My blog posts and tweets are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of my current employer (ESG), my previous employers or any other party.
I do not do paid endorsements, so if I am appear to be a fan of something, it is based on my personal experience with it.
If I am not talking about your stuff, it is either because I haven't worked with it enough or because my mom taught me "if you can't say something nice ... "
Today, HP announced the newest offering in its VirtualSystem for Microsoft solutions family – the VS3, leveraging HP hardware that has been assembled and optimized to deliver the entire Microsoft Private Cloud stack, including:
HP Proliant “generation 8” BladeSystem servers
HP 3PAR storage
HP Insight Control management tools
Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V
Microsoft System Center 2012 (also announced at MMS)
The Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program puts the best practices and private cloud experience of Microsoft into an IT architecture that provides consistency and flexibility in the Microsoft stack, while still enabling its hardware partners to bring their own expertise and differentiated components together for customers benefit.
While at MMS 2012, I had the opportunity to visit with Scott Shaffer from HP, along with Mike Schutz from Microsoft, on the HP VS3 announcement:
Earlier in 2012, ESG Lab tested the Fast Track solution stack, running on HP Virtual System hardware, with some really impressive results.
One of the coolest notables is that the entire hands-on lab environment at MMS2012 is being served up from a single HP VS3 system, which is on display near the registration area. MMS 2010 had easily 4X-5X the amount of server gear for the hands-on labs, and MMS2007 had every VHD running on local hard drives within each HOL workstation. This HP VS3 will serve up over 1,200 VMs every 90 minutes, as part of refreshing the environment, with an estimated 45,000 VMs provisioned over the course of the week. Take that and consider what you could do in a large enterprise!
The Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program puts the best practices and private cloud experience of Microsoft into an IT architecture that provides consistency and flexibility in the Microsoft stack, while still enabling its hardware partners to bring their own expertise and differentiated components together for customers benefit.
While at MMS 2012, I had the opportunity to talk about Private Cloud Fast Track with Mike Schutz, GM of Windows Server and Management from Microsoft – along with Scott Shaffer, Director of Engineering from HP.
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Along with discussing Microsoft’s Fast Track program – and HP’s delivery through its VirtualSystem product-line, we also share some early results of a recent ESG Lab testing of the HP VirtualSystem VS2. With that system, ESG Lab was able to deliver up to 32,000 Microsoft Exchange 2010 mailboxes. Later, ESG Lab tested the HP VS2 with eight virtualized database VMs that was able to simulate over 160,000 online brokerage transactions on SQL Server 2012. Very Cool Stuff !!!
It’s been a few years since I came to SNW – and while, the number of end-users appears to be dropping (my perception vs. recollection), the types of end-users appear to be exactly the right kind of audience that SNW was built for: storage savvy IT stakeholders looking for education on technology evolutions. I do wish that SNW would lessen its restrictions or allow a defined percentage of its sessions to actually mention products, as I heard some veiled sales pitches where the ‘evolution trends’ discussed by the ‘experts’ were coincidentally only manifested by that particular expert’s product-line. Enabling some sessions to be product-informational might breathe some new life into that program.
That being said, this was also my first SNW as an industry analyst and I had the opportunity to visit with companies of all sizes. Here are a few memorable things that I looked at:
Symform – The coolest idea that I saw this week
Symform offers a peer-to-peer cloud-storage model, where you gain access to cloud-storage based on how much capacity you offer (contribute 1TB to the collective and you’ll get 1TB of usable storage). For your data, every block is first encrypted (AES256) and then sliced into 64 fragments. Then, 32 parity fragments are added – so one might think about it as RAID-96. Those 96 fragments are then randomly scattered to 96 anonymous other Symform contributors. The goal is to enable a data protection tier that is secure by its encryption and its disbursement.
It’s a cool idea because it forces you to rethink where in “the cloud” your data is. Does it have to be in one other data center that is simply outsourced – or could it really be scattered across the very Internet itself? Am going to sign up and try it myself and likely blog it later.
