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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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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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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The great thing about blogging and independence is that we can post things that add value that we want to share as long as we give the proper recognition.  One of my colleagues, Mike Dutch from the CTO office of SSG and long time SNIA member had some thoughts as it pertained to storage tiering that were insightful  so together we decided to share this post.  I hope you enjoy it.

I’m guessing that many people define a storage tier by its particular storage technology (like SATA). While this may be a useful working definition it obscures the essential notion of what a storage tier really is and leads to confusion when a new technology like data deduplication comes around.  A precise definition may also lead to some interesting innovations if we were to take a slightly different path.

Should deduplicated storage be considered a storage tier?  I would say “no” and here’s why: because a technology such as deduplication can span, and optimize across all tiers.

A storage tier is storage space that has availability, performance, and cost characteristics different enough from other storage tiers as to economically justify the movement of data between it and other storage tiers based on the importance (value, performance need etc…) of the data. While storage tiers are often thought of as being tied to a particular type of hardware,

e.g.,  Flash, FC, SAS, SATA, VTL, PTL, COM (Computer Output Microfiche), or even paper, this is not necessarily the case. For example, highly available cloud or network-based virtual disks could leverage multiple technologies within their single tier.  Since a variety of technologies can be used to provide a particular storage service level, you should not think of a specific technology as a specific storage tier, but should instead evaluate what technology, or combination of technologies would deliver the availability-performance-cost point that I need for this level tier.  “SATA” is not a storage tier, it just happens to be one “technology-set” that can deliver for a single storage tier.

Note that storage tiers are not defined by their capacity, per se, but there is usually less capacity of more expensive tiers precisely because it is more expensive. Deduplication is “simply” a method to save and access data on a storage medium which is why capacity optimization techniques are best considered features of storage platforms rather than standalone products. (Of course deduplication can also be used as part of a WAN optimization solution but here we’re talking about deduplication in relation to storage tiers, and dedupe engines without storage aren’t very interesting storage tiers).

In other words, deduplication lets you lower the cost/GB associated with a particular storage tier, but it isn’t a storage tier in and of itself.  The same rationale applies on why other space efficient storage technologies (e.g., compression) are not tiers unto themselves.  It’s the mixing and matching of both old and new technologies to create a new “availability -performance -cost” point, that makes up a new storage tier.

So who cares what a storage tier is anyway?  On one hand, as long as you can help your customer affordably satisfy their business requirements it doesn’t matter.  But at another level, it profoundly matters.  If you don’t have the knowledge to think about a subject precisely, you may not only be unable to solve problems related to the subject.  Even more, you may not even be able to recognize there is a problem.  Having the right knowledge lets us understand our challenges and more importantly find alternative solutions to them.  After all, isn’t storage tiering really about helping to deliver on a “no more tears” promise?

The efficiencies that data deduplication and storage tiering bring to data protection enable businesses to reduce risks as well as costs.  Information that was previously protected on an adhoc basis, if at all, can now affordably be brought into the ILM umbrella as a full fledged corporate citizen.  The Storage Networking Industry Association defines Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) as “The policies, processess, practices, services, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective infrastructure from the time information is created through its final disposition.”  Data deduplication and storage tiering are two arrows in the ILM quiver that can be used pervasively within the enterprise to score a bull’s eye in backup… and beyond.  Limiting our thoughts about how any technology can be used, whether it be data deduplication, Flash, or whatever the Next Big Thing is, simply limits the solutions we can find.

Should deduplicated storage be considered a storage tier?  No.

Should deduplicated storage be used as a storage tier?  Pervasively.

Thus endeth the sermon for the day.

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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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Well, until now.  This is an interesting story about archiving and how it could have, but didn’t help a friend of mine.

