PRIMARY STORAGE DATA REDUCTION • TOP BACKUP APPS
Managing the information that drives the enterprise
STORAGE Managing Storage for
Virtual Servers
Vol. 10 No. 4 June 2011
New tools are emerging to handle the specific chores of configuring and managing storage for virtual servers.
ALSO INSIDE Tape’s new techs reshape its role Centera users getting short shrift? Backup isn’t just for the big guys SMBs spawn storage innovation Dedupe still big news in backup
STORAGE inside |June 2011
STORAGE inside | june 2011
Tape makes a comeback (but was it ever gone?) 5
EDITORIAL Someone is spreading rumors about the death of tape, but there’s plenty of life left in this v enerable technology. by RICH CASTAGNA
Centera: End of an era, or end of an error? 9
STORWARS With its Centera storage system, EMC was the standardbearer for content-addressable storage; but the proprietary nature of the product is wearing thin. by TONY ASARO
Managing storage for virtual server environments 12
Virtual servers and storage systems don’t have to exist in separate worlds; new tools and plug-ins provide single-console management of both virtual servers and storage. by ERIC SIEBERT
Pare down primary storage 22
There’s been a great deal of talk about ho w data deduplication is moving from backup to primary storage. Dedupe’s great for trimming primary data stores, but other technologies may do a better job in certain situations. by JACOB GSOEDL
Quality Awards VI: NetBackup, Avamar emerge as top backup apps 33
In our sixth Quality Awards for backup and recovery software, users picked a relative newcomer and a weathered veteran as service and reliability standard-bearers among backup apps. by RICH CASTAGNA
What about the little guy? Data protection for smaller organizations 43
HOT SPOTS Small- and medium-sized businesses should know their options when it comes to backing up and protecting data. And there are plenty of choices, ranging from SMB-specific backup apps to cloud-based services. by LAUREN WHITEHOUSE
Storage innovation is moving up the food chain 47
READ/WRITE The classic scenario where enterprise storage technology filters down to small- and medium-sized companies is being turned on its ear, and some of the coolest d evelopments are happening in midmarket systems. by JEFF BOLES
Dedupe performance is effective if not remarkable 50
SNAPSHOT Approximately 60% of our survey respondents are using data deduplication in backup. Find out the data reduction rates they’re getting and what non-dedupers say about the technology. by RICH CASTAGNA
From our sponsors 52
3
STORAGE June 2011
Useful links from our sponsors. Cover image by Enrico Varrasso
server rooms that require GPS Navigation.
SOLVED. We get that virtualization can drive a better ROI. Highly certified by Microsoft, VMware, HP and others, we can evaluate, design and implement the right solution for you. We’ll get you out of this mess at CDW.com/virtualization
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editorial | rich castagna
Tape makes a comeback (but was it ever gone?)
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
5
h
Somebody out there is spreading rumors about the death of tape, but there’s plenty of life left in this venerable storage technology.
OW MANY ARTICLES have you read in the past year that begin along the lines of
“Despite reports to the contrary, tape isn’t dead”? A lot, right? Not only is it a little tedious to have to deal with the same “tape is dead/tape isn’t dead” stuff all the time, you have to wonder who actually pronounced tape dead in the first place. Don’t look at me—I have nothing against tape. And although journalists get blamed all the time for dumping the tried and true in favor of the latest, coolest technologies, I think it might be the dedupe, virtual tape library (VTL) and disk backup target guys who are trying to drive a stake through tape’s heart. Wasn’t it Data Domain that used to hand out those “Tape Sucks, Move On” bumper stickers at trade shows? And if you read the name of a certain VTL maker from right to left it says “no tapes.” In any event, if tape is truly dying, it’s dragging out the process even longer than Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco did when he took his sweet time shuffling off this mortal coil back in 1975. But tape’s not dying. In fact, at times it seems to be developing and taking on new tasks even faster than its nemesis (hard disk drive technology) has managed. Just consider tape capacities. Oracle’s latest incarnation of its T10000 tape drive (the “C” model) has a capacity of 5 TB. That’s 5 TB of native, uncompressed capacity, so the T10000C leapfrogs LTO-5’s 1.5 TB (3 TB compressed) capacity. A 5 TB tape is pretty amazing when you consider that in November 2005, T10000’s capacity was 500 GB, a 10x improvement in just a little over five years. And IBM just announced that it has pumped its TS1140 tape drive up to 4 TB native. Although 3 TB hard disk
A 5 TB tape is pretty amazing when you consider that in November 2005, T10000’s capacity was 500 GB, a 10x improvement in just a little over five years.
Copyright 2011, TechTarget. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher. For permissions or reprint information, please contact Mike Kelly, VP and Group Publisher (mkelly@techtarget.com).
Storage May 2010
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
6
drives are now available and hard disk drive technology has progressed at nearly the same 10x clip over the same period of time, tape is still the capacity king. Our purchasing research surveys also show how tape has evolved over the years. The biggest change is that companies are spending less money on tape gear. If we go back just four years, 33% of companies said they were increasing the amount of money they planned to spend on tape systems, while 24% were cutting back. Fast forward to today and those numbers are reversed, with 34% now planning to reduce their spending. But that’s not surprising given the role of disk in most companies’ backup operations. Our surveys also show that IT shops buying new libraries are, on average, buying smaller ones: Back in 2006 the average tape library purchased had 159 slots; today it’s approximately 92. That’s a 42% drop, but during the same time, drive capacities went up several hundred percent. So, disk has definitely made a dent and tape technology itself is making smaller look bigger. But according to our most recent survey, 77% of firms still spin off all or some backup data to tape. They just need a little less tape gear to do it these days. Backup probably isn’t the biggest part of the “future of tape” story. Two other areas have heated up over the last few years, where tape is either in the thick of things already or positioned to be there. The first is media and entertainment, specifically for video production. Digitized movies need tons of storage space to handle all the raw footage that needs to be whittled down, edited and made into a commercial product. And hundreds of television stations (big and small) across the country need huge amounts of capacity to store years’ worth of footage. In many cases, these media companies are using tape as a “sub-primary” tier where these big files can reside until they’re needed and then streamed back to disk. Tape is perfect for this because of its ample capacity, portability and low cost of operation. (Hmm, weren’t those the same reasons tape got big in backup in the first place?) Other organizations in fields that require working with massive files, like genomics, geo exploration and healthcare, are also looking at tape in a new light these days. Maybe the best application for tape is one of its old standbys—archiving— which is getting renewed interest these days as IT shops have to simultaneously deal with mountains of new data while cleaning up existing data storage
Other organizations in fields that require working with massive files, like genomics, geo exploration and healthcare, are also looking at tape in a new light these days.
