SEARS® Guarantees 40:1 or better garbage to trash bag ratio!
October 9th, 2008 by 
Steven J. Schwartz
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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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Posted in Backup and Recovery, Deduplication, Start-up | 
4 Comments »
October 10th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I work for SEPATON and feel compelled to respond to your post. Let me address your key points:
1. The guarantee forces a complete change in backup paradigm.
This is simply not true. End users perform full and incremental backups of files, but Exchange and Oracle are different. In the case of Exchange, Microsoft best practices recommend a full backup of the information store nightly, and this strategy is widely adopted.
In the case of Oracle, our customers are very concerned about RTO on these critical databases, and so perform full backups. They do not perform incrementals because they do not want to extend RTOs by first having to recover the full and then roll forward the transaction logs.
2. We are somehow trying to hide and obfuscate this because we think “…our customers are stupid.” [your quote, not mine]
The terms of the guarantee are stated up front. Our customers are anything but stupid, and need to evaluate it for themselves.
Does our program have terms and conditions? Of course. Are they impossibly onerous as you suggest? Nope. If you want to see onerous conditions, check out NetApp’s VMware guarantee (http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/guarantee.html). You need to read 3 whitepapers and have a PhD to figure that one out!
October 10th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
From Microsoft’s Website:
The best strategy is to perform full online backups every day. Some people prefer to do a full backup once a week with differential backups for the rest of the week.
Best Practice and common practice are very different things, also best practice, does not equal best strategy.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/exchangeserver55/maintain/edbwp.mspx?mfr=true
As for “stupid”, I wasn’t specifically calling out SEPATON on this, I was referring to these Guarantees in general, they are so full of restrictions that are “small print” that it really does call into question our thoughts about our customers. I know our customers are smarter then to buy into these marketing ploys.
Obviously, full backups nightly will have better deduplication ratios then weekly Fulls. I was also very specific to point out that SEPATON is doing much more then relying on the backup policy, there is both compression, and I should have pointed out that there is more then just standard deduplication occurring as well.
Thank You for your comments.
October 11th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Like the 0% Financing deals offered by various Auto manufacturers do not apply to all car buyers, similarly these guarantees will not address everybody’s needs and requirements.
Why do some folks find this so hard to understand?
October 13th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Nick,
The difference is…the auto makers don’t say 0% financing guaranteed. They say 0% financing available to well qualified customers. If NetApp came out with a 50% storage savings to qualified customers I don’t think as many people would have “teased” about the program!
Thank you for visiting!
I will go on the record and say: NetApp customers who have implemented deduplication (A-SIS) have seen some great storage savings with very specific workloads and data types (those that are referenced in the Technological Reports and in the fine print of the Guarantee.
These, however, shouldn’t be the ONLY reason to switch storage infrastructure.