services remove or mask complexity, it still comes down to how you are going to use a given service.

Shared responsibility for cloud (and non cloud) storage data protection
Anything important enough that you cannot afford to lose, or have quick access to should be protected in different locations and on various mediums. In other words, balance your risk. Cloud storage service provider toned to take responsibility to meet service expectations for a given SLA and SLOs that you agree to pay for (unless free).

As the customer you have the responsibility of following best practices supplied by the service provider including reading the ToS. Part of the responsibility as a customer or consumer is to understand what are the ToS, SLA and SLOs for a given level of service that you are using. As a customer or consumer, this means doing your homework to be ready as a smart educated buyer or consumer of cloud storage services.

If you are a vendor or value added reseller (VAR), your opportunity is to help customers with the acquisition process to make informed decision. For VARs and solution providers, this can mean up selling customers to a higher level of service by making them aware of the risk and reward benefits as opposed to focus on cost. After all, if a order taker at McDonalds can ask Would you like to super size your order, why cant you as a vendor or solution provider also have a value oriented up sell message.

Additional related links to read more and sources of information:

Choosing the Right Local/Cloud Hybrid Backup for SMBs
E2E Awareness and insight for IT environments
Poll: What Do You Think of IT Clouds?
Convergence: People, Processes, Policies and Products
What do VARs and Clouds as well as MSPs have in common?
Industry adoption vs. industry deployment, is there a difference?
Cloud conversations: Loss of data access vs. data loss
Clouds and Data Loss: Time for CDP (Commonsense Data Protection)?
Clouds are like Electricity: Dont be scared
Wit and wisdom for BC and DR
Criteria for choosing the right business continuity or disaster recovery consultant
Local and Cloud Hybrid Backup for SMBs
Is cloud disaster recovery appropriate for SMBs?
Laptop data protection: A major headache with many cures
Disaster recovery in the cloud explained
Backup in the cloud: Large enterprises wary, others climbing on board
Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011)
Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy

Poll:  Who is responsible for cloud storage data loss?

Taking action, what you should (or not) do
Dont be scared of clouds, however do your homework, be ready, look before you leap and follow best practices. Look into the service level agreements (SLAs) associated with a given cloud storage product or service. Follow best practices about how you or someone else will protect what data is put into the cloud.

For critical data or information, consider having a copy of that data in the cloud as well as at or in another place, which could be in a different cloud or local or offsite and offline. Keep in mind the theme for critical information and data is not if, rather when so what can be done to decrease the risk or impact of something happening, in other words, be ready.

Data put into the cloud can be lost, or, loss of access to it can occur for some amount of time just as happens with using non cloud storage such as tape, disk or ssd. What impacts or minimizes your risk of using traditional local or remote as well as cloud storage are the best practices, how configured, protected, secured and managed. Another consideration is the type and quality of the storage product or cloud service can have a big impact. Sure, a quality product or service can fail; however, you can also design and configure to decrease those impacts.

Wrap up
Bottom line, do not be scared of cloud storage, however be ready, do your homework, review best practices, understand benefits and caveats, risk and reward. For those who want to learn more about cloud storage (public, private and hybrid) along with data protection, data management, data footprint reduction among other related topics and best practices, I happen to know of some good resources. Those resources in addition to the links provided above are titled Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) that you can learn more about here as well as find at Amazon among other venues. Also, check out Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy by Preston De Guise (aka twitter @backupbear ) which is a great resource for protecting data.

Ok, nuff said for now

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2011 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking book released

Ok, it’s now official, following its debut at the VMworld 2011 book store last week in Las Vegas, my new book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) is now formally released with general availability announced today along with companion material located at https://storageioblog.com/book3 including the Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking LinkedIn group page launched a few months ago. Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CVDSN) a 370 page hard cover print is my third solo book that follows The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press 2009) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier 2004).