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
systems to make better use of them. Tape makes a lot of sense as part of an archive scheme; large amounts of tape-based data can be easy to access and available when needed. It won’t be delivered with the kind of immediacy that primary storage offers., but that’s OK because it’s archival data. Those scenarios aren’t all that new, but they’ve become more feasible because of tape’s growing capacities and throughput. But what might turn out to be the biggest new development in tape technology in decades has largely lingered under the radar for the year or so it’s been available. Developed by IBM as part of it LTO consortium efforts, the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) can turn tape into something it decidedly isn’t—disk. Well, not really; it just sort of looks like disk. LTFS carves out a bit of an LTO-5 tape cartridge’s capacity and reserves it for a file system or an index of the contents of the tape. That makes it look a lot like a disk system with its file system. In fact, an application that’s looking for NAS storage could just as easily hook up with the LTFS-enabled tape instead. All that’s required, in addition to an LTO-5 drive and media, of course, is a bit of client software you can get for free from IBM. With that software, you can mount an LTFS-enabled LTO-5 cartridge, browse its index, and retrieve the specific file or files you need by dragging and dropping to and from the tape. Taken a step further, if backup app vendors decide to adopt the LTFS interface, tapes could be interchangeable among different backup applications. Or, put another way, you’d be able to replace your current backup app with another one tomorrow and still have easy access to all the data you parked on tape with the prior backup application. That kind of interchangeability is bound to make backup vendors nervous, so you’re not likely to see them jumping on LTFS any time soon, but archive vendors are actively adapting their apps to take advantage of LTFS. So, if those rumors are true and tape is really dead, it’s doing a damn good job of haunting disk and backup vendors. 2 Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the Storage Media Group. * Click here for a sneak peek at what’s coming up in the July 2011 issue.
Sponsor resources
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STORAGE June 2011
Up to 85% of computing capacity sits idle in distributed environments. A smarter planet needs smarter infrastructure. Let’s build a smarter planet. ibm.com/dynamic
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StorWars | tony asaro
Centera: End of an era, or end of an error?
a
With its Centera storage system, EMC was the standard-bearer for content-addressable storage; but the proprietary nature of the product is wearing thin.
Tape’s comeback
ROUND 2003, we seemed to be on the threshold of a new storage era that had
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
9
the potential to revolutionize how we stored data and could use it more effectively in our businesses. The optimism was encouraged by a new concept called content-addressable storage (CAS) and EMC was its key proponent with its Centera system. Centera was an object-based storage system that provided extended metadata attributes to give users more control over and insight into data. EMC successfully recruited independent software vendors (ISVs) to support Centera’s application programming interfaces (APIs), which required more work but provided deeper integration between the applications and hardware. It was a powerful vision: a storage system that removed the complexities and many of the limitations of storage-area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS). You could scale Centera to any size without increasing the amount of administration. You could leverage the extended metadata to enforce policies on content. The most prominent example of this is its write-once read-many (WORM) capability that prevents stored documents from being altered so they can be used as evidence in litigation or for audits. EMC took a very smart and practical approach to the Centera go-to-market, knocking on the doors of those industries that had relied heavily on optical disks. The ROI calculations suggested that even though there would be an increase in infrastructure spending, the operational cost reductions could save users hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over time. And with the backing of the ISVs that supported Centera, it was relatively easy to sell hardware/software solutions. Those efforts were bolstered by EMC’s great reputation and excitement around the new storage platform that seemed to present a great vision for the future of storage. And then the government passed a number of regulations, including SEC Rule 17a-4, Sarbanes-Oxley, the FDA’s 21 CFR Part 11 and new HIPAA rules, propelling Centera into a billion dollar business. The timing was perfect. Other storage vendors and startups joined the fray. NetApp added WORM functionality and Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun all made efforts but ultimately failed in this space. Hitachi acquired a startup called Archivas but missed the
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
market. Other startups, including Caringo and Permabit, found this was a big vendor’s game. In fact, it was only EMC’s game and everyone else either did OK (NetApp) or terribly (pretty much everyone else). But trouble began to brew in paradise. Some people questioned the viability of Centera, while others said it was slow and expensive, proprietary, corrupted data and wasn’t that easy to manage. Over time, Centera went from being the hottest (and coolest) storage system in the market (and often one of its most controversial), to almost being just an afterthought. It became yesterday’s news. Today there appears to be little to no continued engineering for Centera, even though there’s an estimated 600 petabytes of it in the market. One Centera user told me he believes the latest release of it will never come out. EMC is going to replace this particular user’s Centera with Atmos, and provide the same functionality with the exception of WORM and immutability, which this user’s environment doesn’t require. However, depending on when or if Atmos ever supports WORM, the customers using the Compliance Editions of Centera may be stuck. Some of the objections to Centera may have been right. However, the main problem is Centera’s proprietary APIs. Both EMC and ISVs locked-in customers, so they’ve avoided price erosion or competitive threats. Some users told me that unlike other storage systems, Centera has actually gone up in price. It’s tough to migrate data from a Centera to a competitive platform. I spoke to another user whose firm took 18 months to migrate off Centera, an effort that included custom development and pressuring its ISV to support the move. There should be some outrage about this situation. Centera is a proprietary system, which should be unacceptable in today’s data center. It’s true that Centera users made their choices voluntarily, but it now looks like they’re locked into a platform that has no long-term future. EMC should offer a way to make Centera non-proprietary and provide free migration services to a more sustainable and open platform. Meanwhile, the storage vendors that missed the boat when Centera was on the rise (all of them) will get a second chance as Centera’s star fades. 2
Today there appears to be little to no continued engineering for Centera, even though there’s an estimated 600 petabytes of it in the market.
