Road to Recovery

Data protection management has come a long way in the past decade.  More importantly the features and functionality that are in products these days and what customers have come to expect are now no longer ‘nice to have’ feature in the data center, they are ‘need to have’ features.

Additionally, the term ‘data protection’ is morphing every day and has different meanings to different people.  Questions like ‘is replication data protection?’ or ‘is archive data protection?’ or ‘is DR / BC a function of protection?’ are now common in IT circles.  Each in their own right is a methodology for protecting information or has some play in the grand scheme of data protection.  The reality is, much like every answer in IT, the answer to these questions is ‘it depends’.  Data Protection has many different definitions, which start to expand the scope of what it actually is and more importantly, how it is managed cost effectively across the whole environment.

It is this expanding scope of data protection  where data protection management tools come into play, and the more flexible and granular the tool, the more effective.  It is hard to have good data protection capabilities without having insight to the environment.  First, understanding what type of data lives in the environment, where it is, how it is used and some characteristics about its age or its access frequency helps to determine how to best protect the information.  This is where a data protection management tool that provides some insight to the file system adds a great deal of value.

Next, if archive is a part of data protection (and I would argue that a functional archive, when used properly, is) then a data protection management tool that provides insight to the data in the archive can also help manage the overall protection process within the greater environment.  Knowing if the data in the archive is actually being accessed or if it can be deleted (unless stored for compliant purposes) can help to control archive costs.

If replication is a part of the overall data protection scheme, a data protection management tool that provides insight to this process can also add a great deal of value.  Identifying if links are up, if data is moving between sites and if the data is available, accessible and meets my recovery point objectives at the remote site can ease the concern of recoverability in the event of a disaster.

And finally, providing as much information as possible such as deduplication rates,  tape growth, disk growth (in disk based backup targets – including deduplication targets), as well as providing true analytics into the backup environment to help make decisions as to when to switch from a tape-based solution to a disk-based solutions.  These analytics need to be in-depth enough to show that if some data that is being protected with traditional backup technologies are moved to a next generation solution, such as source-based deduplication, then what affect will it have on the overall backup environment, will it help to better control costs, will it help to increase SLAs?

At a higher level, customers are telling me that they no longer want to manage backup, they just want it to work and they want proof it is working.  As customers move to a more virtualized IT infrastructure, they find that they are being forced to rearchitect their data protection environment and they are now looking to solutions that elevate the process.  IT is looking for tools to make their environment “data protection aware.” As virtual machines are added to the environment they are automatically protected and want notification if they are not so they can mitigate any risk, and let’s face it, backup is all about risk mitigation.  Backup is insurance.  Wouldn’t it be nice if your insurance company had deeper insight to all the cars / drivers in your family and told you when your teenager was speeding on a monthly basis and told you that your premiums are going to go up if they don’t start driving the speed limit before they got the ticket and your premiums increased?

Any tool that IT invests in for a common process, data protection in this case, needs to be flexible enough to allow IT to manage as much of the overall process from a single pain of glass.  Good data protection management tools need to provide IT as much visibility into the overall data protection environment as possible in order to help make good decisions about what data technologies should be invested in, in order to help IT meet its overall SLAs and hence business objectives.

There is no sense spending a great deal of money on rearchitecting a backup environment if there is no insight to the success of the new architecture.  Sooner or later, management needs to have the pretty graphs that prove to someone that the right decisions are being made when it comes to protecting information, or when it comes to how much is spent on data protection or if the SLAs can be met.  Not having good data protection management tool, and spending too much on new data protection architectures while not meeting your SLAs could lead to a RGE (resume generating event).  Data protection management tools today are a need to have, not a nice to have.  Make the investment and put your data protection environment back on the Road to Recovery.

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What does that really mean?  When I worked for Veritas, back in 1998 we acquired a company based out of Canada called TeleBackup that backed up desktop / laptops.  In 1999 Veritas acquired Seagate and the Backup Exec product which also had a desktop / laptop option.  These products were meant to eventually be integrated into the main backup applications but never were.  Additionally, a lot of that software was given away (hard to make a business on that) and for the most part,  lived on a shelf somewhere and was never installed.

In 2004 I worked for Connected Corporate (acquired by Iron Mountain), who’s sole business was desktop / laptop backup.  (In fact, from 2000 to 2004 I worked as an analyst for ESG covering all the vendors in the backup space and used the Connected product to backup my work laptop – and it actually saved my hide once.)  While the company executed a successful exit, the business was (and probably still is) only about a $20M to $40M business.

Why do I bring this up?  There is a new reality in IT these days.  I have said it before, IT is accountable for 100% of the data created in any company, including that stored on desktop/laptops.  This means that not only do they have to provide a location to store this data but IT also needs to provide tools to protect this information and ensure that this information is highly recoverable for both business productivity purposes as well as corporate and legal governance.   This means that desktop / laptop backup is now gaining a lot more visibility in the enterprise.

