Entries categorized under “Data Reduction”

Enterprise backup has changed significantly in the last decade with disk-based backup and deduplication contributing largely to that shift. But as array-based snapshots emerge as the next big wave in how data protection is done, organizations should not assume that a choice between array-based snapshots and disk-based backup looms. Rather, array-based snapshots and disk-based backup are complementary technologies that change the decision from being "one or the other" to "how to make them work better together." (read more)

Many SMBs are interested in moving beyond virtualization's upfront consolidation and cost reduction benefits to also achieving improved availability, data protection and business continuity for their applications. But to date the costs and technical complexities of pursuing those goals have held many of them back. VMware's recent vSphere 5.1 Data Protection release changes that as VMware leverages EMC's deep backup and recovery expertise to address these specific SMB needs. (read more)

Inline deduplication data storage solutions provider GreenBytes, Inc. recently released a new high-availability (HA), globally optimized solid-state drive (SSD) storage array solution called Solidarity that is garnering a lot of attention. Solidarity offers inline real-time deduplication and compression via a dual-controller unit outfitted entirely with SSD storage. The buzz over Solidarity is in large part because of its 200,000-plus IOPS performance--with deduplication and compression enabled. (read more)

EMC has seen that organizations spend approximately $4 billion annually on backup and recovery software yet still struggle to fully realize the full value of this investment. To close this gap EMC has done a substantial amount of work over the last couple of years to integrate its Avamar, NetWorker and Data Domain solutions. The end result is new flexibility for its channel partners to configure these individual products in various combinations so they may be deployed and function as a single, logical solution in small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). (read more)

When it comes to implementing any form of data reduction (compression or deduplication) on primary storage, many companies are still reticent to do so. So it was with some interest that I spoke to Mike Power, the CEO of Neuxpower, whose company is having success in not just delivering data reduction of files on primary storage but doing so leveraging lossy technology. (read more)

How target-based deduplication solutions are implemented going forward may have just been permanently altered after this week's announcement from EMC. While EMC simultaneously announced a number of new Data Domain features, its implementation of global deduplication in the GDA through its heightened integration with backup software changes some assumptions as to how one should think about target-based data deduplication architectures going forward. (read more)

These days it seems that all someone has to do is use the word "deduplication" in conjunction with a data protection product and that data protection product magically looks "better". But what organizations have to be careful to do is not allow deduplication to color their view of what they hope to accomplish with the implementation of disk-based data protection. Rather organizations need to look at data protection from a different viewpoint that it is not tainted by deduplication and allows them to fully leverage the flexibility that disk-based backup provides. (read more)

While attending SNW last week and receiving a briefing from WhipTail Technologies CTO James Candelaria, Bob Farkaly, Director of Marketing for Exar's Storage System Products, was never far away. Because of the brevity of my meeting with Candelaria, I never really had a chance to formally talk with Farkaly at the show and connect all of the dots between Exar and WhipTail, other than to assume some component of Exar was an integral component of WhipTail's Racerunner solid state storage appliance. (read more)

Every week I talk to a lot of people within the storage industry - end users, other analysts, resellers, public relations, CEOs, storage engineers, etc. While none of the news I pick up is necessarily enough to substantiate a blog on its own, when aggregated it becomes interesting and noteworthy. In fact, I was talking to Don Jennings at Lois Paul and Partners (LPP) about this yesterday and he suggested that I weekly post a blog that recaps what I hear and do on a weekly basis. Since Friday's are typically a slow day during the summer months and anyone who is anyone is always looking to cut out a little early on Fridays anyway, I thought I'd give everyone a reason to check out the DCIG website before they do. (read more)

Determining backup performance has consistently been extremely difficult for customers to rationalize, seeing as there is no real meter or benchmark to look at. Just take a second and think of all the moving parts inside your backup and recovery environment (media servers, clients, databases, email, network, SAN, disk, tape, offsite vaults) - you name it, there is a laundry list of things to look at when trying to determine accurate performance metrics. (read more)

I have made no secret about my skepticism of using dual controller architectures for inline deduplication, specifically at the enterprise level. My concern was that the workloads in enterprise backup environments would essentially overwhelm the capacity of just using two controllers and negatively impact backup jobs. However a recent briefing I had with Data Domain's VP of Product Management, Brian Biles, has started to change my perspective as to why doing inline deduplication using dual controller architectures is becoming a more viable option for enterprise environments. (read more)

Most businesses small and large have many IT needs but one that they continue to focus on as they move into a completely paperless world is data protection and, more specifically, data recovery. They know their current in-house backup and recovery processes are often less than adequate so when they ask hard questions like, "How long can I afford to be without my data?" and "What does losing that data mean to the company and the company's public reputation?", they don't like the answers. But what IT managers are surprised to learn as they look to move to a SaaS offering based on a cloud-based computing architecture for their backup and recovery services, they find there are many options from which to choose. (read more)