Tony Asaro is senior analyst and founder of Voices of IT (www.VoicesofIT.com).
10
STORAGE June 2011
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Managing storage for virtual server environments
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
12
Virtual servers and storage systems don’t have to exist in separate worlds; new tools and plug-ins provide single-console management of both virtual servers and storage. BY ERIC SIEBERT
v
IRTUALIZED SERVERS HAVE created plenty of problems for data storage managers, not the least of which is keeping track of the relationships between data storage assets and virtual servers. Some storage management products have adapted to this new environment, allowing users to keep track of virtual servers, the apps they host and the storage they’re using.
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
FUNCTIONAL SILOS
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
13
Inside every data center there are typically silos related to specific functional areas, each with a dedicated group responsible for management. There are teams responsible for managing specific data center resources, such as the network, servers, storage systems and virtualization. Each group focuses on managing its own area and works with other groups when needed to handle integration points between groups. If a new server requires shared storage, the server team works with the storage team to get storage provisioned and presented to the server. In a traditional physical server environment, the storage group can easily manage the relationships between storage and physical servers: a logical unit number (LUN) created on a storage-area network (SAN) is assigned to a physical server and only that server uses the LUN. Server virtualization changes all that. But storage is perhaps the most critical component of a virtual infrastructure, so it must be implemented and managed properly for maximum performance and reliability. The relationship between server virtualization and storage is a tight one, so the management must be as well.
VMs CAN COMPLICATE STORAGE
Among server virtualization’s strengths are its features that provide high availability and workload load balancing across a virtualization cluster.
Virtualization is about the sharing of a common set of physical resources among many virtual machines (VMs). Virtualization file systems like VMware Inc.’s VMFS allow many physical servers to read and write concurrently to the same LUNs. This is possible because of a special locking mechanism that ensures multiple hosts have exclusive access to each of their VMs on a shared LUN. Among server virtualization’s strengths are its features that provide high availability and workload load balancing across a virtualization cluster. Features such as VMware’s vMotion and Storage vMotion can move VMs while they’re running from host to host, as well as from one storage device to another. To further complicate things, the movement of virtual machines on storage devices doesn’t just occur at the virtualization layer. Many storage arrays now have an automated storage tiering feature built around tiers of devices with different performance characteristics such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and SATA drives that are pooled and presented to a host. The array dynamically
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
14
moves data across tiers based on performance demands. All of that occurs at the storage layer and the virtual host is unaware of the movement. While the features that move VMs around are beneficial, they can cause headaches for storage and virtualization administrators as the relationships among virtual machines, the physical hosts they’re located on and the storage device where their virtual disk resides is a dynamic one. That will have the most impact when troubleshooting problems and monitoring performance. Because the virtualization admin is unaware of what’s occurring at the storage layer and the storage admin doesn’t know what’s happening at the virtualization layer, neither one gets to see the big picture.
PLUG-INS FILL THE MANAGEMENT GAP Storage vendors recognized the importance of tight integration between storage and server virtualization and have worked to develop software integration with existing virtualization management tools like VMware’s vCenter Server. VMware offers a solid set of vSphere APIs that allows third-party vendors to integrate their products with vSphere. Also, vCenter Server has a plug-in architecture that makes it easy for thirdparty plug-ins to seamlessly integrate with the vCenter Server admin interface. Plug-ins appear as a tab inside the vSphere Client, and their behavior and appearance can be customized. This allows options or information that’s specific to a particular object like a VM, host or cluster, to be displayed. Not all storage vendors were quick to develop vCenter Server plug-ins, but most of the major storage vendors today offer plug-ins that allow their storage arrays to be monitored and managed from within vCenter Server. Each vendor’s storage plug-in typically only supports specific storage array models and families, and the plug-in’s functionality and features vary from vendor to vendor. Generally, storage plug-ins may offer these capabilities: • Simplified expansion of virtual datastores. LUNs are created and presented to hosts, which then create datastores such as VMFS volumes from them. To increase the size of a datastore, the underlying LUN on the storage array needs to be increased first. The plug-in allows both the LUN and VMFS volume to be increased from the same console. • Storage provisioning. Storage admins can assign chunks of storage to virtual environments; this allows virtualization administrators to create and
Plug-ins appear as a tab inside the vSphere Client, and their behavior and appearance can be customized.
STORAGE June 2011
Su p e r i o rSt o r a g eSo l u t i o n s
Advi zeX UnleashesthePoweroftheConverged I nfrastructure
D2 DSt or eOnc eP 4 000 3P AR Adv i z e X—Pr o v i di ngEx c e pt i o na lI TEng i ne e r i nga nd Co ns ul t i ngf o rHP’ sCo mpr e he ns i v eSt o r a g eSo l ut i o ns T ur nt oAdv i z e Xf o rI nde pt hI ndus t r yEx pe r t i s e o nHP’ sCo mpl e t eRa ng eo fSt o r a g ePr o duc t s : HP’ s3PAR>Exper i encet hebes tnewt echnol ogyi nt hes t or agemar ketpl ace. HP’ sP4000>I dealf orv i r t ual i z eds er v erenv i r onment s . HP’ sD2DSt o r e Onc eDa t aDe dupl i c a t i o n>Dr amat i cal l yi mpr ov ebackup/r ecov er yt i mes, accessdat af ast erandr educecapaci t yr equi r ement sf orbackupsbyupt o95per cent wi t hHP’ sadv anceddedupl i cat i onsol ut i onst hr oughAdv i z eXTechnol ogi es.
