Entries categorized under “Virtualization”

It's hard to talk about data center consolidation without the topic of server virtualization and VMware popping up somewhere in the conversation. Nearly every company I talk to is testing or using VMware somewhere in-house and looking to expand its adoption of VMware in 2009. But companies may still start and stop their virtualization conversation with enterprise servers. Despite the server sprawl that most companies are looking to deal with, a more insidious problem that they also recognize that they need to deal with is corporate desktop management. Companies may have thousands or even tens of thousands of desktops in-house and while the hardware costs for these desktops have become fairly nominal, the soft costs of configuring and supporting them mount. Add in the hidden costs of accessing and searching the data on these desktops should companies find themselves subject to an eDiscovery request and the costs of desktop management can quickly escalate to match or even exceed that of server management. (read more)

Grid computing is starting to appear in some unlikely places. It is easy to assume that grid computing appears primarily in the world of academia or high tech corporate IT engineering labs. In these environments, computer scientists typically have the time and expertise to engineer complicated, high performance, low cost computing solutions that can perform tasks like mapping out the human DNA or identifying possible new sites to drill for oil. But applying grid computing to address a low-tech problem like backup and recovery? That almost seems like a misnomer. (read more)

It is easy to understand why disk-based backup solutions such as Quantum's DXi Series are growing in popularity as a primary target for backups. Disk shortens backup times, expedites recoveries and removes the inconsistent results that tape delivers when used as a primary backup target. However the difficulties that arise with using disk as a primary backup target are less intuitive. Disk solves the immediate pain of backup but creates other less intuitive, longer term data management issues. (read more)

It is no secret that Overland Storage (Nasdaq: OVRL) endured a period of declining sales and management shake-ups in 2007 and 2008. A new CEO, VP of worldwide sales and VP of marketing in the past year indicate the company is trying to right itself from a leadership perspective. These changes provide insight as to where Overland Storage intends to go as it starts its makeover. Yet this transition will be far from easy as traditional technologies like tape libraries and drives are now taking secondary roles in organizational backup processes. Because of this, Overland Storage needs to make more than just leadership changes but move disk-based storage and deduplication products to the forefront of its product strategy. (read more)

David: The Data Collectors can do an automated discovery of new VMs by connecting to either individual VMware ESX servers, XenSource servers or a Virtual Management Center, which stores and organizes data about physical hosts and VMs. The Data Collector provides a GUI that displays the new VMs that require backup so all an administrator needs to do is select the VM from the Televaulting management interface to initiate backups on those VMs. (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)

"You know things are tough when companies finally stop throwing capacity at their infrastructure problems and start thinking about how they provision and allocate storage." Those are the sentiments that Craig Nunes, 3PAR's VP of Marketing, expressed in a recent conversation I had with him in regards to how the economy is affecting 3PAR's business. In short, the economy is not affecting 3PAR badly at all. (read more)

Configuring, allocating and then managing storage capacity on storage systems has been to date been a very tenuous proposition. To address this, thin provisioning has recently emerged as a way for storage systems to only reserve the storage capacity that is actually needed. By monitoring when data is written to a storage system, it eliminates the need to allocate extra, unneeded storage capacity for an application. In so doing, thin provisioning provides a more efficient and cost effective approach to storage capacity management. However to date thin provisioning has been the exclusive domain of a few NAS and SAN based storage systems. (read more)

In the face of these fundamental shifts among corporate data centers in server data protection and virtualization, data protection software needs to do more than just adapt. It needs to embrace backup-to-disk and server virtualization in order to transform data protection software into an information recovery platform. That is exactly what today's 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting brings to the table in the following ways: (read more)

Any time one looks at midrange backup appliances, the appliances are almost always NAS based. When configured this way, the backup appliance is attached to the local LAN it appears as a filer server to the backup server and files are backed up to a folder on that appliance. Though I initially called to speak to Overland Storage's Senior Product Manager, Jeff Graham, about REO's Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) technology, I first wanted to get some clarification on why Overland Storage's REO-series appliances are configured as Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) rather than as a NAS-based appliance. (read more)