LTFS (Linear Tape File System) – Affected my most incorrect presumption
I am definitely not a “Tape is Dead” guy, but I was admittedly biased to relegate tape as a long-term retention medium only. LTFS, as a feature of LTO-5 tapes which provides two data tracks on the tapes themselves – one for the data stream and a second with the metadata that is effectively a file system directory. The resulting capability is a software-independent, standardized way to mount an LTO-5 tape like a USB Flash drive. You get what tape has always offered (long-term shelf-life) but also to a certain degree, a multi-access storage medium that is usable even without backup software. Think about this:
For the last several years, folks wanting something that looked like tape but was fast like disk have used “VTL” as a virtual tape (device).
With LTFS, I felt like I was looking at a VDL, a virtual disk – something that looks like disk, even though it was actually something different (tape).
My only disappointment was seeing how the three vendor representatives (all wearing the same LTO Ultrium consortium shirt) finished each other sentences cohesively – but when I said “I’d like to try one to talk about,” each pointed to one another and they became separate vendors again. I don’t really blame them, as a standalone LTO-5 drive costs over $2,000 (still well within SMB budgets). Hence, don’t look for my personal observations on LTO-5 and LTFS in the near future. Still, LTFS forced me to admit that my assumption that “all that could be innovated in tape already has” was incorrect.
Windows Server 8 – What I wasn’t expecting at SNW but was glad to hear
Many years ago, Microsoft’s storage teams were as common at SNW as any storage/server vendor that was a platinum sponsor this year. As SNW evolved and Microsoft’s storage solutions matured and converged within the Windows OS itself, Microsoft hasn’t been as visible at SNW – but here they were, talking about some of the storage solutions that Windows will soon be supporting, which either enabled or leveraged almost every other SNW demonstrating storage vendor. From my past lives, I know that many of the storage-specific features that used to only be in their OEM’d Windows Storage Server offerings are now often found in the mainstream Windows server.
Between the changes in SMB (Microsoft’s implementation of CIFS) and its approach to file systems and what appears to offer scale-out and scale-up storage through a clustering of Windows Server 8 that doesn’t look much different than the adding of storage controllers and capacity shelves in any other top tier storage solution, including features such as deduplication (for example). In regard to its upcoming built-in deduplication feature, which arguably might be better referred to as per-volume single-instancing, it was cool to hear that in Microsoft’s own test labs, they saw an 87% reduction in VHD storage. There is more information coming on WS8, but I was happy to see Windows storage topics back at SNW in a way that all of the Windows-owning SNW attendees and Microsoft partners that deliver storage solutions can learn and prepare their Windows environments for evolutionary storage innovations.
There were several other interesting topics at SNW, some of which you’ll be hearing about over the next several weeks as they are publicly announced and/or in future blog posts from me. But in the meantime, feel free to check out Symform, LTO Ultrium and Windows Server 8.
You have it on your calendars for March 31 (Saturday), right?
Are you testing your Disaster Recovery solution over the weekend to ensure you can resume service? Remember, if it doesn’t get tested, then you don’t have a “DR Plan”, you have a “DR Hope”.
Are you rolling out the updates for your end-users’ mobile device backup solution through BaaS or in-house protection? That’s important since we know almost as much data lives uniquely on endpoint devices as exists in the datacenter (not including transactional apps). And of course, you’ve mastered the diversity of devices coming in via the trends in consumerization of IT or BYoD, right?
Or maybe, you are kicking it old-school?
You don’t have any unique data on your endpoint devices, because they just sync data from your datacenter/cloud-based repositories.
You are nearly fully virtualized, with the VMs, data sources, and supporting infrastructure replicated between two or more production data centers or private clouds to ensure resumption of service within your own environment.
And you rigorously test not only your ability to resume across sites, but with different IT personnel and without a planned window – that everyone doesn’t have the luxury to plan for.
