Paradigm Perturbations
Once upon a time (about 18 months ago actually) data protection was considered one of the most boring areas of the storage market. If ever there was an area ripe for change (in fact, ripe for an entire paradigm shift), it was backup. Well, ask and ye shall receive. Data protection is now the most dynamic area in storage today.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll confine this discussion to just backup (although there’s a lot happening in replication too). First, let’s start with tape. For most companies, tape now comes in two very distinct flavors: real (the old fashioned kind) and virtual (really a disk library). For the most part, the virtual kind of tape is eventually written out to real tape for vaulting (as well as costs and long term storage) purposes. Secondly, there’s deduplication. Deduplication comes in many flavors, but the net effect is that less data is stored (sometimes, less data is moved over the wire as well). Deduplication is complicated because not all data de-dups well. It’s good to know which data does and which data doesn’t (by the way, this often depends on the deduplication solution being used). Thirdly, there’s virtualization. Now, virtualization is not a data protection technology, however, it is the impetus behind this inflection point for backing up data. Virtualization basically destroys the old fashioned “back everything up to tape every night” backup strategy. Why? For starters, take the most I/O intensive process in your whole IT operation, backup, and layer it on top of the worst technology available for I/O performance, virtualization. Also, in a virtualizaed environment, there is a lot more data because there are a lot more servers. Additionally this data has a ton of redundancy. Lastly, virtual servers raise a huge number of configuration issues. It’s not as simple as the old days when a server was really a server, and it was backed up to a physical tape. If you don’t get this right, recovery can be unbelievably fun (e.g., sorting through tapes to figure out what data was where on a given day) (NOT!).
Enter Data Protection Management (DPM)…
DPM has been one of the fastest growing sectors in storage software for all the reasons stated above. Put another way, backup is: too expensive, too risky and too hard to properly manage. These are the problems that DPM solves. Most DPM products are focused on backup/recovery today, however this is changing rapidly. Vendors in the space are hearing from their customer that they to manage the entire stack of data protection technologies including replication as simply, cheaply and with as little risk as possible. Fundamentally, customers are telling me that they want to be able to apply one service level to critical production data, another to email and a thrid to less important generic user data. These SLA’s cover everything from recovery time objectives (RTO) to retention periods. Customers want to be able to leverage old and new technologies (traditional tape backup and deduplication for example) to create an efficient, cost-effective data protection environment that meets their business requirements for availability. Using DPM, you not only guarantee efficiency and utilization levels (thus eliminating costs by purchasing more capacity than is needed), you also reduce risk and manage configuration changes and such that occur in today’s hybrid virtual/physical environments. Customers have told me that they are seeing payback of 12 months or less in real, hard dollars after implementing a DPM solution. That’s real money. As an added bonus, they also sleep better at night knowing that their data protection policies (especially policies associated with recoverability) have been rigorously enforced and that they can cleanly demonstrate this via flexible reports to anyone who cares. To me, DPM goes hand in hand with all the new, emerging data protection technologies. Given the payback period, one might wonder why every company hasn’t implemented DPM. The surprising fact is that an ever increasing percentage have implemented DPM and are already reaping the benefits.
Posted by Alan Atkinson
Recent Comments