However, desktop / laptop data protection is one of those areas in IT that is just a nuisance because it seems like it should be an easy problem to solve, but there are so many moving parts to it that it ends up falling by the wayside.

A successful desktop / laptop backup technology needs three very specific capabilities:

• Integrate seamlessly with the existing backup solution in the enterprise
• Share a common, deduplicated, back end repository
• Have a very SIMPLE and robust end-user interface to allow for end-user restores

The desktop / laptop solutions I discussed above did not, and do not, have these capabilities.  Even though these technologies come from reputable companies, not having these three capabilities is what has led to their very low adoption.

These three capabilities are all inter-related.  First IT needs an integrated solution because they do not want to have yet another piece of software in their environment that they have to manage, especially data protection software.  The fundamentals of backup are pretty simple.  Install an agent on the machine you want to protect, go to the management interface of the backup application and set up a few simple rules or policies (backup this system, at this time, to this device, catalog it and finally, keep the data for ‘x’ number of days, weeks, etc..) and start protecting your data.

One challenge is that most backup products don’t have an agent that is lightweight enough to run as a client on a desktop or laptop.  This causes incredible performance degradation of the system during backups, and let’s face it, if you have a laptop, 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be working on it when the backup kicks off so you will end up shutting it down which leaves you with unprotected data.  Client side data reduction techniques help to reduce this problem.  By moving less data, they run for shorter periods of time so there is little to no end user impact.

Next, if you did have an agent that worked well enough to backup all the desktop / laptop systems, then it would impede the backups of the other mission critical systems in the environment by utilizing all of the resources on the devices where the data is being backed up too.  (Take a look at Architecting for Recovery for more info.)  This means that IT would have to set up additional, separate devices to protect one subset of systems leaving them with more devices to manage and making it a hassle to implement.  (This is one reason why ‘cloud’ like solutions have become popular, providing less things to manage, however not every company wants their data outside of their control.)

Also, if you look at the nature of data on desktops and laptops, they share a ton of common data.  Why would any IT person want to backup that much data over and over again?  Traditional desktop / laptop solutions don’t provide robust capabilities for reducing the amount of redundant data that needs to be protected which also translates into longer backup times and more ‘storage’ utilization (making it more costly).  Deduplication allows you to implement a common repository.

Finally, the tools for end user recoverability need to be very robust.  The last thing IT has time for is an increased call volume to perform data recovery for end users.  This also means that data needs to be stored on disk because end users aren’t going to load tapes to recover data which also means that data needs to be stored on disk in the most efficient manner possible to save on costs.

There are a number of other nice-to-have features, but the lack of the three capabilities outlined above have has limited the adoption of desktop / laptop backups. Until today there hasn’t been a good solution that met these criteria.

This week EMC | Avamar launched a desktop / laptop backup component as part of their enterprise solution.  The difference between traditional desktop / laptop solutions and the Avamar solution is that the Avamar solution is 100% integrated as a part of its enterprise backup application, storing data on disk with a high degree of efficiency leveraging single instancing and deduplication.  Additionally, clients are free and they all share a common backend repository with the enterprise backup application that is protecting other common data in the enterprise.  Finally, end-users are able to perform their own restores.  What does all this mean?  Simplicity and low cost.

The Avamar backup technology provides enormous economies of scale when extending from the enterprise to the desktop / laptop.  By backing up to a single common repository utilizing global single instancing and deduplication you NEVER backup the same data twice, no matter where the data lives.

Think about this scenario – a user creates some document, say a PowerPoint presentation.  This presentation ends up being emailed to a number of people in the company and then saved on the desktop as well as in a number of file shares (home directories) on the NAS system.  This one 1MB presentation can represent 120MB of backup disk capacity.

Now if you utilize Avamar, the process would be, first the enterprise application would backup the NAS box and may see the file 20 times.  Avamar would single instance and deduplicate it such that it only one instance is backed up.  Next the desktops start their backup process and see that the Avamar Data Store has already protected this data so again, it doesn’t need to move or store any additional data.  A pointer is created to let the data store know that the desktop / laptop also has the ability to recover this same file.  This provides tremendous scalability.  This essentially means protecting all your desktops / laptops for free.

The technology is easy to manage (same client, same simple management tools), it provides a simple to navigate end user interface for self restores, and provides an integrated, single instance, deduplicated backend.

Seems like a triple play from the Avamar product and is helping to put IT back on the Road to Recovery.

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Here is a shocker for you, backup IS a science.  Good backup administrators / architects are worth their weight in gold.  CIO’s just wish backup would go away.   Backup costs money, it’s not strategic, it chews up man power and when it is ‘running’ (successfully or not) no one really pays attention to it, but when it fails or more likely when you need to restore data and can’t, someone can lose their job – so backup is VERY important, it is a science and to architect a backup environment correctly  it takes time, skill, money and someone who knows what they are dong.