Or maybe, just maybe – you just don’t have time for backups & BC/DR?
That is why there is a “World Backup Day”, as an excuse to restart the conversation at least once per year.
Frankly, you could argue that that is what Mothers’ Day or Fathers’ Day is about too. While you should likely be showing appreciation or credence to your parents all year, the day marks an excuse to do so in a more intentional way. Treat WBD that way – as an excuse to restart discussions or put a little special attention on something that really ought to be done every day – assessing your ability to ensure that your company and its users can keep doing what they need to do. And that means not just assuring of backups, but ensuring recoverability.
So, how will I be celebrating WBD?
I have a few new blog posts that I need to finish and post around backup. I have been dogfooding some data protection products and methods in my own home, and need to finish those posts and thank the nice folks who loaned me their technology. But to kick WBD off, I am moderating a @SyncSort #TweetJam on Wednesday at 1:30P (follow #backupjam) to listen in.
A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my laptop with an SSD primary disk – and along the way, I discovered the magic that is Acronis.
It was supposed to be a trivial upgrade. Especially for a guy who does backup & recovery for a living, right? My awesome Lenovo T420s allows for not only a standard SATA disk but also an mSATA slot, so my thought was to back up my System Volume and C:-drive and then restore them to the SSD. This would give me a fast OS and longer battery life, but keep my big data set on a 7200 SATA disk – sounds easy? Actually, no.
Attempt # 1 – I assumed that I could use the Windows Backup (WSB) utility, which after all enables a push-button system restore. But there were some limitations. WSB didn’t want to restore my SYS and C partitions without also restoring my D (data) volume. Uggh !
Attempt # 2 – So, I figured out how to selectively back up the whole SYS and C partitions in WSB and then restore them selectively. But WSB wouldn’t restore my 76GB C partition to the 74GB of free space on the SSD, even though there was lots of free space. Dang it !!
Attempt # 3 – I disabled Hibernation and the paging file. Rebooted. Then, I shrank the C partition by 3GB. Then I backed it up yet again with WSB. And the restore failed – with no actionable error message. $%@& !!!
Attempt # 4 – So, I tried to back up to an alternate media type with WSB and then restore from the System Restore Disk … and the restore failed again. AGGHH !!!!
And then my IT guy sent me a CD with Acronis on it (am a remote user) – thanks Dan!
After booting from the CD, I used their very straight-forward UI to get a copy of my C: to a USB disk – and then restored the backup to new partitions on the SSD. DONE !!!!!
(now I remember why peripheral manufacturers ship OEM licenses of value-add software)
My boot time went from 85 seconds to 17 seconds (from first graphical elements to login prompt)
My battery life on airplanes went from about 1 hour to 2.5 hours – using Word or OneNote non-stop.
Will I ever use a primary laptop without an SSD C:, NO.
Will I ever do partition management/protection without Acronis? Why?!
My next mission is to visit with the Acronis folks on how they do that voodoo that they do so well … and what else does their magic pixie fairy dust solve for. Maybe, I’ll even talk the ESG Lab guys into doing some validation of whatever Acronis releases next. Maybe, I’ll be able to help them the way they helped me. However it goes, you’ll hear about it here.
Today, Symantec held live events covering the upcoming BackupExec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 releases. According to Symantec, “Backup is broken” (I agree). And they intend to be the fix.
Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO, started by offering “Every year, I stand up and talk about how data is growing … and every year we underestimate it.” (which is oh so very true for most IT environments today)
The launch events were recently held at the Tesla Motor headquarters, with highlights shared in today’s live webcasts along with new product demos and very active tweets. The Tesla event was impressive (no, I didn’t get to drive one). But the theme of innovation was the right one, and they had some cool stuff to talk about on both product lines.
You can get some insight what the new technologies are and how they work at Symantec’s new video launch site – http://www.betterbackupforall.com/. Kudos to the Symantec PMs and distinguished engineers on bringing some advanced functions not only to market but explaining them in a way that is meaningful and not just marketecture.
