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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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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