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Advi zex Technologi es Headquarters -6480 Rocksi deWoods Blvd.S,Sui te190 I ndependence,OH 44131 2169011818 [ voi ce] 2169011447 [ fax]
STORAGE
Quality Awards: Backup apps
size their own LUNs and manage the configuration of the storage. • Storage management. A plug-in can give virtualization administrators the ability to manage storage array capabilities like LUN masking and thin provisioning, set multi-pathing and tiering policies, optimize I/O settings and define access lists. • Automated VM storage mapping. This type of plug-in lets you monitor and manage the physical/virtual relationships among the virtual machines, hosts and storage arrays. This can help the virtualization admin by mapping between the virtualization identifier and the storage array identifier for the same disk. • View detailed storage information. This brings information from the virtualization layer and the storage layer into a unified view, and lets you see the exact details of the physical storage layer from within the virtualization console. • Physical storage health monitoring. This capability provides information on the physical health of storage arrays so virtualization admins will know when physical hardware fails or becomes degraded. • VM cloning. The cloning of VMs is basically just a data copy job that can be offloaded to the array, which can do it more efficiently. This is especially useful in virtual desktop environments that have larger VM density. • Backup and recovery at the storage layer. This allows you to create point-in-time snapshots on the storage array of VM datastores. You can then mount the snapshot and restore VMs from it as needed.
Backup not just for the big guys
ANATOMY OF A PLUG-IN
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
16
The joining of the storage and virtualization layers allows the virtualization admin to stay within the context of the virtual management user interface (UI) without having to grant access to a specialized storage management UI. Most of the storage plug-ins let you define credentials for the storage arrays that will be managed inside the virtualization management console. This allows seamless integration between the two consoles, and it’s also good from a security perspective as you don’t have to grant virtualization admins direct access to the storage management console. Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co.’s approach to the integration of storage management into vCenter Server was to leverage its Insight Control management console and integrate portions of it within vCenter Server as a plug-in. In addition to a module to manage HP storage, the company included a module to manage HP server hardware. So both server and storage hardware can be managed from a single console. When the plug-in is installed, it creates a special HP storage privilege within vCenter Server that allows access to be
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Storage vendors’ vCenter Server
plug-ins
Storage Vendor
vCenter Server Plug-In
Dell/Compellent
vSphere Client Plug-in (information only, scheduled for Q4/2011 release)
Dell/EqualLogic
EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware (Downloadable via Dell support site)
EMC
PDF describing multiple plug-ins (Downloadable via PowerLink)
Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter
HP/3PAR
HP 3PAR Utility Storage and VMware vSphere
IBM
IBM XIV Management Console for VMware vCenter
NetApp
Virtual Storage Console
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
17
granted to the HP storage plug-in. The plug-in brings storage management into virtualization but not vice versa. vCenter Server has very granular permissions and roles can be defined so access to storage-specific information can be granted to storage admins. This allows storage admins to have a single console to all the storage arrays integrated with vCenter Server. The HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter Server currently supports the firm’s EVA, P4000, P9000/XP and P2000/MSA storage arrays. The plug-in creates an HP Insight Software tab in vCenter Server that appears whenever a VM, host or cluster is selected; it also offers a menu option for actions such as cloning/creating virtual machines or creating datastores. The tab provides a storage overview of the object selected, such as storage provisioned to a host, and storage provisioned by a host and the arrays it’s connected to; it also provides links to directly launch the storage management console for an array. There are various views you can select to see different information such as storage disks and host bus adapters (HBAs) and paths; in addition, you can customize the columns and choose from the many detailed storage fields that are available. Sections allow you to see specific storage objects related to the object you’ve selected such as virtual machines, hosts and datastores.
STORAGE June 2011
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EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. © Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
STORAGE
The vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
VMware Inc.’s vStorage APIs were introduced in vSphere to allow tighter integration of advanced storage capabilities between vSphere and third-party storage applications and devices. There are multiple categories of vStorage APIs that deal with different aspects of storage integration. The vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) were co-developed with specific storage vendors (e.g., Dell, EMC, NetApp) to enable storage array-based capabilities directly from within vSphere. Here are three examples of current VAAI features: • Copy Offload. Virtual machine (VM) cloning or template-based deployment can be hardware accelerated by array offloads rather than file-level copy operations at the ESX/ESXi host. This can also be applied to other copy operations that occur such as Storage vMotion. • Write-Same Offload. When provisioning an eager-zeroed virtual disk (VMDK), the formatting process sends gigabytes of zeros from the ESX/ESXi host to the array. With write-same offload, the array handles formatting the eager-zeroed thick VMDK. • Hardware-Assisted Locking. The traditional file-locking mechanism using SCSI reservations is replaced by a more efficient mechanism that is atomic (handled in a single operation). This allows for an increase in the number of ESX/ESXi hosts deployed in a cluster with VMFS datastores. As the vStorage APIs mature, expect to see even more offloading and features at the storage array level such as UNMAP support (return zeroed VMFS blocks), thin provision stun (stuns I/O if a thin volume runs out of space), NFS file-level copy (analogous to XCOPY on block) and NFS advanced file attributes (so vSphere can better understand more about files on NFS storage).
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
19
SINGLE-CONSOLE CONTROL In addition to information about storage arrays, there are storage tools that can perform actions such as cloning a virtual machine by utilizing arraybased replication, creating batches of new virtual machines, or provisioning storage and creating VMFS volumes. While these tasks can be accomplished within vCenter Server, the HP plug-in provides automation and offloads the tasks to the storage array, which can handle it more efficiently.