You’ll see more from ESG on both products as they come to market, and am hoping that my buddies in the ESG Lab get a chance to get some deep hands-on time with both products. But in the meantime, the topline good stuff to me were:
Backup Exec 2012
Easier Acquisition through Simpler SKUs, including Small-Business Edition and V-Ray editions
Easier Operation through new UIs and workflows that seem to really make sense.
Very cool “No hardware disaster recovery” through P2V and B2V functionality (more on that later)
NetBackup 7.5
Up to 100X faster backups, by combining client-side dedupe during backups through NBU Accelerator
Integrated use of snapshots from NetApp through NBU Replication Director
Smarter retention of data through NBU Search
I was able to get a preview copy of BE 2012 and just started trying it out on my own home server – which might be a separate blog post later, along with other coverage by ESG as these products hit the street.
It was a privilege to work with two ESG Lab Engineers, Tony Palmer and Ajen Johan, to do some hands-on with the new Riverbed technologies.
To me, the really cool part of Granite is how it changes some presumptions for branch offices. Traditionally, I still see large customers doing things in two very different ways:
For their large data center facilities, SAN-based manageable and consolidated storage.
For their remote offices, standalone servers with direct-attached disk.
The reason for this is that most presume that managing a SAN at each branch office is non-viable. So, even though managed storage may be more effective for many scenarios, it only seems to happen in the data centers of many companies. If only there was a way to do it for the branches?
The Granite technology effectively extends an iSCSI scenario from your data center SAN to a branch office server. Technically, there are two iSCSI scenarios in play:
Within the data center (diagram-left), the Granite “core” device has an iSCSI initiator to mount LUNs from your existing iSCSI SAN provider.
At the branch office (diagram-right), the Granite “edge” device caches a copy of that LUN and becomes an iSCSI target, whereby any machine in your branch with an iSCSI initiator can mount it.
The result is that managed storage blocks that appear local are in fact replicated from a centralized data center copy. This leads to some really interesting (and presumption-twisting) changes from a Data Protection perspective. Maybe you still run your backups at the branch? Maybe you want to finally adopt NDMP and back up directly from the SAN at the data center? There are some options worth looking at, without ripping out whatever backup solution is currently in play.
There is more to the Steelhead EX + Granite solution than just the iSCSI capabilities, including a built-in VMware hypervisor inside the new Riverbed device – enabling further server consolidation to VMs within the edge device, using iSCSI LUNs that are actually from the corporate data center.
Today, CommVault is holding a virtual event to announce some of its latest innovations for the Simpana 9.0 product. I had the opportunity to do some early hands-on testing of a few of the new capabilities during an ESG Lab Review — including its new "OnePass" technology and its ability to integrate with Scale-out NAS.
Click here to read the new ESG Lab Report on CommVault Simpana 9.0 "OnePass"
Click here to read a new ESG Analyst Brief on CommVault Simpana 9
With data growing at ever increasing rates, more data sets are simply becoming "too big" to back up — at least not in the traditional sense. To help combat this, Archive is becoming more and more the steady-partner to Backup, whereby once something is adequately backed up, dormant data can be archived off — making future backups better.
That all sounds like steps in the right direction, but let’s take a look using a "Good, Better, Best" perspective for how these come together:
Good > Some IT environments are now doing Archive and Backup (and Storage Resource Monitoring), which is solving their tactical backup window and retention challenges — but they are using multiple point products; with each niche technology installing its own agent on the production servers, its own management console, and creating its own I/O/CPU impact on every production server.
Better > Some data protection vendors have either built or bought complementary archiving and/or SRM functionality. Often this eases buying and evaluation cycles, as well as support resolution. But the multiple agents, back-ends, management interfaces, and I/O/CPU impact on the production environments still apply.
Best >One agent … One back-end … One console … and (most importantly)One CPU/I/O stream on each production server.