I apologize to those of you who expected this SNW recap last Thursday or Friday. Wednesday ending up being busier than I expected and anyone who was flying last week knows about the challenges associated with air travel due to all of the grounded American flights, spring break, and ATA going bankrupt. Though I left on Thursday flying out on Midwest Airlines, the Midwest flight before mine to Milwaukee was canceled and my flight to Kansas City was delayed an hour due to a series of nasty storms going through the Midwest. (read more)

I put file virtualization in the same category as block storage virtualization: they are both technologies in which businesses usually see the value but have a hard time pulling the trigger to make virtualization technologies a reality. The reason that businesses tend to hesitate in acquiring virtualization technologies in whatever form is that it requires hard dollars to solve what are perceived by businesses as soft dollar problems. (read more)

Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation Suite has come a long way from its humble beginnings virtualizing disk storage devices. The multitude of factors that it needs to account for and manage in today's complex data centers is staggering: clustering, multipathing, multiple operating systems and storage systems, and SCSI-3 persistent reservation bits are just some of the base line features it needs to manage. The question is, does Symantec's latest 5.1 release of Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows still merit consideration in today's data centers? (read more)

Using the full VM backup, there are no choices of file type when doing recoveries; the Televaulting DS-Client backs up and manages the VM as a full image so companies can only recover the entire VM image. When doing these backups, the Televaulting DS-Client only backs up the VMware-specific files associated with a specific VM. Conversely a guest VM backup acts like a normal backup and treats the VM as it does any other server that is not virtualized. Therefore it has all of the normal backup and recovery options such as application awareness and the ability to perform selective backups of specific databases, emails and file systems. (read more)

The point is that to succeed in the SRM space as an independent software vendor that does not tie the software purchase to the hardware, you need to deliver three things: (1) a great product; (2) great value, and (3) a genuine commitment to develop and evolve the product to meet customer's needs. One would think those points would be obvious but I believe a major reason that many SRM products failed on their first go-round was it seemed vendors were more interested in selling half-baked software and getting bought out by larger vendors than they were in providing products that worked, provided value out of the box and then delivered value to customers on a long term basis. (read more)

VMware comes with more than its fair share of "gotchas" for the uninitiated and software licensing costs for VMware VMs are one "gotcha" that may sneak up on unsuspecting companies. Asigra Televaulting's capacity-based licensing model that is based on the size of the backup data store after it is globally deduplicated doesn't really get any better from a cost and management perspective. Since backup software is typically viewed as an expense by companies anyway, this licensing model ensures all data remains protected while adding minimal costs to the corporate bottom line. (read more)

Asigra Televaulting's key value proposition is that it does not require administrators to install an agent on each VM. This is especially important in the new virtual world. Using Asigra Televaulting, its DS-Client automatically discovers all of the VMs on a VMware server. Once detected, the DS-Client displays the complete VMware installation tree (the physical server, the virtual machine/templates and each VM's directories and files) to the administrator. (read more)

Companies have a love-hate relationship with VMware. What companies are coming to realize is that introducing VMware into their environment needs to change their entire paradigm of how they manage servers - from the applications running on them to the data they protect. In the case of data protection, the change is even more extreme. Enterprise companies can not and should not expect their existing version of backup to work well in this new virtual world as it was designed to work from a totally different premise. This new data protection paradigm is what Asigra's Televaulting is designed to address. (read more)

To say that enterprise end-users have, over the years, become jaded to vendor claims that their products can protect heterogeneous environments is an understatement. Supporting the mix of Windows, Netware, Linux, Unix and VMware operating system platforms found in most enterprise environments is not a trivial task. So when Asigra promises that its Televaulting software can meet these enterprise requirements using its agentless architecture, the end-user skepticism barometer in me climbs a couple of notches. (read more)