Entries categorized under “Deduplication”

Backup problems are supposed to be gone, right? All you have to do is throw in some disk and a good dose of deduplication and organizational backup problems will magically disappear. So while that may be true up to a point, today's newly released Information Management Health Check survey conducted by Applied Research and sponsored by Symantec reveals that organizations are failing to take into account the implications of what infinite backup retention periods mean for them long term. (read more)

Simple. Easy. Automated. Those words are used so frequently to describe product features that users have become almost universally cynical about any product's ability to actually deliver on them. So it came as a pleasant surprise to discover the number of new features that EMC NetWorker plans to introduce in 2H10 to make the management of Data Domain systems the turnkey experience that enterprise backup shops expect. (read more)

In the past two months I have probably received more calls from end-users inquiring as to what steps they should take to re-architect their backup infrastructures than I have in the past two years. Yet what I find encouraging is that they are no longer just asking me for point solutions or short term fixes. Rather they are looking for architectures that they can put in place that will solve their immediate pain points while leaving them well-positioned for the future. (read more)

Organizations have a proclivity to look at storage arrays primarily in the context of how much storage capacity do they offer. But as storage arrays add features such as deduplication and thin provisioning, storage efficiency is taking on new importance as an evaluation criteria when selecting a storage array. This is raising questions as to what role, if any, that a storage array's storage efficiency features should play in the final buying decision. (read more)

Not many individuals have ever had the opportunity to be worth $1 billion. Fewer still have had the opportunity to lose a billion dollars over the course of their lifetime. Then there are those privileged few that have both gained and lost that amount of money in just a few years. It was one of those individuals, Peter Bell, a general partner at Highland Capital, who spoke at the opening of this week's BDevent in Boston to share what he learned from that experience and how others can benefit from it. (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)

Data deduplication has exploded onto the backup scene in the last few years. But now that data deduplication has firmly established itself, new options for its deployment and implementation are presenting themselves. One such option is last week's introduction of Data Domain Boost from EMC. (read more)

This week I am spending a couple of days at Compellent's annual C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN where about 500 users, value added resellers (VARs) and Compellent sales reps are in attendance. Since a couple of years have passed since I attended the last one, I thought I would make the 6-hour drive from Omaha to Minneapolis to catch up on the latest going-ons with Compellent and gain some insight as to how they plan to recoup after their latest earnings stumble. (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)

Here is what determines how much storage a CDP product needs. CDP initially needs an allotment of storage capacity that is equal to the size of the volume on which the data resides that is being protected. This is needed so the CDP product can make a copy of all of the blocks on the production volume. However, the wild cards in how much storage the CDP product requires are based not the size of the production volume but two other variables. (read more)

It is 2010 and time to deduplicate, at least that's what 60% of the respondents in a recent IDC survey had to say. However once an enterprise has said it is going to deploy deduplication is the easy part. It gets a little tougher to find a deduplication solution that meets their diverse needs of affordability, high availability, scalability and simplicity. It is these enterprise hot buttons that the new SEPATON S2100-MS2 seeks to hit. (read more)

The introduction of disk and deduplication into the backup process over the last few years has certainly helped to minimize existing backup problems. Organizations using these technologies have found that their backup success rates now approach 100% and that they no longer have to continually troubleshoot backup problems. But while these technologies may fix existing backup problems, they relegate disk to a glorified form of tape and do not serve to fundamentally transform the recovery process. (read more)

Maybe it is just me but 2010 has, up until now, seemed pretty slow on the news front. Or maybe it is just that much of the news released did not really pique my interest. Regardless, the last two weeks a number of news items jumped out at me that I wanted to spend a little time commenting on today in my weekly Friday recap blog. (read more)

In a recent analyst conference call CommVault's VP of Marketing and Business Development, Dave West, pulled no punches about how CommVault wants enterprise organizations to view it in regards to backup modernization. While CommVault is certainly happy to assist those enterprise organizations that want to make incremental changes to their backup infrastructures, that is not who CommVault is specifically targeting. Rather CommVault is seeking out those customers and prospects that are ready to do a wholesale rip and replace of their existing data management products and go with a more modern solution. (read more)