In other words — One Pass on the data, which (not coincidently) is the name of Simpana’s new feature.
CommVault may not be the only vendor to have ever converged its software’s methodologies, but it is now on a very short list of vendors who are addressing multiple data management problems with a truly unified solution through an elegant architecture. And most impressively, they did it while not even asking for new licensing or deployment methods. That’s right, existing Simpana 9.0 customers can take advantage of this by simply applying the most recent quarterly software update and then doing their normal agent update process. After that, two simple checkboxes in the Simpana management console will enable the unified "OnePass" behavior within the Simpana system. (check out the ESG Lab Report on all of this)
While I would love to say that consolidating the 3 workflows of Backup, Archiving, and SRM into one process gives you 3X return for your backup window, there are too many variables to make that claim, including: file types and size, amount of redundancy, archiving retention rules, etc. But by only traversing the disk system once (instead of for each of the three processes) every Simpana customer should see an appreciable improvement in backup window SLA compliance, as well as the less quantifiable but more appreciable reduced I/O impact on production disks and networks and CPU — all of which will free the production environment to do less backup tasks and more production work.
As always, thanks for reading.
Click here to read earlier ESG coverage of CommVault Simpana
Yesterday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of its AWS Storage Gateway, which acts as an iSCSI target, delivered as a virtual appliance. On-premise servers can connect to the iSCSI device and store their data locally, with snapshots being stored in the Amazon S3 cloud-storage environment.
My colleague, Terri McClure who covers storage at ESG, wrote a blog post on whether the availability of the AWS Storage Gateway affects the standalone storage-gateway business by third-party vendors (some of which use Amazon S3 as their storage back end). Check out her blog at http://ITdependsBlog.com
All things being considered, I am very excited about the AWS Storage gateway (AWS SG), mostly because it reminds me in some ways of Microsoft’s for-sale backup product, System Center Data Protection Manager that I used to manage. DPM wasn’t the most full-featured backup software on the market, but it did at least two very good things:
1. DPM gave Microsoft customers an early option in disk-based backup, when other vendors were still trying to move from a tape-centric approach to backups.Similarly, I expect the AWS SG to be another way for customers that would like to start down the path of cloud-based backups and other scenarios, since the storage will simply appear like another iSCSI mounted volume. Many existing cloud-based backup or replication solutions (or even apps that have their own backup-to-disk function) should be able to jump on the AWS SG bandwagon with very little effort.
The other way that many enterprise customers will start to appreciate cloud-based backup is by the recent innovations by their existing backup software, where Amazon or other public-cloud storage platforms, are being leveraged simply as tiers of media storage. More on that in another blog post.
2. DPM also gave Microsoft a perspective that it didn’t have before – a deeper understanding of what was and wasn’t working with Microsoft’s underlying Volume Shadowcopy Service (VSS) functionality. DPM showed MS some opportunities to enhance (or fix) aspects of VSS … and those VSS enhancements benefitted every backup solution that depended on VSS.
Terri’s blog post pointed out several lessons that independent storage gateway vendors have learned or are struggling with. My guess is that the AWS Storage Gateway will give AWS similar new insights on how they can enhance S3 and the rest of the AWS technologies in a way that adds value and new opportunities for the entire ecosystem of cloud-based solution providers.
The AWS Storage Gateway is a credible offering for what its initial release is designed to do. And like most cloud-based offerings, one can expect it to be enhanced in months, not years, as customers give feedback and operational lessons are learned. As Terri points out, the AWS Storage Gateway may not be taking over the world of cloud-based storage enablement quite yet. But the AWS Storage Gateway, when seen alongside all of the other AWS offerings, shows how Amazon is continuing to evolve its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. And those evolutions are good not only to Amazon and its ever-growing AWS direct customer base, but also to the partners that will develop even more solutions based on them for the rest of us.
