Traditional backup, not to name any, has few challenges in our modern IT environments. First is that addiction to copying data over and over again, leaving behind a very long trail of tape that can become very challenging to manage, or even to make sense of, even with the best catalogues.

Second, its the reason why we have a backup window, due to its thirst for CPU and network resources. It will very simply bring all systems to a halt during the backup process. An old friend use to say, if you want to know whether you have a solid network and IT infrastructure or not, start your backups and watch what happens.

By looking at the above symptoms, data deduplication seems to be a good remedy, but all deduplication solutions are not created equal. The choice should be based on the type of IT operations that you have. The performance of the solution will directly impact your backup window. Common sense would tell you the smaller the backup window the higher performance you need, but there is a bit more to that. Your deduplication solution should be able to support different types and techniques of backup operations. An example would be how effective the solution is at deduplicating multiplexed backup streams!

Also, since the deduplication process itself is a CPU-intensive operation, you should check whether you could exclude some data types from deduplication and only apply the process where it matters. It doesnt make sense to try to deduplicate encrypted data, for example, as its pretty much all unique data. You also want to exclude some other data streams, such as archiving medical imagery or microscopic or telescopic data, that are not very friendly to the deduplication process.

And since we are talking about backups, despite the fact that data deduplication allows you retain data longer on disk resources, many organizations still have a requirement to backup data to tape. In that case, youd want a solution that streamlines the process and integrates with tape infrastructure seamlessly. Having two separate infrastructures and performing backups twice, once to the deduplication target and another to a tape library, defeats the whole purpose of deduplication.

And to get back to the waste management analogy, in the greatest borough of all, Manhattan, during curbside collection days you see only garbage bags and no containers, and there is definitely a logistical reason for that. So as with any waste management system, while choosing your data deduplication solution, try to align it to your business and IT goals and operations.

Check out FalconStors next data deduplication announcement on April 26^th. You may find your solution there!

 

That's where automation comes in. By investing in DR automation, businesses reduce the risk and uncertainty that traditional recovery processes carry. Not only does automation technology provide peace of mind, it reduces costs and saves resources by minimizing the time it takes to recover.

To learn more about DR automation, check out this white paper. It explains in detail how disaster recovery automation quickly works to preserve critical data saving valuable time and money in the process.

These are often called delta snapshots and contain only changes from the original source data, and therefore do not consume a
significant amount of disk storage space relative to the original volume. Systems have now advanced to provide greater flexibility by maintaining up to 1,000 snapshots per volume for highly granular recovery points and enhanced business continuity. These snapshots can be maintained on any storage array in addition to the array where the primary data is found. Plus, backups can complete in a fraction of the time with no production impact. In fact, the notion of the backup window disappears as backups can be run at any time, even during the busiest production hours. The impact is diminished even further when heterogeneous devices can be treated as a common pool instead of needing to be backed up one by one.

For full application support, application-aware snapshot agents provide complete data protection for databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2, and messaging applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, to ensure that snapshots are taken with full transactional integrity. Transactional integrity means that the database copy can be brought online without going through lengthy database rebuild processes or file-system checks, saving hours of valuable recovery time in the event of a disaster. Comprehensive transactional data
and integrity is attained through an automated process that takes snapshots of databases for point-in-time granularity and disaster recovery. The agents allow instant recovery to any point in time without requiring scripting. They also utilize a group snapshot feature to ensure transactional integrity of databases across multiple storage volumes.

Data protection has come a long way since the early days of full backup tapes!  

This year we included some important new input channels: our key partners and our customer advisory board. We all understand garbage in, garbage out; but what happens when you feed the hopper with insightful gems from industry leaders? You get diamonds, or at least a collection of precious stones.

We had an amazing exchange of ideas. We continued to propagate new processes and best practices. America learned from Europe, Asia learned from America, we all learned from Asia and we all left the meeting smarter and more energized. I believe we are a much tighter, more globally aware company as a result.

Was it fun? Yes. Was it grueling? Yes. We delivered nearly 100 hours of content to 140 professionals. That adds up to about seven man years of work. I believe now we are all better armed and prepared to educate and support our global customer base.

Thanks to all who attended and special thanks to the key sales and marketing people who put together such a positive event. Well done.

Now the term storage virtualization has been abused by all storage vendors, many of them delivering some form of virtualization within the same storage array, which diluted the meaning of term. Lately the term storage hypervisor is being used to distinguish the high-level storage abstraction layer that spans across systems and storage protocols from inter-array storage virtualization.

The benefits of a storage hypervisor map to those of a server hypervisor: high utilization rate, storage-platform and vendor independence, enabling data mobility at the storage layer, simplifying overall storage management, etc. But this year we are seeing a resurgence of demand for a storage virtualization. This demand is motivated by three main factors, SSD adoption, Thailand, and finally an all-too-familiar but equally vague term, big data.

Solid state disk (SSD) or as some people prefer to call it, solid state memory, flash, NAND, NAND flash, or any other term for super high- performance, extremely expensive storage is all the rage.  It seems everyone wants to have some flash in their data center, but the big boys, or the storage cartel as some refer to the big 5 (not me of course) are charging an exorbitant amount for SSD. Therefore people are looking around and buying the technology from new SSD startups that are popping up like mushrooms these days. The challenge remains that once you buy this expensive toy how do you fit it into your storage infrastructure? Its great, but it doesnt talk to anything around it! And this when the storage hypervisor becomes the knight on the white horse.

Thailand  is where a lot of hard disk is manufactured. The humanly devastating floods in Thailand this year have had far-reaching effects on every data center around the globe. The disk shortage and the significant disk price hikes that resulted have had IT managers worldwide scrambling to keep up with capacity demand while trying to manage their already tight budgets. Being fully accustomed to the initial value proposition of server virtualization, higher resources utilization rate, they are starting to look for the same on the storage side. And again, the storage hypervisor is the answer.

And finally big data. Yeah, what about that? Well, the cartel has been singing the big data song very loudly; and you can bet that when the big sopranos, in the musical sense of the term, sing in a choir, the CIOs will listen. Big data it is, and big data machines we will buy. But that machine is now running live applications and running heavy load analytical tools and applications, which are bringing business applications to a halt. And here is where the storage hypervisor excels, (at least  the one from FalconStor), allowing organizations to move or copy data to secondary resources and run all the analytical tools you can dream of in total isolation from production environments. And, by the way, weve been doing this for a quite a while for all the data junkies who have been running big data analytics for years before we called it big data.

 

Storage hypervisor! Thank you, again!