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
The marriage of storage and virtualization in a single console allows for tighter management integration, which benefits virtualization admins, but is less beneficial to storage admins. Virtualization admins can get more involved with some of the storage-related functions, but those are traditionally handled by storage admins who may be reluctant to give up their control of provisioning and managing storage resources. Demonstrating the integration and features, and granting storage admins access to the virtualization console may help convince them to empower the virtualization admin to perform some basic storage management. Even if virtualization admins aren’t allowed to manage storage resources, being able to view detailed storage array information is advantageous by itself. While there are plenty of management apps that integrate with VMware, there are plug-ins available for other hypervisors like EMC Corp.’s Virtual Storage Integrator for Hyper-V, which integrates with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Vendors have focused on VMware because of its popularity and because VMware has a deeper and more mature set of APIs and SDKs. The storage integration plug-ins that are available for virtualization are relatively new and vendor offerings are still evolving with more features and better integration. No matter what hypervisor you have, storage plug-ins are a must-have for any virtualization environment, as they provide better visibility and integration, and enhance your ability to monitor, manage and troubleshoot your critical storage resources. 2
The marriage of storage and virtualization in a single console allows for tighter management integration, which benefits virtualization admins, but is less beneficial to storage admins.
Eric Siebert is an IT industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience who now focuses on server administration and virtualization. He’s the author of VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration (Prentice Hall, 2009) and Maximum vSphere (Prentice Hall, 2010).
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STORAGE June 2011
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DESTROY
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
Pare down primary storage
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how data deduplication is moving from backup to primary storage. Dedupe’s great for trimming primary data stores, but there are other technologies that can do the job.
s
BY JACOB GSOEDL
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
22
TANDARD IN MANY backup and archival products, data reduction is now
becoming more prevalent for primary storage. The main drivers for this phenomenon are measurable cost savings from having to buy fewer disks and reducing annual support fees, to lowering operational expenses related to storage management. Data reduction may also have a pleasant impact on data storage performance: by not having inactive data occupy valuable high-performance storage, overall storage and application performance may get a welcome performance boost. In a typical enterprise, according to Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) research, 80% of files stored on primary storage
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
23
haven’t been accessed in the last 30 days; the same report asserts that inactive data grows at more than four times the rate of active data. With these facts in mind, it’s no surprise that data reduction techniques have been making their way into primary storage. But in contrast to data reduction methods for backup and archiving, primary storage systems can’t tolerate even a little impact on performance and reliability, the two most relevant attributes of primary storage systems. As a result, data reduction techniques vary and have different relevance on primary storage than they do in storage used for backup and archival. On backup and archival systems, deduplication and compression are the primary data reduction methods, but for primary storage those techniques are clearly second to more subtle and proven approaches that don’t hinder performance as dedupe and compression can. These are the main data reduction techniques that are being applied on primary storage systems: • Choosing the right RAID level • Thin provisioning • Efficient clones • Automated storage tiering • Deduplication • Compression
CHOOSING THE RIGHT RAID LEVEL Putting “choosing the appropriate RAID level” at the top of a list of data reduction techniques may seem strange at first, but unlike other data reduction approaches, it’s the only option available on all storage systems and it greatly impacts disk requirements, performance and reliability. Were it not for its detrimental reliability shortcoming, RAID 0 (block-level striping across all disks without parity or mirroring) would be the most cost-efficient and best performing option, but losing the whole RAID group with the loss of a single drive makes it a no-go in the data center. RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping) and RAID 10 (mirrored drives in a striped set), on the other hand, combine good performance and high reliability but require twice the disk capacity and are therefore the antithesis of data reduction. RAID 5 (block-level striping with distributed parity) with its requirement for a single additional drive has been the best compromise in recent years, but as disks increased in size and rebuild times grew longer, the risk of losing two drives while the RAID is rebuilt after a drive failure has increased to an uncomfortable if not unacceptable level. As a result, storage vendors have been implementing RAID 6, which extends RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block and drive, enabling it to withstand two concurrent drive failures without data loss—but it comes with a varying per-
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
formance penalty, depending on implementation. RAID 6 and a RAID 6 performance benchmark should be on anyone’s evaluation list when shopping for a new storage system. “Unlike most of our competitors, we can do RAID-DP [NetApp’s implementation of RAID 6] with only 5% overhead,” claimed Larry Freeman, senior storage technologist at NetApp.
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
24
THIN PROVISIONING
“Before we had Compellent arrays and thin provisioning, we relied on users helping us estimate storage requirements and we added 20% to 100% to user estimates, depending on what application it was for.”
Until recently, there wasn’t a real alternative to overprovisioning allocated storage and, as a result, storage utilization has been dismal. It’s not unusual for companies to have hundreds of gigabytes of overprovisioned and unused storage in their data centers. “Before we had Compellent arrays and thin provisioning, we relied on users helping us estimate storage requirements and we added 20% to 100% to user estimates, depending on what application it was for,” said Brandon Jackson, CIO of Gaston County, NC, —BRANDON JACKSON, CIO of Gaston County, NC describing the unscientific and wasteful process used by many organizations to ensure sufficient storage capacity. Thin provisioning technologies can help put an end to this profligate management of storage resources by allowing storage to be assigned to users and servers beyond actual available physical capacity. Storage is allocated to thin-provisioned volumes on an as-needed basis. For instance, thin provisioning enables allocation of a 100 GB volume even though it may only have 10 GB of physical storage assigned. Thin provisioning is transparent to users, who will see a full 100 GB volume. The cost savings of thin provisioning can be tremendous and enables storage utilization beyond 90%. The number of vendors that support thin provisioning is growing quickly, and it should be one of the key criteria when selecting a storage system. Keep in mind, though, that not all thin provisioning implementations are equal. While some systems require setting aside areas that can be thin provisioned, in others all capacity is available for thin provisioning without the need for special reservation. The ability to convert regular “thick” volumes into “thin” volumes, how unused storage is recovered and the way thin provisioning is licensed are other areas of differentiation. With more storage provisioned than physically present, running out of physical storage is an ever-present risk in thinly provi-
STORAGE June 2011
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STORAGE
Side by side: Primary storage reduction technologies
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Technology
Efficacy
Prevalence
Challenges
RAID level
RAID 5/6 provide best capacity/ performance/ availability compromise
Widely available; proven technologies
RAID 6 processing overhead; performance of RAID 6 varies greatly among vendor implementations
Thin provisioning
• Excellent storage capacity savings • No performance impact
Increasing availability; thin provisioning is turning into a must-have feature
Charged by capacity by most vendors; not all implementations are reservationless
Efficient clones
• Excellent storage capacity savings • No performance impact
Thin cloning is not widely available yet
Varying levels of efficiency
Automated storage tiering
Enables efficient usage of expensive fast storage tiers
Increasing availability
Depending on the implementation, requires managing rules that keep data on appropriate storage tiers
Deduplication
Best suited for virtual machine images, emails and file-based content
In early adoption stage; not widely available yet
Processing overhead causes performance impact
Compression
Outperforms deduplication with random data
In early adoption stage; not widely available yet
Processing overhead causes performance impact
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
26
sioned environments. Therefore, alerts, notifications and storage analytics are essential features that play an even greater role in thinly provisioned environments than they do in traditionally provisioned storage.