Good backup administrators architect for recovery, not for backup.  Prove it you say.  Okay, question: “Why do backup administrators do full backups of Exchange every night?”  Answer – because it is way easier and much faster to perform a one step full recovery for Exchange than it is to lay down the weekly full and apply the incrementals.  Since mail is considered a “critical application” in the enterprise these days, and down time is critical for this application, good backup administrators architect for the least amount of downtime for the application.  This also applies to databases.  Ninety-five percent of all databases are actually snapped for quick recovery and I would also bet that a full backups is performed on them (or the snap) every evening.

Recovery is a primary driver of any good backup architecture but lately I have been hearing a great deal of talk around ‘backup consolidation’.  The reality is, there is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to backup software or hardware.  Consolidating backup software may make your environment easier to manage, but does it provide you the tools/technology you need to maximize your data protection objectives in your environment?  Consolidating backup targets (tape / disk) may yield fewer devices to manage, but what happens to your overall backup and recovery performance when doing so?  While new technologies may help fine-tune the science side of backup, they still need an artist’s touch.

An area where consolidation comes up quite frequently in the backup arena is around new data deduplication solutions.  While these technologies add tremendous value, it should not be suggested that you forget about good backup architecture practices.  For example, if deduplication is the removal of duplicate data, how much duplicate data is there really between your production data bases and your file systems within your company?  Mixing the storage repository for your file system and data base data just doesn’t buy you a lot in your deduplicated backend so why mix them?  It would make sense, however, to have a device / appliance for each database or set of databases that have common data as well as a device / appliance for file systems that have common data.  Doing so would yield better backup and recovery performance and would probably mirror the same set of rules you would you used your ‘old’ backup environment.  (Notice, I said ‘rules’ not devices or technologies.)  Now as long as the cost isn’t exponentially higher having multiple devices (including management costs), recovery can be much easier and faster.

Another interesting side note, since most IT shops do FULL backups every night of their database, for the purpose of faster recover, then why wouldn’t you want to have a dedicated backup storage device that does a ‘full’ backup every night of the data and only needs to move the changed data?  This is the very nature of the Avamar technology and what this ‘next generation’ backup technology is designed to accomplish versus what traditional backup technologies try to do with cumbersome processes of full and incremental backups.  Why not, for example, set up a dedicated Avamar Data Store for DB backups with the proper number of nodes for performance, and leave it at that?

Best Practices / Professional Services Have the Last Word

Instead of naysayers making a bunch of statements that certain technologies ‘can’t’ solve a problem, why wouldn’t they take a page out of a professional services handbook that says ‘if the solution is architected properly (and can be delivered at the right cost, and meet your business objectives) then there is no reason not to make any technology work to its maximum potential and solve difficult problems, that is the real science.

Ten years ago, backup administrators would say, “okay, if you can’t get the backup / restore performance you need for that data set, then we will add another media server, get some more licenses and backup that data separately such that when you need to perform a restore, you can set up a dedicated media server for faster recovery.”  Should this be any different today?

Backup is about recovery and more importantly performance (RTO) but it is also about architecture and a good backup architecture will put you on the Road to Recovery.

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Technology is great isn’t it?  When someone thinks they have a new idea on the same old technology foundation they call it “X 2.0″.  I have been watching the banter between analysts and vendors (specifically NTAP’s Dr. Dedupe and Permabit’s CEO Tom Cook) on the topic of Deduplication 2.0 and it is my belief that the proverbial boat is being missed (since we are using water analogies).  I have been watching these guys hash it out for the past few weeks and decided I have to jump in.  I find the real value to these conversations is the value to the end user.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who ‘coined’ or ‘invented’ a term (like deduplication 2.0) but what does matter is if  the term actually helps describe a technology and how that technology can be leveraged to make things better in the data center.  We should focus on the implications of this new generation of deduplication – ‘deduplication 2.0’.

In May I delivered a presentation to a number of EMC customers on the topic of Data Deduplication 2.0 – Comprehensive Capacity Optimization.  The point of my presentation was simple (and keep in mind this was before the Data Domain acquisition); there are a number of capacity optimization technologies/capabilities that are available to customers today.  Originally these deduplication technologies were used primarily for backup purposes but slowly, deduplication is making its way into primary storage. Deduplication in primary storage makes a lot of sense FOR DATA THAT IS STATIC.  Why only static data?  Static data is data that isn’t used frequently (doesn’t mean it’s not important, it just simply is not accessed often); because access to this data is infrequent, the performance requirements for this data is less than that of active data. Remember; nothing in IT is free.  If I deduplicate data, in order to use it, I must ‘rehydrate’ it and thus there is a performance implication so I want to be careful where I deduplicate data so as not to inhibit performance on production data.