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking Book by Greg Schulz
CVDSN book was on display at VMworld 2011 book store last week along with a new book by Duncan Epping (aka @DuncanYB ) and Frank Denneman (aka @frankdenneman ) titled VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive. You can get your copy of Duncan and Franks new book on Amazon here.

Greg Schulz during book signing at VMworld 2011
Here is a photo of me on the left visiting a VMworld 2011 attendee in the VMworld book store.

 

Whats inside the book, theme and topics covered

When it comes to clouds, virtualization, converged and dynamic infrastructures Dont be scared however do look before you leap to be be prepared including doing your homework.

What this means is that you should do your homework, prepare, learn, and get involved with proof of concepts (POCs) and training to build the momentum and success to continue an ongoing IT journey. Identify where clouds, virtualization and data storage networking technologies and techniques compliment and enable your journey to efficient, effective and productive optimized IT services delivery.

 

There is no such thing as a data or information recession: Do more with what you have

A common challenge in many organizations is exploding data growth along with associated management tasks and constraints, including budgets, staffing, time, physical facilities, floor space, and power and cooling. IT clouds and dynamic infrastructure environments enable flexible, efficient and optimized, cost-effective and productive services delivery. The amount of data being generated, processed, and stored continues to grow, a trend that does not appear to be changing in the future. Even during the recent economic crisis, there has been no slow down or information recession. Instead, the need to process, move, and store data has only increased, in fact both people and data are living longer. CVDSN presents options, technologies, best practices and strategies for enabling IT organizations looking to do more with what they have while supporting growth along with new services without compromising on cost or QoS delivery (see figure below).

Driving Return on Innovation the new ROI: Doing more, reducing costs while boosting productivity

 

Expanding focus from efficiency and optimization to effectiveness and productivity

A primary tenant of a cloud and virtualized environment is to support growing demand in a cost-effective manner  with increased agility without compromising QoS. By removing complexity and enabling agility, information services can be delivered in a timely manner to meet changing business needs.

 

There are many types of information services delivery model options

Various types of information services delivery modes should be combined to meet various needs and requirements. These complimentary service delivery options and descriptive terms include cloud, virtual and data storage network enabled environments. These include dynamic Infrastructure, Public & Private and Hybrid Cloud, abstracted, multi-tenant, capacity on demand, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) among others.

Convergence combing different technology domains and skill sets

Components of a cloud and virtual environment include desktop, servers, and storage, networking, hardware, and software, services along with APIs and software stacks. This include virtual and physical desktops, data, voice and storage networks, LANs, SANs, MANs, WANs, faster blade and rack servers with more memory, SSD and high-capacity storage and associated virtualization tools and management software. True convergence combines leveraging technology and people, processes and best practices aligned to make the most of those resources to deliver cost-effective services delivery.

 

Best people, processes, practices and products (the four Ps)

Bringing all the various components together is the Ps (people skill sets, process, practices and products). This means leveraging and enhancing people skill sets and experience, process and procedures to optimize workflow for streamlined service orchestration, practices and policies to be more effectively reducing waste without causing new bottlenecks, and products such as racks, stacks, hardware, software, and managed or cloud services.

 

Service categories and catalogs, templates SLO and SLA alignment

Establishing service categories aligned to known service levels and costs enables resources to be aligned to applicable SLO and SLA requirements. Leveraging service templates and defined policies can enable automation and rapid provisioning of resources including self-service requests.

 

Navigating to effective IT services delivery: Metrics, measurements and E2E management

You cannot effectively manage what you do not know about; likewise, without situational awareness or navigation tools, you are flying blind. E2E (End to End) tools can provide monitoring and usage metrics for reporting and accounting, including enabling comparison with other environments. Metrics include customer service satisfaction, SLO and SLAs, QoS, performance, availability and costs to service delivered.