Often, when speaking with customers, I talk to them about the 4 fundamental principals with regard to data protection:

1. Assess
2. Archive
3. Backup
4. Manage

The assessment phase is a multi-dimensional phase.  It’s about people, process and technology.  Like with most things, the technology piece is the easy piece.  EMC has tools that allow us to scan file systems, data bases and email systems that report back a litany of information including but not limited to:

• Number of files
• Age of files
• Volume of data
• Owner of the data

Once EMC passes the information to the customer about their data, the real hard work begins.  Armed with the information, IT now has to go and speak to line of business managers in order to determine the value of the data, and how data of a specific value needs to be managed and protected.  The problem is line of business managers want everything saved forever, until IT tells them what the bill would be.  IT begins to describe the different ‘classes’ of service capabilities and line of business managers, who don’t really care about the details (not because they don’t care, they are just too busy), finally say “Just give me the highest level of protection I can get for the least amount of money.”  IT now does the best they can to align their perceived value of the data, to the most appropriate backup and archive capabilities they have.

Now, in Vegas, I think we can all agree that the video surveillance has a ton of value to  the stake holders of the hotels and casinos.  The amount of debauchery that takes place in Vegas with the amount of money that is ‘rolling’ around Vegas, it is important to ‘know what is going on’ and to make sure all situations can be handled as efficiently as possible and this is where video surveillance comes into play and the more you ’save’ on high speed disk, the easier it is to get to the truth or solve the mystery.

The exception is that this data is not available for just any general purpose.  Case in point.  A good friend of mine, lets call him ‘Josh’ was running around Vegas one evening having a grand time.  He and some friends ran into a group of young ladies and had a great time seeing the sights of Vegas for the rest of the evening.  As the night was winding down and people were going back to their hotels, Josh, being a very nice guy decided to ensure his ‘date’ made it back to her hotel safely.  He rode with her in the cab and then walked her to her hotel room.  Now, if any of you have been to Vegas, you know that from the cab stand to the room can be a mile and you will take one of several elevators and walk down one of many corridors to a hotel door that looks exactly like the other 3500 in the building.

They young lady asked Josh in to talk and to say good night and as time went past, they talked all night until the fell asleep.  Josh, having to catch a flight the next afternoon, and not wanting to wake anyone decided to quietly leave early in the am.  Josh then took a cab back to his hotel and when he went to pay the cab driver, he realized that his wallet was gone.  After calling all the places they had been the night before, Josh was convinced that he had left / lost the wallet in hotel room of the young lady and decided to call her.  First problem.  He didn’t know the room number.  He didn’t even remember the floor she was on.  Josh went back to the hotel and started to go up and down the elevator and walk down the halls looking for anything that looked familiar so he could knock on the door and ask if he had lost his wallet in the room.  After  a few hours of walking the halls, he had his first great idea, instead of walk throughout the hotel, how about call every room?  As he started doing that, he realized he still had about 2500 more rooms to call and with his cell running out of juice and not wanting to be a spectacle in the lobby he had is second brilliant idea.  Lets ask the security department if he can have a look t the video surveillance to see if they can tell him which floor he went to the night before and what hallway he walked down so he could, perhaps,  more easily find his wallet.

Well, the security department was less than sympathetic to Josh’s request (I would bet they get this question a lot).  In fact, the security department would not even comment on the fact as to whether or not they even had video cameras covering the different areas of the hotel for ’security reasons’.  (Reminds me of a time when I worked at VERITAS and we sold some software to Bank of NY who told us to not divulge what they had purchased because they considered this piece of technology a competitive edge.)

Defeated, Josh left his name with the hotel, went back to his hotel.  It has been over 7 hours of searching and is now just moments before checkout and him having to go to the airport.

Just goes to show you, having the data, doesn’t always put you on the Road to Recovery.

(BTW: Josh got a call on the way to the airport, the hotel ‘found’ his wallet and would be mailing it to him.  What a relief.)

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Okay, so the dust it taking more time to settle on the whole EMC / DDUP / NTAP saga, so given this may go on for a while, let’s try to shed some light on ‘why’ EMC would

want this technology.