Dr. Dedupe and Tom allude to Deduplication 2.0 moving beyond backup storage and into primary storage.  While deduplication in primary storage is technically possible, it is important that customers understand two important points:

1) Performance: whatever I do to deduplicate (I like optimize) capacity in order to save space, I must ‘undo’ in order to use the data.  If I set a policy that says any data that is 30 days old can be ‘optimized’, I need to be sure that data 30 days old is not active or I could pay a substantial performance penalty when using this data.  I may set a policy ‘any data that hasn’t be touched in 30 days, can be optimized.  I would just want to make sure that there is no scenario where at the end of a quarter let’s say, I would need to rehydrate all data in order to run some report.

2) Comprehensive and cumulative deduplication throughout my storage tiers.  What do I mean?  If I compress and single instance (deduplicate) data on my primary storage utilizing one set of deduplication technologies, say single instancing and compression algorithms, and then I backup this data using sub-file deduplication, a separate set of algorithms, then what I am left with are two separate sets of deduplicated data silos, and no one wins in this scenario.

It is important, no matter what deduplication technology you decide to use, that you can actually leverage the data stored in the deduplication device and that as data moves from device to device it doesn’t need to be rehydrated before it is moved.

A great use case of capacity optimization in primary storage is how EMC evolved the Celerra product this year.  Through a policy, let’s say any data that is older than 30 days, is compressed and stored as a single instance, with users seeing as much as 30% to 50% storage savings.

The real goal of Deduplication 2.0, and I think Dr. Dedupe alluded to this in his post “The Dedupe 2.0 Pundits Are Still Swimming in Lake 1.0” is that customers win when deduplication technology is a part of the core system or file system, when I no longer need to rehydrate data as I move it from primary storage to secondary storage.  If each storage device in the ’stack’ understands the language of the device in the stack ahead of it and the ‘deduplication’ or file system is coordinated and cumulative from device to device than the customer is the winner.  This pertains to primary storage, backup storage and archive storage.  Never having to rehydrate data allows for more efficiency and a reduced tax on devices that can save the end user money.

Tom Cook, CEO of Permabit points out in his blog post “Dedupe 1.0 vs. Dedupe 2.0: The debate ensues” that the only value to deduplication for primary storage is to move your data to a deduplicated archive which allows you to store data, efficiently, long term which I agree with, but as we have seen, not that practical.  Why? Because at the end of the day, the costs to manage storage are going up, up, up and the costs to buy storage are going down, down, down.  End users (NOT IT) are generally lazy or should I really say, just too busy to manage this storage.  In order to properly archive data, you need to have a policy that tells you what to move and when to move it.  IT can make all the recommendations in the world about the value of archive, but if users or really, lines of business managers don’t tell IT what data is important and what can be archived, then IT doesn’t really have a choice, which makes the premise of moving data to an archive, deduplicated or not – moot.

The real issue is balancing capacity optimization (to what granularity you deduplicate data) against performance on the appropriate tier of data, given that deduplication will happen on all tiers of storage.  The higher the performance requirements (tier 1) the less ‘optimized’ I make the data, the lower the performance requirements (tier x, archive) the more optimized I make the data.  The benefits to the customer are that I can A) optimize data, consistently among each of its devices, and B) it can be cumulative from device to device, removing silos of deduplicated data across the stack.

For more on tiered dedupe, read my Betamax Redux blog post on EMC’s vision for deduplication and hopefully this will put you on a high performance ‘Road to Recovery’.

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Server virtualization has changed the IT landscape dramatically.  It has become a magic potion curing a number of ills in the physical server world such as low individual CPU utilization and excess use of space, power and cooling in the data center.  However, like all potions that cure what ails you, there can be side effects.  You need to be careful of what the Witch Doctor orders.

When I speak with customers who have aggressively implemented a virtual server infrastructure, 9 out of 10 will tell me that they underestimated the affect that virtualization would have on their backups and backup process and how backup might actually make virtualization less of the magic potion they had hoped, when not considered during the virtual server assessment and planning process.  So what is the issue?  Backup is a virtualization bottleneck, and without addressing it, you may not be able to obtain the server consolidation ratios you had been expecting which can have a negative effect on your virtual server TCO and ROI.

This is a timely discussion as VMworld has just concluded.  VMware users flocked to VMworld looking for best practices when it comes to implementing virtual server technology.  Because virtualization allows IT to reduce the overall physical hardware infrastructure, users will be looking at how to maximize their server consolidation ratios (get as many virtual servers on a physical server as they can and still provide good application performance).

I often hear that companies assess their environments by looking at the production applications on their physical server environment, identify their work loads and translating that into some consolidation ratio of physical servers to virtual servers.  I also hear, from these same customers, that backup was never taken into consideration during the assessment phase when trying to identify the best possible consolidation ratios.  These customers implement their new virtual server environments, install the backup agent they had previously been using for physical server backups and attempt to backup their virtual servers and they find that they would only be able to protect 50% to 60% of the new environment.  Why?