 

The importance of data protection for virtual, cloud and physical environments

Clouds and virtualization are important tools and technologies for protecting existing consolidated or converged as well as traditional environments. Likewise, virtual and cloud environments or data placed there also need to be protected. Now is the time to rethink and modernize your data protection strategy to be more effective, protecting, preserving and serving more data for longer periods of time with less complexity and cost.

 

Packing smart and effectively for your journey: Data footprint reduction (DFR)

Reducing your data footprint impact leveraging data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques, technologies and best practices is important for enabling an optimized, efficient and effective IT services delivery environment. Reducing your data footprint is enabled with clouds and virtualization providing a means and mechanism for archiving inactive data and for transparently moving it. On the other hand, moving to a cloud and virtualized environment to do more with what you have is enhanced by reducing the impact of your data footprint. The ABCDs of data footprint reduction include Archiving, Backup modernization, Compression and consolidation, Data management and dedupe along with Storage tiering and thin provisioning among other techniques.

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking book by Greg Schulz

How the book is laid out:

  • Table of content (TOC)
  • How the book is organized and who should read it
  • Preface
  • Section I: Why the need for cloud, virtualization and data storage networks
  • Chapter 1: Industry trends and perspectives: From issues and challenges to opportunities
  • Chapter 2: Cloud, virtualization and data storage networking fundamentals
  • Section II: Managing data and resources: Protect, preserve, secure and serve
  • Chapter 3: Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM)
  • Chapter 4: Data and storage networking security
  • Chapter 5: Data protection (Backup/Restore, BC and DR)
  • Chapter 6: Metrics and measurement for situational awareness
  • Section III: Technology, tools and solution options
  • Chapter 7: Data footprint reduction: Enabling cost-effective data demand growth
  • Chapter 8: Enabling data footprint reduction: Storage capacity optimization
  • Chapter 9: Storage services and systems
  • Chapter 10: Server virtualization
  • Chapter 11: Connectivity: Networking with your servers and storage
  • Chapter 12: Cloud and solution packages
  • Chapter 13: Management and tools
  • Section IV: Putting IT all together
  • Chapter 14: Applying what you have learned
  • Chapter 15: Wrap-up, what’s next and book summary
  • Appendices:
  • Where to Learn More
  • Index and Glossary

Here is the release that went out via Business Wire (aka Bizwire) earlier today.

 

Industry Veteran Greg Schulz of StorageIO Reveals Latest IT Strategies in “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” Book
StorageIO Founder Launches the Definitive Book for Enabling Cloud, Virtualized, Dynamic, and Converged Infrastructures

Stillwater, Minnesota – September 7, 2011  – The Server and StorageIO Group (www.storageio.com), a leading independent IT industry advisory and consultancy firm, in conjunction with  publisher CRC Press, a Taylor and Francis imprint, today announced the release of “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking,” a new book by Greg Schulz, noted author and StorageIO founder. The book examines strategies for the design, implementation, and management of hardware, software, and services technologies that enable the most advanced, dynamic, and flexible cloud and virtual environments.

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking

The book supplies real-world perspectives, tips, recommendations, figures, and diagrams on creating an efficient, flexible and optimized IT service delivery infrastructures to support demand without compromising quality of service (QoS) in a cost-effective manner. “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” looks at converging IT resources and management technologies to facilitate efficient and effective delivery of information services, including enabling information factories. Schulz guides readers of all experience levels through various technologies and techniques available to them for enabling efficient information services.

Topics covered in the book include:

  • Information services model options and best practices
  • Metrics for efficient E2E IT management and measurement
  • Server, storage, I/O networking, and data center virtualization
  • Converged and cloud storage services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
  • Public, private, and hybrid cloud and managed services
  • Data protection for virtual, cloud, and physical environments
  • Data footprint reduction (archive, backup modernization, compression, dedupe)
  • High availability, business continuance (BC), and disaster recovery (DR)
  • Performance, availability and capacity optimization

This book explains when, where, with what, and how to leverage cloud, virtual, and data storage networking as part of an IT infrastructure today and in the future. “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” comprehensively covers IT data storage networking infrastructures, including public, private and hybrid cloud, managed services, virtualization, and traditional IT environments.