In late January 2010 someone posted a comment in response to a blog that I wrote in the October 2009 time frame. This individual was questioning the value that an inline deduplication solution like the Exar Hifn BitWackr DR1605 provides since most of the performance bottleneck associated with deduplication is primarily in the disk I/O. (read more)

Virtualization, consolidation and servers are becoming inextricably linked in the minds of mid-sized organizations as they look to reduce data center footprints and energy consumption while increasing server hardware utilization. Yet what can get overlooked during the consolidation and virtualization of their Windows applications is the development of a corresponding storage strategy. This is where the specifics on what is needed to deliver on an appropriate storage solution for this environment become a necessity. (read more)

Considering that many enterprise organizations have numerous applications spread across many server platforms with numerous database servers on the backend, the value of decommissioning these application servers quickly becomes evident. However application retirements go beyond just the hardware and software costs. Maintaining and managing the infrastructures needed to support legacy applications takes expertise, often specialists. (read more)

Anyone who has ever witnessed a disaster knows that one of two things can happen. Either the area affected by the disaster can be devastated, never to recover; or, new life can spring up in its place. In many respect, the economic disaster that hit the entire nation and world hit the data storage industry equally hard. However the data storage industry is picking itself back up and, based upon what I saw and heard this week at The BDEvent in Palo Alto, CA, it has brought an end to one era in data storage while the dawn of another is now upon us. (read more)

I have heard it said that you cannot compare the complexity found in small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) to what is found in the "really big" enterprise shops. That is certainly true in some cases but when one starts to examine the complexity associated with backing up, recovering and managing data at the dozens of branch offices that many SMEs support, it equates to any challenge that large enterprises face. However it is this exact complexity that the new features on the Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 are designed to address. (read more)

Small, mid-sized and large enterprises are not the only ones looking to consolidate and simplify their IT management to create more cohesive management solutions. In the last few years, Symantec has been taking many of the same steps to integrate components of its Backup Exec, Enterprise Vault and NetBackup product suites to deliver solutions appropriate for the different size organizations that it serves. The progress that it has made in delivering on these ideals is reflected in today's Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 product releases. (read more)

This week it was evident everyone is getting back to work - at least those individuals who still have jobs and received something other than pink slips over the holiday break. People starting returning my phone calls and emails, PR agencies started requesting my time again for briefings and, maybe most importantly, news releases started flowing again so I have something other than 2009 recaps and 2010 trends to write about. This week three news items caught my attention: FalconStor Software's FDS 2.0 release; a cloud storage announcement from Pillar and a new term (like this industry needed any more): Disaster Proof Hardware. (read more)

Right now deduplication and replication are the two main features seen as critical to delivering on the promise of disk-based backup. But as organizations store more of their backup data to disk, they are quickly realizing that other features are required to successfully execute on the redesign of their backup infrastructures. Specifically, companies with numerous remote offices are finding that systems availability and data management cannot be overlooked in their disk-based backup redesigns and is what today's release of FalconStor's File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) 2.0 is intended to address. (read more)

An article that appeared back in 2009 on the Forbes website commented on the questions that executive management teams are asking about proposals that they are receiving from their IT departments. Their uncertainty is probably only heightened when their IT departments bring forward a proposal that recommends a seemingly new process that involves the deployment of lesser understood technologies like deduplication and replication. (read more)

Right now on Yahoo finance it is counting down what it considers the top 10 tech trends for 2010. However some of the trends that it is including in its top 10 are so broad in their definition that when it lists 'Data Centers' as its #2 trend and then identifies nearly every technology company in the space as being part of this trend, you have to question just how real this trend is? The list of what I consider the more subtle storage trends of 2010 will be a bit more specific in terms of what features, products, services and/or vendor alliances are taking place that support these theories. (read more)