Let’s look at the physics.  Let’s say your virtualization ratio is 12 virtual servers to 1 physical server.  Ten physical servers backup with 12 NIC cards, 12 CPUs, 12 Memory ‘chunks’, etc… When you moved these 12 physical servers into the virtual world and put them on one physical server did you put 12 NIC cards in the new physical server?  Did you put 12 CPUs in the new server?  Do you have 12x the memory?  Chances are, probably not.  However the capacity didn’t change did it?  So how could one expect that the backup performance, which is I/O, memory and CPU intensive would operate well in a virtual world?

Diagram 1 below show how when you backup 12 servers, the resource drain on each server is roughly 25% (per system during a full backup).  When you virtualize these 12 servers onto one or two physical servers, your physical system utilization shoots up to 80%+.  This utilization can be so dramatic that it actually effects the number of virtual servers you can have on these systems which can ruin your virtual server TCO / ROI.

Figure 1

Simple math dictates, unless you have all the same resources on your new physical server as you did on all your physical servers before the consolidation, you won’t get the same backup performance.  I have spoken with customers who aimed to do a 25 to 1 virtual to physical server consolidation, who  were only actually able to get a 15 to 1 consolidation ratio in reality because their backup application couldn’t handle 25 virtual servers on one physical server, leaving some unprotected.

People could argue that if you properly schedule each virtual machine to backup in a window when all the other systems are not backing up, then perhaps you could get by with traditional backup.  The flip side is, IT has been telling me they don’t want to manage the backup process anymore than they have to.  So how do you ‘fix’ this problem?

The issue is that backup is a very intensive I/O application therefore there is only one way to fix the problem.  You need to reduce the amount of I/O generated and sent through the physical devices that house the virtual servers during backup.  Virtual servers were designed to provide a lot of benefits but high I/O capabilities is not one of them.  (This is okay, every technology implementation has its tradeoffs.  When the positives outweigh the negatives, especially in a substantial way, as they do with virtual servers, you usually have a paradigm shift, and this is what we are seeing with virtual servers.)

So how do you change the I/O pattern of backup?   You do so by decreasing the amount of data that is utilizing the shared resources during backup.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  One way is to leverage the storage array and snapshot the data.  Snapshots allow you to make copies of virtualized server data and mount this snapshot to a proxy host and off-load the backups from the physical server that house the virtual servers.  The downsides are:

1)      This becomes a new set of processes to manage unlike traditional backup processes

2)      You need extra storage capacity with this solution

3)      You will need to manage another physical server (proxy server)

4)      You will need more backup agents from your backup software provider

The most efficient way, however, is to take advantage of a new backup software application that leverages data reduction (data deduplication) on the client.  Your processes stay the same, there is no need for additional primary storage hardware and by leveraging a ‘smarter’ backup client, you will reduce the I/O tax on your physical server devices and thereby have the ability to maximize your TCO / ROI for your new virtual server environment.

Additionally, a number of these technologies have additional offerings that truly make them next generation.  Backup licensing is slowly moving to a capacity based license model.  One great feature of these new products is the fact that there is no charge for clients or agents.  This allows you to create a virtual server template with the backup agent embedded within it.  You no longer have to worry about proliferating backup clients and then paying for all those clients when it is time to ‘true up’ with your backup software vendor.  Data deduplication technologies also offer the ability to replicate the backup data efficiently to disk at a remote site so you can develop a more efficient disaster recovery plan that reduces the reliance on a tape and increases your overall operational efficiency.

Regardless of which path you choose, each requires IT to rethink their backup strategies when it comes to protecting virtual server environments.

I encourage you to do two things as you consider moving to a virtual server infrastructure:

1)      Make sure you are thinking about data protection when architecting your new virtual server environment

2)      Check out some of the new technologies and best practices offered by vendors for protecting virtual servers.

Hopefully this will help put your virtual server world back on the Road to Recovery!

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The Architecture

This ‘architecture’ diagram, as you can see, is not a typical architecture diagram, but hopefully it can be used to align your business and business objectives with the technologies that are available and can best be applied to solve your issues helping to balance, cost, complexity and compliance.

This diagram can also be used to do a couple of other things.  It can help you begin to classify your data and align your  data to your business objectives.  It also lets you begin to identify what data or data services in your environment that may be more important to you than others and based on this help you to choose areas you may want to outsource or move to the cloud.