“With all the chatter in the market about cloud storage and how it can solve all your problems, the industry needed a clear breakdown of the facts and how to use cloud storage effectively. Greg’s latest book does exactly that,” said Greg Brunton of EDS, an HP company.

Click here to listen and watch Schulz discuss his new book in this Video about Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking book by Greg Schulz video.

About the Book

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking has 370 pages, with more than 100 figures and tables, 15 chapters plus appendices, as well as a glossary. CRC Press catalog number K12375, ISBN-10: 1439851735, ISBN-13: 9781439851739, publication September 2011. The hard cover book can be purchased now at global venues including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Digital Guru and CRCPress.com. Companion material is located at https://storageioblog.com/book3 including images, additional information, supporting site links at CRC Press, LinkedIn Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking group, and other books by the author. Direct book editorial review inquiries to John Wyzalek of CRC Press at john.wyzalek@taylorfrancis.com (twitter @jwyzalek) or +1 (917) 351-7149. For bulk and special orders contact Chris Manion of CRC Press at chris.manion@taylorandfrancis.com or +1 (561) 998-2508. For custom, derivative works and excerpts, contact StorageIO at info@storageio.com.

About the Author

Greg Schulz is the founder of the independent IT industry advisory firm StorageIO. Before forming StorageIO, Schulz worked for several vendors in systems engineering, sales, and marketing technologist roles. In addition to having been an analyst, vendor and VAR, Schulz also gained real-world hands on experience working in IT organizations across different industry sectors. His IT customer experience spans systems development, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, and capacity planner across different technology domains, including servers, storage, I/O networking hardware, software and services. Today, in addition to his analyst and research duties, Schulz is a prolific writer, blogger, and sought-after speaker, sharing his expertise with worldwide technology manufacturers and resellers, IT users, and members of the media. With an insightful and thought-provoking style, Schulz is also author of the books “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC Press, 2009) which is on the Intel developers recommended reading list and the SNIA-endorsed reading book “Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures” (Elsevier, 2004). Schulz is available for interviews and commentary, briefings, speaking engagements at conferences and private events, webinars, video and podcast along with custom advisory consultation sessions. Learn more at https://storageio.com.

End of press release.

Wrap up

I want to express thanks to all of those involved with the project that spanned over the past year.

Stayed tuned for more news and updates pertaining to Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking along with related material including upcoming events as well as chapter excerpts. Speaking of events, here is information on an upcoming workshop seminar that I will be involved with for IT storage and networking professionals to be held October 4th and 5th in the Netherlands.

You can get your copy now at global venues including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Digital Guru and CRCPress.com.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2011 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking book VMworld 2011 debut

Following up from a previous preview post about my new book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) for those for those attending VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas Monday August 29 through Thursday September 1st 2011, you can pick up your copy at the VMworld book store.

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking Book

Book signing at VMworld 2011

On Tuesday August 30 at 1PM local time, I will be at the VMworld store signing books. Stop by the book store and say hello, pickup your copy of Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press). Also check out the other new releases by fellow vExpert authors during the event. I have also heard rumors that some exhibitors among others will be doing drawings, so keep an eye out in the expo hall and go visit those showing copies of my new book.

The VMworld book store hours are:

Monday 8:30am to 7:30pm
Tuesday 8:30am to 6:00pm
Wednesday 8:30am to 8:00pm
Thursday 8:00am to 2:00pm

For those not attending VMworld 2011, you can order your copy from different venues including Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, DigitalGuru and CRC Press among others.

Learn more about Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) at https://storageioblog.com/book3

Look forward to seeing you at the various VMworld events in Las Vegas as well as at other upcoming venues.

Ok, nuff said for now.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2011 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved