Entries categorized under “Deduplication”

Most VARs who have had success selling Data Domain systems over the last couple of years are feeling a bit uncomfortable right now: EMC has announced its official take-over of Data Domain. VARs have made a good living on Data Domain, contributing to Data Domain's success as having one of the best-selling, fastest-growing deduplication storage systems in the market. VARs are now feeling vulnerable to EMC's goodwill - or probable lack thereof. (read more)

Maybe it has always been this way, but when a vendor hosts a customer event, it always seems that you (Mr. Customer) must pay to go and to learn about their (Mr. Vendor's) product. To me, this has always seemed somewhat backwards. You (Mr. Customer) pay a whole bunch of money for their product in the first place, then another 15 - 20% annually for support, then more for training and then, to add insult to injury, they make you pay for airfare, hotel and a registration fee to attend their annual customer event. (read more)

"We were getting to the point where we had more and more data and less and less time to back it up", says Mike Fishell, Director of Information Technology for Hay House. "And then there were the increasing expenses of doing the backups. Between time, money and storage space, we needed a new solution." (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)

In the last few weeks I have had conversations with users and consultants in the US and Europe regarding the new role that data deduplication will play in enterprise data centers. Needless to say, everyone is talking about it, many are starting to implement it and data deduplication's role as a permanent fixture in reducing backup data stores is all but assured. But what is more interesting is that these individuals are starting to look beyond just using data deduplication as a means to solve their backup problems. (read more)

Personally, if someone told me that they could reduce my database storage footprint by 50% I'd begin to worry about data quality within my database. Reducing the storage requirements for databases, through deduplication, really just puts a Band-Aid on this problem and doesn't address the real issues. (read more)

Delivering software specific solutions in the form of appliances have turned niche software applications such as deduplication into some of today's hottest mainstream technologies. But independent software vendors (ISVs) can still be fearful that offering their software in the form of an appliance can rob from existing revenue streams and create new support costs. In this final segment of a 3-part series, independent consultant to Bell Micro, Tom Baylark, discusses how offering software on an appliance can broaden software's appeal without increasing and even possibly lower ISV costs. (read more)

582,226. That's the number of individuals laid off at America's largest companies as of July 10, 2009, according to the Layoff Tracker on the Forbes website since November 1, 2008. And, depending on what date you are reading this blog, that number has probably gone up. But what this number can not quantify is how layoffs are forcing the individuals left behind within these Fortune 500 organizations to cope with increasing workloads and nowhere is that problem more acute than within IT. (read more)

Many deduplication technologies attack the storage optimization angle at the tail end of the data management process: when it is transmitted by the backup software to a target storage device. However, some storage providers believe that as the benefits of deduplication are better understood by organizations, deduplication technology will rapidly move upstream such that it will become a core feature in more primary, value-tier and cloud storage offerings. (read more)

Moving aging, stale or infrequently accessed data from high cost, high performance production storage to lower cost, high capacity value tiers of storage can be easy to justify in enterprise organizations. However explaining the value proposition of archiving this same data in small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is sometimes less clear-cut as they may already store aging emails and file data on low cost local hard drives, inexpensive network file servers and even with Internet cloud storage providers. (read more)

Over the last few years, it is understandable why Symantec Backup Exec users may have felt a little unloved as deduplication has proliferated throughout the backup space. While NetBackup, its data protection product for the enterprise space, was getting all sorts of deduplication capabilities, the best that Backup Exec users could say was, "Hey, we can deduplicate data using 3rd party deduplication appliances." (read more)

The pending acquisition of Data Domain by either EMC or NetApp is going to have a ripple effect across the storage industry with some providers more affected by it than others. Numerous backup providers have gone on the record and told me that they are confident they can compete against Data Domain regardless of who acquires them. However, Permabit has a bigger view. It sees Data Domain's acquisition as the catalyst to the spread of deduplication beyond just disk-to-disk (D2D) backup into primary storage. (read more)

Most organizations simply do not like to think about their backup problems. To many their backup problems feel so overwhelming and the steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. (read more)

One might think the data protection world has gone mad. After all of the coverage over the last few years about the "goodness" of disk and the "evils" of tape, a recent announcement from Spectra Logic that it had entered into a new OEM agreement with Symantec ran counter to this disk-based backup craze. What specifically caught my eye in this announcement was that Spectra Logic was now bundling solutions that would integrate Symantec's NetBackup and Backup Exec software solutions with either its disk or its tape library products. (read more)

