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     Users of NetBackup’s PureDIsk feature set may have gotten over the hump of the pain, but for the majority, they have ignored Symantec’s product because of complexity of software installation, software configuration, and performance configuration/tuning for a specific storage configuration. 

     Why does this matter?  Because today InQuinox is announcing the release of the SD3, a NetBackup PureDisk Appliance.  By announcement I mean general availability of this product.  So what does this mean for customers?  Typically, InQuinox (known for industry leading consulting services for Symantec products) is engaged to profile NetBackup installations, make recommendations for sizing and configuration of PureDisk, and ultimately contracted for the deployment and tuning of the PureDisk configuration.  While rich in consulting hours, many of the tasks are solved by the SD3 appliances.  These appliances are configured in a few different configurations (SD3-T1, SD3-T4, SD3-T32, & SD3-T96 – data sheet) based on performance and capacity requirements.  These appliances are pre-built with PureDisk installed (licensing offered via InQuinox or other sources, including Symantec), pre-configured with information from a customer’s NetBackup environment and shipped almost plug-n-play to the customer site.  With minimal onsite configuration, validation, and testing these appliances can be up and running in significantly less time then a services engagement.  The T1 and T4 versions of the appliances use captive storage configurations,  The T32 and T96 configurations are powered by ATRATO disk storage (which I’ve covered in the past).  The appliance itself is sourced as a powerful Corvalent hardware platform.  This isn’t just a “install PureDisk”  on a platform with storage play, InQuinox has put time and engineering effort into having options such as remote office solutions, ruggedized solutions, HA configurations, and scalability within the product models.

     Another great thing about this synergy of products simplifying PureDisk, is the recent announcement that PureDisk will be supported for BackUp Exec as well, which opens up a huge potential marketplace.  Claims of storage reduction via implementations of PureDisk are estimated between 40% and 90% depending on the implementation, backup policies, and application types.  For more information on PureDisk, support matrix, and features see Symantec’s website.

Updated: InQuinox Press Release: http://www.inquinox.com/media/news_release_10142009.php

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     In recent news, and in reaction to H-Ds claim 50% tire reduction announcement, SEARS® released claims that using it’s trash compactors will condense the amount of trash a given household puts into trash bags.  There are of course some limitations and requirements.   Firstly, this will be measured over 30 days.  Secondly, if you are only filling a single bag of trash a week currently, you must increase your trash output to 5x this amount as a minimum.  Lastly, you must be throwing out certain types of trash.

    I know I’m cheating here, taking my idea from before and playing it out again, but give me a break guys!  Your customers aren’t this naive!

In similar news, SEPATON released its own “quarantine”:

SEPATON guarantees that the FastStart Plus Deduplication Package will reduce the capacity of backup data at a 40:1 ratio under the following conditions: Guarantee only applies to currently GA backup applications with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 Agent, Oracle 10 and 11 using flat files or RMAN. The package must be installed and configured by a SEPATON Professional Services representative. The customer must
follow SEPATON best practices including performing full backups of applicable data at least five times per week for thirty days…

Now to be fair, SEPATON, is doing much more then just just compression, but requiring customers to go from traditional back-up practices of weekly full backups, to daily full backups is NOT a fair requirement.  I am beginning to question the marketing firms and marketing teams that are working on these programs.  There is a time in our industry that it feels like the vendors believe that our customers are stupid…that’s right I said it.  I would like to hear from customers, end-users, and IT professionals on this…is anyone buying into these marketing programs at the worker levels?  Or are these programs being pushed on your by executives that don’t understand technology?

Related articles:

• Sepaton’s tape library de-duplication guarantee
• Dell’s disk-to-disk backup box
• Pillar pumps performance in Axiom array

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Local and Remote Data Protection (NOT a RAID discussion)

     Ever since building out the BCDR service at StorageTek, I’ve been extremely interested in replication technologies.  Off-site data storage is nothing new for IT infrastructure, however, how various vendors accomplish this and the definitions around those technologies.  I’m going to define technology terms ranging from real-time data transfer through traditional tape vaulting.  Why do i even bother?  Mainly I think there is a knowledge gap in this area among end-users, including impacts of site-to-site networking requirements.

     The following are some basic general types of get data off-site, I am listing these in RPO(recovery Point Objective) order, from least data loss to most potential data loss.

1. Synchronous Mirroring
2. Asynchronous Mirroring
3. Delta-Based Replication
4. Tape/Disk Vaulting/FedEx Truck Method

     I will define and explain my interpretation of these technologies, and some of the caveats.

Read the rest of this entry »

     In the past several months I’ve written a couple times about Deduplication, mainly in regards to my feeling that it is a feature and not a product, and more recently looking at NetApp’s implementation of A-SIS.  I also mentioned the announcement of a newer blog DEDUPEMATTERS.com, which is run by Data Domain, here.

     It isn’t that I’ve been ahead of the curve with Deduplication, it just continues to come up as a checkbox mark in every storage discussion.  Why?  Mainly because of the exponential growth of storage, and storage retention requirements for both public and private companies (please ignore the current economy turn down in the United States, and while this has an impact short term, I believe long term projections will still be accurate).

     So where am I going with this train of thought?  I honestly believe, as I’ve stated before, that Deduplication is a feature, and primarily a feature of backup storage/suites and server applications.  This is a personal belief for the following reasons:

• The act of Deduplication on a data set, in both online and post-processing activities, is a compute and storage intensive process.
• The act of data re-hydration, or re-duplication, is also an intensive process, but mostly can have a storage capacity ballooning effect.
• A data set which has been through Deduplication forces data into a consolidated format, which, in certain instances can cause disk hot spots and data access performance to be lowered.
• Current methodologies for Deduplication are based only on capacity savings, and not the important of data access, nor application performance.

     What does this all mean regarding features vs. products?  How does this apply to your implementation of Deduplication?  What does this mean for Deduplication of primary storage volumes?  Let’s explore this:

Product vs. Feature

     I would like to make a parallel here to Storage Virtualization.  Some time ago, there were a plethora  of “Heterogeneous” Storage Virtualization products/appliances.  The biggest issues with these products/appliances was a very common IT dilemma; what I call the IT Triangle!  There is no way to get ALL three without on of the corners suffering.  If you want the highest performing, and highest resiliency, you end up with the HIHGEST COST.  So in order for Virtualization products/appliances to stay cost effective and provide “heterogenous” storage support, they sacrificed performance and/or reliability.  So the market dictated, that this level of functionality should be based within storage devices, and that "the flexibility” of true heterogeneous support would become less of a priority.

     Deduplication products/appliances typically have the same problem, however, what the target is that they are deduplicating will have much different requirements.  I will touch upon this shortly.  So, the real question is, what are the sacrifices you are willing to make with a deduplication product/appliance in your environment?  Are you willing to par extra for an additional product in the IT infrastructure for deduplication of the backup stream?  Do you want to run your NAS environment on a 3rd party solution in order to take advantage of block based deduplication, when file level deduplication might be built into your current file serving solution?  Would you be willing to place an in-data-path appliance between your application servers and your primary storage in order to leverage block based deduplication, knowing that it may have significant storage savings, however, at a cost to application performance?

How Deduplication is used in Environments Today!

     YOU ARE ALREADY USING DEDUPLICATION TECHNOLOGIES!!!!!  You might not even know it!  There are several technologies that ARE Deduplication technologies present is MOST datacenters today.

1. Are you running Exchange 2000, 2003 or 2007?
   • Guess what, Exchange has Single Instance Storage built-in for email messages and attachments already.
2. Are you utilizing Windows Storage Servers?
   • Well starting with Windows Storage Server 2003 RC2, there is file level Deduplication within volumes and set per volume.
3. Are you utilizing any pointer based snapshot technology within your storage system, or VSS within Windows?
   • Once again, this is a form of data Deduplication, specifically around data protection.  Storage arrays that utilize a pointer based snapshot technology allow virtual backup copies of a volume set, this is the case when utilizing VSS within windows as well, just handled at the OS level rather then the disk storage level.  (some storage providers can utilize VSS functionality to use disk based snapshot technology to take OS and Application consistent snapshots at the hardware layer, rather then the default software layer.
4. Do you utilize COTS applications running on a Database?
   • Many database applications utilize record linking in order to minimize multiple copies of the same data rows/columns/table spaces.

     So what do the above examples show?  Application/OS based deduplication which is a feature of a larger application set, not a product unto itself.  Primary storage features that over several years have become relatively mainstream features. (note:  NOT ALL Snapshots are created equal!).

     There are also deduplication features available for most backup packages for helping reduce the footprint of the backup environment.

Deduplication of Primary Storage Volumes

     So Primary Storage Volumes seem to be the next logical discussion point.  Catching up on my questions earlier, virtualization appliances gave heterogeneous storage support, and cross platform data services, however, at a performance degradation, as well as with additional cost.  Most customers I’ve come across in recent years are so concerned with performance, that detailed application assessments, and deep technical dives into storage performance was required in order to drive purchase decisions.  The number of saved perfmon exports, and IOSTAT redirects that I’ve looked at an analyzed through tools sets continues to grow.  So, as Stephen Foskett recently put, ”deduplication is not yet ready for prime time in primary storage applications”, it is however, readily present and ready for production use in other areas.

     So, high IO, and low latency requirements for storage need to be seriously looked at as applications that aren’t “storage hardware feature” ready for deduplication.  Applications can be more intelligent typically about deduplication, minimizing performance impact for a very specific data set, which just hasn’t been seen yet in the storage industry’s feature set.

Final Thoughts

     So I am going to contradict myself.  Several years ago I was actually a very big fan of Virtualization appliances, they were a non-perfect stop-gap for the storage industry.  My customers wanted strong storage services, like Snapshots, site-to-site replication/mirroring/archiving, and heterogeneous storage pooling.  They were willing to make an investment in products like SANSynphony, IPStor, and SVC, in order to gain an agnostic storage approach, re-deploy older storage, and leverage cheaper featureless storage arrays.  The storage vendors caught up however, and began offering better performance with the same feature sets, and, in general, the virtualization appliance went away.  I believe the same is occurring with deduplication appliances.  This is a good stop-gap until the application providers and storage vendors come up with better native deduplication technologies and support.  So yes, while I STRONGLY feel that Deduplication is a feature of either applications or storage hardware, for the time being deduplication appliances will continue to be prevalent, just a stop-gap though!

Looks like Data Domain has decided to break the Blog silence recently. I think of the three posts available the second I find most interesting: “Storage Vendor Stages of Grief About Deduplication”. I think coming from a storage vendor that grief is a huge overstatement. It is a funny way to pick on companies with 100x your current revenue stream, clearly they have been doing something right!

Let’s start out with the vendors position against someone like Data Domain (big storage didn’t start this fight by the way!):

1. Denial – Deduplication doesn’t work and/or put data at risk.
2. Anger – Find a 3rd party product to fill the gap.
3. Bargaining- Lie about deployments and market share.
4. Depression – Cry about choosing the wrong 3rd party products.
5. Acceptance – Maybe DD is hiring.

This is of course a very shorted version of what was blogged, but then of course, it is so far off so who cares. This is how I see the reality of Dedup.

1. Denial – Wow cool functionality, will greatly gain market share in the backup to disk space. Wait, now what on earth are they doing claiming they are a fully functioning NFS and CIFS production disk vendor? They don’t even have an HA configuration, but are telling customers that isn’t a concern.
2. Anger – Innovators Dilemma, yes companies came up with a new product/feature. It is really a shame we are such a big vendor that we can’t really come up with quick new exciting ways to bring those types of products to development in a timely enough fashion. (*****See bullet 5 as well)
3. Bargaining – Only one vendor in the market lies about market share by giving away product to existing customers and then claiming it is new revenue and now they are the market leader. The name they are called rhymes with MetCrap. They’ve done it with iSCSI (completely fabricated numbers) and now they are doing it with SIS. Please do NOT lump all storage vendors into the same group. We are NOT all created equal.
4. Depression – OEMing products is a great way to get familiar with a new product idea with little investment. If the product is that great then see bullet #5, if not, no harm no foul, drop the 3rd party product and find something else to sell. Finally, sometimes and OEM agreement is just a gap measure while internal development is occurring.
5. Acceptance – If a start-up or up-start company has a great product, buy them. Acquisitions occur all the time, some work out really well, some don’t.

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