As you can tell, there really is not one solution for meeting all your data protection needs.  The challenge comes with managing multiple solutions in an effort to meet your business objectives.  While there are only a few technologies available that allow you to manage your environment across all your RPOs and RTOs, it is important that I point out EMC’s NetWorker is able to do this, centralizing your data protection infrastructure  for ease of management.  It allows you to manage traditional backup, source based deduplicated backup with Avamar, CDP with RecoverPoint, as well as the EMC disk libraries and tape where the data is stored.  Now, I am not saying that NetWorker solves all of your data protection challenges, nor am I suggesting that replacing one traditional backup technology for another is the right answer, but what I am saying is that if you’re looking to have all the feature functionality required to meet all your business objectives and you want easier management, NetWorker is one avenue to get you there.  Additionally, the underlying image of the triangle represents data protection management.  Putting all the new technology in place is one thing, managing it, and ensuring you are now meeting your business needs is another.  EMC’s Data Protection Advisor can help here as well.

This diagram can help customers layout a new, better data protection schema for their environment and start thinking about data protection a bit more strategically versus tactically.  It can also help vendors speak to customers about how they should look at their environment in order to identify specific challenges and the means they need to alleviate these challenges , taking backup, beyond.

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One of the more thoughtful analysts in the industry, in my opinion is George Crump from Storage Switzerland.  (I like the name and George is as independent as you can get in

this business.)  Yesterday I had the pleasure of briefing George on EMC’s Data Protection Vision.  I like talking with George for a couple of reasons.  First, he gets it.  What does that mean.  Read his material.  He is genuinely trying to educate IT folks on what is really important in the data center and how to address these challenges.  Next, he keeps the ‘pay for’, ‘vendor spin’ to a minimum.  George works hard to just talk about the facts of a product or industry and talk about how products can help without selling.  The reality is, we live in a great technological time.  The problem with IT is that only 50% of the problems are technology related.  The other 50%  is psychological.  IT can’t just implement new technology because its cool or even because it really does solve a problem.  Sometimes new technology is too expensive to implement or the solution that is currently in place had a three year amortization and your only two years into your product life.  Or, more importantly, the new technology may be the greatest technology at the right price but it doesn’t fit into the current IT priorities.  These are all things IT needs to work through when considering whether or not to invest in new technology.  The other thing George and I spoke about was the fact that it gets difficult to be ’strategic’ in IT especially given certain economic times.  A lot of times IT just needs a band-aide or quick fix to move on to more important issues that really drive the business.  I talk about this  a lot, especially when it comes to backup.  Lets face it, it may not be what we all want to hear but backup is not strategic to most environments.  The applications that drive the business are most important.  Backup is about risk mitigation and information availability if everything else fails.  Right, ‘if everything else fails’, and IT typically invests in technology in the front end in an effort to have as little failure as possible.  Meaning, IT doesn’t just buy JBOD with no RAID if they think the environment shouldn’t be put at that kind of risk.  So IT is  already investing in some risk management up front which drives the spend on the back end for data protection.

I wanted to say “Thanks” to George for taking the time to come in and understand the bigger strategy EMC is driving with its products in the data protection space and to talk about our existing successes with the current portfolio.  Hopefully George, as well as all of you, can see how we are helping to put customers on the Road to Recovery.

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I was walking through the data center the other day when I heard one of my colleagues, MJ “Scream”, “I wish I had some ‘Morphine’”.  Well, I have to say I was “Speechless”.  I walked over to where MJ was standing, near the tape library, and when I asked him what was wrong, he replied “there was another backup tape ’Jam‘.”  MJ told me he had been “Working Day and Night” on a major backup problem and he was now bouncing “Off The Wall”.  He told me he was sick of dealing with traditional backup tools and just wanted to get rid of tape.  I told MJ that it was “Human Nature” to feel “Bad” in a time like this but I also told him, “You Are Not Alone”.  I said MJ, “’Keep The Faith’, we all ‘Remember The Time’ when backups ran like a ‘Speed Demon’ and were ‘Unbreakable’, but that is ‘HIStory’, tape isn’t that fast any more given the amount of data we now have.  I also told him that “We are Backup Administrators, we are ‘Invincible’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait’ for us, and while we may not have our issue fixed at the ‘Break Of Dawn’, we would ‘Come Together’ to ‘Heal The World,’ or at least the datacenter’ (I chuckled).  I proceeded to tell him about a revolutionary new backup concept utilizing source-based deduplication technology.  It’s “PYT”, a pretty young thing, but  more importantly it’s here to stay.  EMC  offers it with a product called Avamar , the most efficient variable block,  source-based, deduplication technology on the market that:

• Helps to eliminate tape all together
• Is perfect for VMware environments
• Protects remote offices most efficiently
• Stems the tide of data growth on NAS platforms

Well I thought MJ was going to give me “Trouble” for my comments.  I mean it, all of the sudden I had “Butterflies”, I felt “Threatened” because I knew this guy could be a loose cannon when it came to trying something new, he could be “Dangerous” he may moonwalk over to me and slap me with his glove. Change can be scary.  But just then MJ let out a “Smile” (quite frankly I thought he was going to “Cry”) and said “’I Can’t Help It’, my job is ‘On The Line’ and I ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ soon before my boss tells me to ‘Beat it’” he just felt “2 Bad”.  I told him, “’Don’t Walk Away’ and ‘Whatever Happens’ ‘Billie Jean’ and I were going to help get him out of ‘Trouble’ and together we would replace the tape infrastructure, make backups run 10x faster, provide him with tools that actually verified his backups and make his backup problems ‘Ghosts’”.

I called Billie Jean and at first she said, “’Leave Me Alone’, ‘Why You Wanna Trip On Me’”, but I told her we need her help, so she said she could help MJ and I.  When she asked what the trouble was, I told her that our backup environment was in shams and if MJ didn’t get it fixed, with the right solution that they were going to put MJ on a “Carousel”, that there would be “Blood On The Dance Floor” and he would end up being “Someone In The Dark” “In The Closet”.  Billie Jean hopped on the phone and called “Dirty Diana”, we are all “Just Good Friends” really.  She told her the story and when it came right down to it, it really was “Black or White”.  We needed some “Money”, “2000 Watts”, to replace the old tape libraries with the new Avamar technology and “One More Chance” to fix all of MJ’s backup issues.

I told MJ the plan; we were going to sneak past the guards (that would be simple because “They Don’t Care About Us”) and then replace the old equipment with the new equipment.  MJ asked, “’Is It Scary’ in the datacenter at night?”  I told him we would be fine, that this would not be like his “Childhood” days.  MJ just said, “I Wanna ‘Rock With You’”.  The next night we snuck into the data center like a “Smooth Criminal”.  First, we had to “Get On The Floor” the new Avamar technology.  Next we installed Avamar and it fixed our backup problem right away.  I said, “Man ‘Is It Scary’ or what?”  “Another Part of Me” was just proud of the work we had all accomplished.

The next morning we went into the office of “Little Susie” and knocked on her door (it was always closed because she liked her “Privacy”).  She was MJ’s boss and she was no “Tabloid Junkie” she was a real “Superfly Sister”.   She said, “’Who Is It’”?  We told her and she let us in.  We showed here some reports we had generated from another product we acquired called Data Protection Advisor.  We showed her where all the previous backups had been failing due to problems with network performance, tape libraries and not enough time to back everything up.  Then we showed her that with Avamar we were backing up data in just 1 hour with 100% success because we were seeing 99.5% duplicate data in our NAS environment and that was why we couldn’t meet our backup windows with tape.  We also showed her that our VMware environment could go from 10 to 20 virtual servers per ESX host because backup was no longer the bottleneck keeping us from implementing more virtual guests.  Well she was pretty happy, she said “You Rock My World” and she was not upset that the tape environment was “Gone Too Soon” because it was a true “Heartbreak”.  I told her it was a team effort and we couldn’t have done it without the help of a lot of people including EMC. It was a real “Thriller”.

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There has been a lot written about the airline industry and its ongoing challenges.  Bankruptcies and mergers have been frequent topics on the business pages of the newspapers. Stranded passengers and jets sitting on runways for hours make are page news.

I travel a lot and have been doing so for 20 years.  It’s an interesting industry I have observed first hand, often times painfully.  I would postulate, the air travel industry is one of the few industries that effectively hasn’t improved in any measurable way over the past 20 years.  Consider:

- It still takes you six hours to fly from Boston to London, just as it did 30 years ago. Despite the brief, and ultimately failed foray into speed improvements via the Concorde, jets still fly +/- 500 MPH and get you to your location no faster than they did a quarter of a century ago

- Customer satisfaction has been steadily declining – across the board

- Flight delays and lost / mishandled baggage continue to increase

- The food is still awful, if you get any at all

It is, however, worthy to note that air travel continues to have excellent safety records. So if the airlines haven’t improved in speed, comfort, or the basics like taking off and landing on time, what the heck have they been focused on? After all, look at another travel related industry, automobiles, over the past 25 years. More features (how many of you still “roll-up” your windows), safer (airbags, traction control), more fuel efficient (introduction of hybrids), and more dependable (Six-sigma, Kaizan!). Airlines? Well, no such luck. They’ve been focused on “cost.” With de-regulation and the entrée of low cost carriers coupled with the price of fuel, cost savings is where all of their focus has been. Let’s think about these two facts:

- Fuel efficiency in the airline industry increased 21% over the last five years

- But the price of oil, increased 130% over the last five years

If you’ve flown recently you probably have noticed all the cost savings efforts. Paying for food, paying for extra bags, less amenities, etc… But here’s the real focus – stuff more people in seats to spread that cost of fuel over more tickets. Two more facts:

- In 1980 there were 433 billion available seat miles with a breakeven load factor of 59%

- In 2002 there were 893 billion available seat miles with a breakeven load factor of 84%

Just to state the obvious, in 1980, you needed 59% of the seats filled to break even (less, lose $, more, make $). In 2002 it took 84% of the seats being filled for airlines to make money (notice how this date correlates with the onset of airline chapter 11 filings). In the past few years, by flying more efficient planes and of course serving you fewer peanuts, the airline industry has taken its cost down a bit, but not much. In Q1 of 2006 the breakeven load factor stood at 77.2.