Today's release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy. (read more)

The STN-6000 Series resides in the data path on corporate LANs between production servers and corporate file servers and compresses data stored on the corporate file servers. While it supports any file server that does CIFS or NFS traffic (which is pretty much all file servers) and is available in models suitable for departments, organizations that are using enterprise network filers like the EMC Celerra, HP StorageWorks 9100 or NetApp FAS are likely going to see the greatest benefit. The simple reason is that organizations need to generate enough savings in capacity to justify the cost of introducing the 6000 Series into their environment. (read more)

For the vast majority of the IT Directors and CIOs one of the more elusive questions that that they need to answer is, "Will the useful life of the infrastructure I just acquired match up to my depreciation cycle?" This is a slippery financial slope that anyone in IT management has to constantly be concerned about. If the useful life estimate is three years of depreciation and the equipment lasts only two, then you and your company are stuck with an extra year of depreciation on the books, as well as an extra year of maintenance you didn't really need. Conversely, if it lasts four years, you end up depreciating too much up front and not extending the depreciation out over the appropriate period of time. (read more)

Companies sometimes assume that they must continue to use legacy archival techniques for retaining their critical intellectual property and business data. Based upon my experience, when developing new and more up-to-date archival strategies for organizations, tape and optical can no longer be viewed as the primary media for archival data. (read more)

One of the more interesting conversations I had was with John Martin, VP of Product Management with Riverbed Technology. For those of you unfamiliar with Riverbed, its Steelhead® appliances provides WAN acceleration to improve application performance across corporate WANs. As part of the underlying secret sauce in these appliances, Riverbed uses compression and deduplication technologies (among others) to accelerate application performance. That information is fairly well known. What is not so well known is that it has seen instances where it has improved the data reduction rates by 30 - 70% of data that was already deduplicated, and it has specifically seen these results when testing with Data Domain's appliances. (read more)

When you really look into the data that your organization is archiving, there is usually a good reason for the business to retain that data, otherwise why would it be archived at all? Placing that data on a system designed and built from the ground up to be an archival repository is probably a really good idea. (read more)

The enterprise data center continues to evolve, driven by ever-growing amounts of data and new demands for data availability - local and remote. These demands are driving companies to identify alternatives to existing data protection methods with deduplicating disk-based storage systems, such as Quantum's DXi Series, becoming a preferred backup target. However deduplicating data is only half the equation. To fully deliver on enterprise data protection, companies need efficient, cost-effective options so they can move this deduplicated data off-site for long term compliance and disaster recovery, or centralize and consolidate data from remote offices. (read more)

Deduplication is currently one of the hottest topics in data protection but it takes more than one form. The CommVault® Simpana® software suite implements deduplication as a Single Instance Store (SIS). In this iteration, SIS deduplicates archived and backed up files at the file level and then only stores one occurrence of the file. In part 2 of this interview series with CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, Simon Taylor, elaborates on how Simpana leverages SIS for information search and data mobility as well as how this approach complements block-based deduplication approaches found on certain disk-based storage solutions. (read more)

One would think that at some point organizations would reach the tipping point for storage consumption and that year-over-year storage capacity growth rates of 30%, 50%, 100% or more would come to an end, or at least slow down. If so, it hasn't occurred yet and, if anything, it shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future. Nowhere is this more evident than with the amount of data that companies need to archive and retain. (read more)

As the deduplication debates rage on, it is easy to forget that the debate occurs on many fronts. The debate that tends to receive the most attention is on which method of deduplication is better, "inline" or "post-processing", as it pertains to its use by disk-based backup appliances. However in the "Which is the best deduplication?" debate, an angle that tends to get overlooked is the one between file-based, such as is used by the CommVault® Simpana® software suite, and block-based deduplication. (read more)

Backup to disk is now seen as "The" solution for any company looking to solve its backup problems. Factor in deduplication as part of the disk-based backup solution and it is easy for companies to believe that they are well on their way to solving their backup problems. To a certain degree, that's true. Introducing disk almost always solves the immediate corporate pain of failed backups while shortening their backup windows. In fact, I am only aware of a few, isolated instances where that is not the case. (read more)

However as companies move towards archiving data on disk-based storage systems, you can't just always build bigger buildings or knock down walls. If anything, companies want to store more data in a smaller footprint. Making it more complicated, companies are creating exponentially more data than they were 10, 5 and even 2 years ago and keeping it for longer periods of time. Factor in mobile devices that manipulate existing data and create new data and the increasing use of video in corporations and the result is millions, billions and even trillions of file-based data elements that create thousands of terabytes of data. (read more)

One of the more agonizing choices that some companies face when looking to implement the same deduplication scheme across the enterprise is quantifying which version of deduplication to use: inline or post-processing. From a purist's viewpoint, inline (deduplicating data as it is ingested) is sometimes viewed as the best approach since data is deduplicated immediately as it is ingested. (read more)