EFFICIENT CLONES Cloning is used to create an identical copy of an existing volume, and it has become more relevant with server virtualization where it’s frequently used to clone virtualized OS volumes. The most basic and still predominant implementation of a clone is creating a full copy of the source volume, with the cloned volume allocating the same amount of physical storage as the source volume. The next level up is the ability to clone thinly provisioned volumes. While
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
27
some storage systems turn thinly provisioned volumes into thick volumes during cloning, others can create a copy of a thinly provisioned volume where the thinly provisioned source volume and cloned volume allocate the same amount of physical storage. “In our Virtual Storage Platform [VSP], we’re able to create a thin-provisioned clone from another thin-provisioned volume,” said Mike Nalls, senior product marketing manager at Hitachi Data Systems’ enterprise platform division. The most efficient clones are thin clones, where a cloned volume holds no data at all, but instead references blocks on the source image. Thin clones only have to store differences between the original image and the cloned image, resulting in huge disk space —MIKE NALLS, senior product marketing manager, savings. In other words, a fresh clone Hitachi Data Systems’ enterprise platform division requires minimal physical disk space and only as clones change do differences from the original image need to be stored. NetApp’s FlexClone and the cloning feature in the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance (Sun ZFS Storage 7000 series) are examples of storage systems that support thin clones today.
“In our Virtual Storage Platform [VSP], we’re able to create a thinprovisioned clone from another thinprovisioned volume.”
AUTOMATED STORAGE TIERING Automated storage tiering is another mechanism for reducing data on primary storage. An array’s ability to keep active data on fast, expensive storage and to move inactive data to less-expensive slower tiers allows you to limit the amount of expensive tier-1 storage. The importance of automatic storage tiering has increased with the adoption of solid-state storage in contemporary arrays and with the advent of cloud storage to supplement on-premises storage. Automated storage tiering enables users to keep data on appropriate storage tiers, thereby reducing the amount of premium storage needed and enabling substantial cost savings and performance improvements. There are a couple of key features to look for in automated storage tiering: • The more granular the data that can be moved from one tier to another, the more efficiently expensive premium storage can be used. Sub-volumelevel tiering where blocks of data can be relocated rather than complete volumes, and byte-level rather than file-level tiering, are preferable. • The inner workings of the rules that govern data movement between tiers will determine the effort required to put automated tiering in place. Some sys-
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
tems, like EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), depend on policies that define when to move data and what tiers to move it to. Conversely, NetApp and Oracle (in the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 series) advocate that the storage system should be smart enough to automatically keep data on the appropriate tier without requiring user-defined policies.
DEDUPLICATION Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
28
Well established in the backup and archival space, data deduplication is gradually finding its way into primary storage. The main challenge that has slowed adoption of deduplication in primary storage is performance. “Dedupe and performance simply don’t get along,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO Group, Stillwater, Minn. Nonetheless, deduplication has found its way into a few storage systems and it’s simply a matter of time before others will follow. NetApp offers a deduplication option for all its systems, and it can be activated on a per-volume basis. NetApp’s deduplication isn’t executed in realtime though. Instead, it’s performed —GREG SCHULZ, using a scheduled process, generally founder and senior analyst, StorageIO Group during off hours, that scans for duplicate 4 KB blocks and replaces them with a reference to the unique block. Instead of generating a unique hash for each 4 KB block, NetApp uses the block’s existing checksum to identify duplicate blocks. To prevent hash collisions, which happen if non-identical blocks share the same checksum (hash), NetApp does a block-level comparison of the data in the blocks and only deduplicates those that match. As far as performance is concerned, “we can deduplicate an average 1 TB of data per hour,” NetApp’s Freeman said. NetApp’s deduplication is currently performed by individual volumes or LUNs and doesn’t span across them. Similar to NetApp, Oracle features block-level deduplication in its Sun ZFS Storage 7000 series systems. But unlike NetApp, dedupe is performed in realtime while data is written to disk. “The overhead of deduplication is less than 7%, depending on the environment and amount of changes in the environment,” said Jason Schaffer, Oracle’s senior director of product management for storage. Among smaller players, BridgeSTOR LLC, with its application-optimized storage (AOS), supports deduplication. Another vendor apparently committed to data reduction is Dell Inc. With the acquisition of Ocarina Networks in 2010, Dell picked up content-aware deduplication and compression technology, which it intends to incorporate into all its storage systems. “Starting the second half of this year, we’ll launch storage products with the Ocarina deduplication and compression built-in,”
“Dedupe and performance simply don’t get along.”
STORAGE June 2011
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STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
said Bob Fine, director of product marketing at Dell Compellent. While the aforementioned companies developed or acquired data deduplication technology, Permabit Technology Corp. has developed Albireo, a dedupe software library it intends to license to storage vendors, enabling them to add deduplication to storage systems with the advantage of time to market and without the risk inherent in developing it themselves. “With Xiotech, BlueArc and LSI, we have three announced customers, and we expect first product shipments with Permabit deduplication later in 2011,” said Tom Cook, Permabit’s CEO.
COMPRESSION Compression shares many of the challenges of deduplication in primary storage. Like deduplication, compression has a performance overhead; it’s limited to a volume and whenever data is moved out of that volume, it has to be decompressed, just like deduplicated data has to be deduped when moved from one volume to another. In an ideal world, different tiers, including backup
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
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Archiving: Quick data reduction on primary storage The simplest method of regaining valuable space on primary storage is through archiving. Companies, like individuals, have a tendency to keep too much stuff. Businesses keep reams of data on primary storage for the unlikely event it might be needed one day. Archiving can be as simple as relocating data to archival storage and restoring it back to primary storage when needed—at zero cost. Those who want to automate the process of moving data into archival storage and restoring it to primary storage can use products like Symantec Corp. Enterprise Vault or Waterford Technologies’ archival products that can leave “stubs” (references) to archived data on primary storage that conceal the location of files from users. The archival product will automatically pull data referenced by “stubs” back into primary storage when accessed, fully transparent to users.
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
and archival tiers, should be able to accept and deal with compressed and deduplicated data, but because of a lack of standards, they usually don’t. Compression and deduplication are complementary technologies and vendors that implement deduplication usually also offer compression—BridgeSTOR, Dell, NetApp and Sun all do. While deduplication is usually more efficient for virtual server volumes, email attachments, files and backup environments, compression yields better results with random data, such as databases. In other words, deduplication outperforms compression where the likelihood of repetitive data is high. In addition to the above vendors, EMC Corp. offers compression in its VNX Unified storage products and with the single-instance storage feature for filebased content, which enables storing single copies of identical files, it does offer some level of deduplication. IBM offers its Real-time Compression Appliances (STN6500 and STN6800) to front-end NAS storage; the appliances and the compression technology came to IBM via its 2010 Storwize acquisition. “The Storwize real-time compression software will be a software feature on some IBM arrays later this year, and it will be available across all lines within 18 months,” said Ed Walsh, director of IBM’s storage efficiency strategy.
A BLEND OF NEW AND OLD TECHS Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
31
Data reduction on primary storage is a reality today and with the unchecked growth of data, it will undoubtedly become a key part of storage efficiency.
Data reduction on primary storage is a reality today and with the unchecked growth of data, it will undoubtedly become a key part of storage efficiency. Data reduction features like RAID 6, thin provisioning, efficient clones and automated storage tiering are becoming must-haves and should be on anyone’s feature list when evaluating a primary storage system. Data deduplication and compression, on the other hand, are emerging technologies that will become more pervasive over time, but right now these relative newcomers are just beginning to have an effect on primary storage. 2 Jacob Gsoedl is a freelance writer and a corporate director for business systems. He can be reached at jgsoedl@yahoo.com.
STORAGE June 2011
Memorizing RAID level definitions and knowing which level does what can be: Confusing Hard to Remember Useful All of the above
So how much do you think you know about RAID? Find Out For Yourself and Test Your Knowledge with Our Exclusive RAID Quiz! And don’t forget to bookmark this page for future RAID-level reference.
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NetBackup, Avamar emerge as top backup apps Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
In our sixth Quality Awards for backup and recovery software, users picked a relative newcomer and a weathered veteran as service and reliability standard-bearers. BY RICH CASTAGNA
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
33
IT’S BEEN SAID that familiarity breeds contempt, but in the world
of backup and recovery software, it looks like it might be breeding contentment. Backup application users seem more pleased than ever with their programs. The Storage magazine Quality Awards for Backup and Recovery Software surveys have seen overall scores climb steadily for both midrange and enterprise backup apps over the years, and that trend continues in the sixth edition of the award, with the highest winning scores we’ve ever tallied in both categories and the highest average overall scores for all products.
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
EMC Corp.’s Avamar coasted to victory in the midrange group by sweeping all five rating categories on its way to a very impressive overall 6.69 rating. In the past, Avamar didn’t garner enough survey responses to become a finalist. Among the five enterprise finalist backup apps, Symantec Corp.’s NetBackup prevailed with a strong 6.46 in a tough competition with IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager (6.33). To put the high scores in perspective, consider that all five qualifying enterprise products racked up overall scores of 6.00-plus; in the past we’ve never had more than two products break the 6.00 barrier. On the midrange side, only Avamar ended up with a rating higher than 6.00, but the four other midrange finalists all had scores that could have won past competitions. Thirty-three products were included in the survey (see “Products in the survey”); five midrange and five enterprise products emerged as finalists based on 566 product evaluations made by 345 survey respondents (see “About the Quality Awards”).
ABLE SALES TEAMS Buying backup software is a lot more than just making a simple purchase. It represents a commitment that will likely shape how a company protects its data for years to come. As such, storage managers need the assurance of a capable sales and sales support team before taking the plunge. The Quality Awards sales-force competence rating category endeavors to measure the intangibles that contribute to a confident purchase. In the enterprise product group, Symantec NetBackup and IBM TSM topped the group with average scores of 6.50 and 6.43, respectively, divvying up top honors for the seven statements in the category. IBM came out on top for having a well-prepared sales force, with leading scores for the statements “My sales rep is knowledgeable
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
34
ABOUT THE QUALITY AWARDS The Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. The results are derived from a sur vey of qualified readers who assess products in five main categories: sales-force competence, initial product quality, product features, product reliability and technical suppor t. Our methodology incorporates statistically valid polling that eliminates market share as a factor. Indeed, our objective is to identify the most reliable products on the mark et regardless of vendor name, reputation or size. Products were rated on a scale of 1.00 to 8.00, where 8.00 is the best score. A total of 34 5 respondents provided 566 backup and recovery software evaluations.