It’s simple really, and it’s analogues to the auto industry and hence the reference to the title of this piece.  Rather than drone on about what ‘Who killed the electric car?’ I’ll just tell you.  GM, Chrysler, and Ford killed the electric car and by doing so drove themselves into bankruptcy and Toyota into the spot of number one car dealer in the world.  The big difference?  Toyota listened to its customers and developed and delivered products that consumers wanted.  Consumers wanted safe, fuel efficient automobiles.  Toyota delivered the Prius.  GM built the Hummer, Chrysler built muscle cars and Ford continued to build on their truck reputation with more pickups.  The American auto manufacturers killed the electric car.  Had they listened to the consumer, they would have built more fuel efficient cars, consumers would have purchased them, and perhaps our dependence on foreign oil would be less significant, our world would be safer, and GM, Chrysler and Ford would still be in business and our economy would be a bit stronger.  (Now, I am no politician and I can’t say for sure that our world would be safer or that GM, Chrysler and Ford would definitely be in business, but I think you get the point.)  The point is that vendors didn’t listen to the consumer and now the vendors are wishing they had listened.

This is no different in the world of technology vendors.  When I was an analyst for the Enterprise Storage Group, I saw a number of incumbent technology vendors discuss how they were building technology that complemented their existing product suite but didn’t necessarily fit the important needs of their customers.  After a short period of time (as with most things in the technology space) their technology would be replaced with a startup’s technology ; the startup had listened to the customer’s needs and developed and delivered on it.  I also worked with a number of startup CEOs who believed they were building technology that no one could live without because it’s what they themselves wanted, not what the consumer wanted.  These companies usually went out of business pretty quickly.

So why have this conversation?  Why now?  As EMC speaks with its customers regarding data protection, two things are very clear.  First, customers want to leverage the capabilities of data deduplication.  Second, they want to leverage these capabilities in a manner that best fits their needs.  This means that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to data deduplication.  Many vendors that have data deduplication capabilities love to argue the merits of the most appropriate ‘place’ to do data deduplication.  The reality is, as with EVERY answer in IT, it depends.  It depends on the use case and every customer has its own set of issues or use cases that are influenced by service levels and budget.  It is important to provide customers with technology they want and in a manner in which they feel most comfortable consuming it.

When IT customers speak, they speak with their wallets.  It is clear, today, that Data Domain is a vendor of choice when it comes to target based data deduplication technology.  A big part of EMCs success is its ability to listen to their customers and provide them with technology they desire in a manner in which they want to consume it.  EMC will continue on its consistent mission to own the very best intellectual property it can across its storage ecosystem because that is what contemporary IT demands.

EMC has been clear in its vision when it comes to capacity optimization technology and that does not change with the acquisition of new technologies.  However, a vision can take time to develop and can morph based on customer demands.  EMC will continue to drive toward an ‘architecturally consistent and pervasive’ capacity optimized infrastructure, but we will also provide best of breed solutions to customers in order to help them achieve their business objectives today.

Now let me go get into my gas guzzling truck, pick up some backup tapes and get on that ‘Road to Recovery’.

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EMC World kicked off this morning first with a presentation from yours truly on Data Deduplication 2.0 – Comprehensive Capacity Optimization.  We discussed how data deduplication 1.0 is morphing into all areas of EMC’s storage ecosystem in order to optimize capacity everywhere.  I talked about data deduplication as well as single instancing and compression are technology components that will help EMC achieve this goal.

Next Joe Tucci spoke in his keynote about how data deduplication as well as compression are key technologies for the data center of the future and how these technologies will aid in delivering a more efficient cloud computing strategy.  Not only will these technologies help in building out a cloud infrastructure, they will also help to protect a cloud infrastructure (which is what we are all about here).

Finally, Paul Maritz gave his keynote on how the virtual infrastructure will help to fulfill the goals of a private cloud.  He also discussed that it is time to invest in software and people and not hardware as VMware continues to drive value into their software to help make your data center, better, smarter, stronger and faster for less.

Each of these initiatives will have an impact on how data is stored and ultimately protected but new storage services will enable more efficient storage and protection across the virtual data center and the cloud and ultimately take backup beyond and put you on the road to recovery.

Stay tuned for more updates about the show.

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