Now let’s take another “industry”…one close to my heart – “Data Protection!” Now, I don’t want to draw a complete parallel between air-travel and backup because for backup – there has indeed been progress in the technology. The problem with backup is that it hasn’t kept pace with demand, e.g. the requirements associated with the explosion of digital data being stored today. Consider the history…

1) We started by backing up individual systems, using backup software provided with the operating system; this was time consuming, decentralized, and you needed tools to backup and restore for each unique OS.

2) Progressed to network based backup (hence the names NetWorker & NetBackup”); one tool for the entire environment, centralized, sharing of resources (e.g. tape drives).  Still very time consuming and creates lots of network traffic.

3) Added the ability to perform backup over the SAN; reduced network traffic.

4) Began leveraging storage technologies like Snapshot based backup and increasing disk as a target; still, today, for the most part this is still effectively, “make a copy” and that “copy” usually goes to tape.

5) Introduce VTL and data deduplication; provide users the most efficient means to move data to a disk device (by making it look like tape) and give them the ability to store it, and subsequently move it, more efficiently, driving the costs of disk and tape much closer together and helping to reduce the reliance on tape all together.

Still here’s what users think about backup today:

Question: “What are the biggest problems with your current backup and recovery solutions (% of all users, multiple responses accepted) (Forrester Conslting on behalf of HP, December 2008)

1. Need to improve RPO / RTO (64%)

2. Need to improve recovery success rates (63%)

3. Need to better protect virtual servers (58%)

4. Need to manage data proliferation (57%)

5. Need to consolidate remote office backups (47%)

So, backup is indeed a little like the airline industry – it still takes a long time, and no one likes the service. But, is there a light on the horizon? I think so…and it’s embodied in EMC’s Data Protection Strategy. I think three key tenets of the strategy;

1. Backup as little data as possible

2. Use disk to store the backup data

3. Enable customers to use backup for other purposes

Let’s talk a bit about these concepts and the products and technologies that enable them.

How to backup as little data as possible?  A) Actively and continuously archive stale data; and B) use deduplication to minimize the bits and bytes that are required to represent information.

Use disk to store the backup data? Using disk is all about cost, since the benefits of disk vs. tape are pretty obvious e.g. random access, speed of recovery, reliability, to name a few. Active archive and deduplication, coupled with the continued march to bigger and cheaper disk drives enables the use of disk today. Cheaper “bulk storage” will only improve this in the future. EMC has a broad portfolio of archiving software for key applications (e.g. email, file servers, SAP), and the leading platform for storing it (Centera). Deduplication techniques are increasing embodied in our backup and archive as appropriate, e.g. at the object level (Centera); file/attachment level (EX); and the sub-file level (Avamar). In the future, you’ll see a unified deduplication “service” that will bring some of these techniques together and will be embedded across EMC’s product lines (Celerra). Someday, deduplication may be as ubiquitous as RAID

Enable customers to use backup for other purpose? Wouldn’t it be great to periodically replicate your backup data to another site to use as a cheap and easy recovery site? How about doing eDiscovery for compliance purposes on your backup data? These are great ways to leverage backup data for additional purposes that we are working towards. We’re not there yet, and by-the-way, while this sounds simple, it is not. File this under “the vision thing.”

Evolutionary or Revolutionary. We’re hearing from customers today who want to re-vamp their entire backup strategy and start from scratch. Others want to attack “hot-spots” and evolve to a new approach. We can do it either way. Our EMC Disk Libraries are a very effective way to get disk based backup benefits while fitting into customers existing backup paradigms. EMC Avamar gives you disk based backup, enabled by state-of-the art de-dupe, which replaces traditional backup software (though Avamar will co-exist and complement traditional backup too).  NetWorker has embraced B2D as well as deduplication.  It also has EMC Disk Library integration.

Let’s not forget data protection management.  Today we have the Data Protection Advisor product, which effectively gives us a Dashboard that provides backup monitoring, reporting and analytics across most of our data protection products – NetWorker, EMC Disk Libraries, Avamar, plus popular backup products from Veritas, CommVault and IBM. Look for us to add Centera and other products in the future.

So, we’re at an inflection point. Backup is indeed changing and EMC is leading the way. The strategy is solid, the customer need is clear, and we have most of the pieces today. It’s ours to win.

For the air travel industry, I’m afraid I am not so optimistic. Here’s a story that sums it all up… On a trans-continental flight a passenger was sitting way back in economy. As it was a long flight, the flight attendants came by with the meal carts. The passenger was asked if he would like a meal. Being hungry he said, “Sure, what are my choices?” The flight attendant answered, “Your choices are ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Until next time, _Mark

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