"We need cheaper and simpler backups and recoveries for our remote and branch offices." That statement is repeated more often by mid-size companies as they seek solutions that take the pain and management overhead associated with backup and recovery out of their remote offices without breaking the budget or requiring heroic efforts to implement. This is exactly the type of scenario that the recently announced DXi2500-D appliance and version 3.0 of Quantum Vision™ Software from Quantum is designed to address. (read more)

It's time to start thinking ahead. Over the next 60 - 120 days someone is going to acquire Data Domain - be it EMC, NetApp or some other suitor that may yet emerge. That means Data Domain, today's leading mid-market deduplicating disk-based appliance player, will be changing its colors. To discuss how and if ExaGrid can take advantage of this opportunity, I recently met with ExaGrid's CEO, Bill Andrews, to discuss this development, his perspective on the deduplication market as a whole and how ExaGrid stands to benefit (or lose) from Data Domain's acquisition. (read more)

If one didn't know any better, one would think that deduplicating backup data is going to solve all of IT's backup pains. The current train of thought goes something along the lines of "Plug in a deduplicating appliance, point the backup software at the new appliance and, Voila!, the backup problems are solved." The only problem with that viewpoint is that deduplicating appliances alone do not solve equally pressing corporate data management problems and may even create new backup and data management challenges along the way. (read more)

This morning's news that NetApp has over-called EMC in what has become a bidding war for Data Domain is not a surprise: if you believe the projections cited by Joe Tucci yesterday, Data Domain's expected 2010 revenue of $480M means that both NetApp and EMC could justify a higher acquisition price - and we're likely to see a few more bidding rounds. However, the real question of interest in this war isn't the eventual winning bid, but rather which will be the winning bidder. In short, which of the two is the more desirable for the storage industry, its reseller channels, and its customers? (read more)

Normally I refrain from immediately jumping in the fray when major announcements occur in the storage industry. This is in part because much of the initial news is often speculation with insufficient facts to support any meaningful conclusions. However the announcement yesterday that EMC and not NetApp may be the likely acquirer of Data Domain is of a little bit different nature since the future of Data Domain has now been up in the air for a few weeks. (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)

By now most enterprise backup users have heard about Symantec's new Open Storage (OST) API that was included as part of the Veritas NetBackup 6.5 release in August 2007. However the full benefits of OST are still largely unknown mostly because so few users are taking advantage of them. Now that more systems have added this feature, Symantec recently held a round table discussion during which it shared some of the progress that has occurred around OST with one early adopter on the call sharing a pretty amazing story about the performance gains that he has seen in his production environment using OST. (read more)

Last Friday, May 8, 2009, the latest unemployment figures were released by the US Bureau of Labor and it was not a pretty sight with US unemployment rates reaching 8.9% in April 2009. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Granted, a lot of individuals are now looking for work but I also speak to a lot of IT staff who are still employed that now need to get their job done plus do the jobs of the individuals who were let go. These individuals need more integrated solutions that require less time to manage, not more. In that vein, the announcement that the Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) 8.0 will continue to be powered by CommVault (now in more ways than one) should be welcomed by enterprise organizations that need a robust and integrated data management and protection solution that extends across both hardware and software platforms. (read more)

Applied Research recently surveyed 400 companies with 1000 or more employees and uncovered that 12% of them found that there is no way that their business could survive another 24 months without buying more storage. Conversely, 15% said they could go "cold turkey" without buying any more storage capacity for that same period of time. But the majority of companies (over 70%) are unsure if they need more storage capacity and, if they do, what tier of storage capacity they need. This uncertainty around what to do next probably explains the recent increases in storage utilization that companies have experienced in the last six (6) months as well as the renewed interest that companies are expressing in better managing their existing storage capacity. (read more)

Recently Kelly Polanski (another DCIG analyst) and I had a rather lengthy discussion about the value of keeping archive and backup data on disk versus tape long term. We were both in agreement that using disk in some form as an initial backup target makes sense in most environments but as we started to debate the merits of keeping data on disk versus tape long term, the issue can get more cloudy. While DCIG has previously argued that eDiscovery is becoming a more compelling reason to keep archive and/or backup data on disk long term, the concerns we had centered on the fact that some disk-based archival and backup storage systems can become as problematic as tape. (read more)

STOP BUYING STORAGE!!! If there is any one dictate that organizations are following right now in this current economic crisis then "Stop buying storage" would have to be it. Aside from anecdotal evidence that organizations were buying too much storage capacity last year, the first solid evidence that organizations were overbuying came out last fall in Symantec's annual "State of the Data Center" survey uncovered that storage utilization had actually dropped from ~60% utilization in 2008 to closer to 50% in 2007 even though storage purchases had increased. Since then, new survey results show that organizations still plan to buy more storage but it also appears that they are doing a better job of utilizing the storage capacity they have. (read more)