ESG recently authored a white paper on “DR in the Cloud“, based on where we see companies struggling with home-grown DR solutions — and how the AWS offerings can help.
To read the ESG Whitepaper on “DR in the Cloud” using AWS, click here.
Mozy has announced the public beta of its new Stash offering. The public beta is available to existing Mozy Backup customers, as an add-on capability that takes advantage of customers’ existing accounts, subscribed storage capacity, etc. In other words, it’s a great example of the convergence between backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and Online-File-Storage (OLFS).
BaaS and OLFS have a lot in common, so their convergence is natural, and frankly, almost inevitable.
They work by installing an agent on the range of consumer devices that you carry. After installation and a usually user-friendly (wizard or push-button) experience, they routinely if not near-continuously transmit changed data to the cloud.
They rely on a massive cloud-based storage architecture, whether it is self-maintained by the original vendor or leveraging a public cloud’s storage platform, e.g. Amazon.
They’re sold usually on a subscription basis, almost always with tiered offerings, based on how much storage you plan to consume
So, what is different between OLFS and BaaS?
BaaS is focused on multiple recovery points as a key design criteria, often including a definable retention period for past versions
OLFS is focused on sharing – whether that means across your varied devices, or between you and your friends/coworkers, will vary based on the OLFS offering
Some OLFS offerings do support previous versions, though its usually within the context of restoring that Word document that you just accidently overwrote — and not preserving your data for a year. And while whole-machine recovery may not be a primary design function of most OLFS, the reality is that if your machine is re-image-able from either it’s factory DVDs, a monthly backup to a USB drive, or perhaps your corporate backup solution … and your data is regularly uploaded to some OLFS cloud — then whole machine recovery really can be a fairly trivial event.
BaaS-only solutions know that that they are "backup" solutions, so sharing options aren’t typically part of the model — which makes sense.
So, how does Mozy’s Stash solution stack up?
I took the opportunity to try out both the Mozy Backup and Stash offerings on one of my home machines. The setup for backup was relatively straight forward and I found it interesting how they pre-define data types and then simply prompt you to either back them up or not. I will look closer at its BaaS capabilities in a later blog post (or ESG Lab validation) but for now, I just wanted to get it installed so that I could be one of the millions of Mozy Backup customers that could now try the Stash feature.
Stash functionality enabled pretty easily, with the standard OLFS concept of defining a root-level folder for data storage. And as exciting as it sounds, I dropped some files into it and watched my drive light and network lights start blinking away. Sure enough, by installing the same Mozy client software on my work laptop, the files were there. Yay! But let’s be clear — it is a beta of a first release in the space. I am actually an avid user of another OLFS service which has a key feature that Mozy doesn’t yet offer — sharing between users. For that reason alone, I can’t use it yet. If you don’t share data with others, is Mozy viable for you? Maybe.
Although it is ‘beta’, it isn’t fair to call their offering a ‘1.0’ — because they aren’t standing it up from scratch. Mozy has oodles of experience with what it takes to create a lightweight agent technology across a variety of consumer devices. They understand how to build and operate a cloud-based storage platform at scale. They have millions of subscribers. Some of them may be using another OLFS, and if they aren’t sharing with others, may be happy to run one less agent and pay one less monthly bill. Other Mozy subscribers may have been thinking about OLFS, and the Stash offering will be what gets them started. And don’t forget, it is still only in beta.
So, more functionality will eventually come, and like most cloud-services, incremental features will come months, not years, later. Some of Mozy’s backup users will jump on this (likely increasing their storage consumption subscription in the process) — and Mozy will invariably hear the feedback of what their install base wants vs. needs. And with Mozy’s agility, as well as their commitment to cloud-enabled storage, things can only go up.
What excites me the most is seeing examples of the convergence between BaaS and OLFS. And if Stash helps more folks to get their data into the cloud, that is goodness. Beyond the convergence, I’m also looking forward to seeing what happens with Mozy Stash 1.1 … 1.5 … 2.0.