STORAGE June 2011
PRODUCTS IN THE SURVEY The following products were included in the Quality Awards for Backup and Recovery Software survey. (The number of responses for finalist products is shown in parentheses.)
ENTERPRISE Asigra Inc. Cloud Backup* BakBone Software Inc. NetVault (now part of Quest Software Inc.)* CommVault Systems Inc. Galaxy or Simpana (23) EMC Corp. NetWorker (42) Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. Data Protector (38) IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (60) Symantec Corp. NetBackup (76)
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Syncsort Inc. BEX (Backup Express)* Zmanda Inc. Amanda Enterprise*
MIDRANGE Acronis Inc. Backup & Recovery (38) Arkeia Software Network Backup* Atempo Inc. Time Navigator*
Storage for virtual servers
BarracudaWare Yosemite Server Backup* BridgeHead Software Inc. HT Backup* CA ARCserve Backup (38)
Primary storage data reduction
CMS BounceBack Server* Copiun Inc. Data Manager* Druva Software inSync* EMC Corp. Avamar (22)
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
EMC Retrospect* FalconStor Software Continuous Data Protector (CDP)* i365, a Seagate Company EVault Data Backup Software* Microsoft Corp. Data Protection Manager (DPM) (24) NovaStor NovaBackup* Paragon Software Group Paragon Drive Backup Server* PHD Virtual Technologies PHD Virtual Backup (formerly esXpress)* Quest Software Inc. (formerly Vizioncore) vRanger*
Dedupe still big backup news
SonicWALL Inc. SonicWALL Continuous Data Protection (CDP)* StorageCraft Technology Corp. ShadowProtect*
about my industry,” “My sales rep understands my business” and “My sales rep keeps my interests foremost.” Symantec’s strengths were having a knowledgeable sales support team, being easy to negotiate with, being flexible and having licensing schemes that offered good value. The last is particularly notable as Symantec has taken some heat in the past over its licensing programs. In the midrange group, EMC Avamar’s category average of 6.71 was the highest sales-force competence rating recorded to date, helping it to easily outdistance the other four products. Avamar’s commanding score was achieved by coming out on top for all seven statements in the category and was highlighted by two 7.00-plus scores: a 7.10 for “The vendor’s sales support team is knowledgeable” and a 7.05 for “The vendor’s licensing formula offers good value.” With a category score of 5.91, CA ARCserve Backup just barely nosed out Symantec Backup Exec (5.90) to take second place. Microsoft Corp. Data Protection Manager (DPM), a first-time finalist, followed closely with a 5.83.
Symantec Corp. Backup Exec (126)
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UltraBac Software UltraBac Server or Enterprise Edition* Veeam Software Veeam Backup & Replication* Vision Solutions Inc. Double-Take RecoverNow (formerly Double-Take Backup)* *Did not receive enough responses to be included in the final results
35
STORAGE June 2011
FIRST IMPRESSIONS The worst thing that can happen with software (for both users and vendors) is to have it sit on a shelf or struggle through a long, painful implementation. Judging from the
OVERALL RANKINGS
6.46 Symantec
n CommVault Galaxy (or Simpana)
6.33 IBM
n EMC NetWorker
n HP Data Protector
6.14 EMC
n IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
6.06 CommVault
n Symantec NetBackup
6.06 HP 4.00
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
SALES-FORCE COMPETENCE
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
5.00
5.50
6.50 Symantec
6.34 Symantec
6.43 IBM
6.06 EMC
6.02 EMC
6.02 HP
5.83 CommVault
5.93 IBM
5.80 HP
5.92 CommVault
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.00
6.50
7.00
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.34 Symantec
6.59 Symantec
6.27 HP
6.48 CommVault
6.26 IBM
6.41 EMC
6.13 CommVault
6.21 HP
6.05 EMC
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.00
6.50
7.00
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.52 Symantec
82%
IBM
6.38 IBM
80%
Symantec
6.17 EMC
79%
HP
5.97 HP
76%
EMC
5.94 CommVault
70%
4.50
5.00
5.50
7.00
6.00
6.50
7.00
6.00
6.50
7.00
BUY AGAIN?
TECHNICAL SUPPORT
4.00
6.50
PRODUCT RELIABILITY
6.66 IBM
4.00
6.00
INITIAL PRODUCT QUALITY
PRODUCT FEATURES
Quality Awards: Backup apps
4.50
6.00
6.50
7.00
40%
50
CommVault 60
70
80
90
100
(Percent)
36
STORAGE June 2011
Based on a 1.00 to 8.00 scoring scale
ENTERPRISE
QUALITY AWARDS VI • BACKUP SOFTWARE
Quantum’s DXi-Series Appliances with deduplication at lower cost than the provide higher performance p competitor. leading competi Q Quantum has helped some of the largest organizations in the world integrate deduplication into their backup process. The benefits they report are immediate and d ssignificant—faster backup and restore, 90%+ reduction in disk needs, automated DR using remote replication, reduced administration time—all while lowering overall costs u and improving the bottom line. a Our award-winning DXi®-Series appliances deliver a smart, time-saving approach O to t disk backup. They are acknowledged technical leaders. In fact, our DXi6500 was just nominated as a “Best Backup Hardware” finalist in Storage Magazine’s Best j Product of the Year Awards—it’s both faster and up to 45% less expensive than the P leading competitor. le
G more bang for your backup today. Get Faster performance. Easier deployment. Lower cost. F
Contact us to learn more at (8 (866) 809-5230 or visit www.quantum.com/dxi Preserving The World’s Most Importan Important Data. Yours.™ ©2011 Quantum Corporation. All rights reserved.
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
38
scores in the initial product quality rating category, neither is likely to happen with MIDRANGE these vendors and their backup products. HEAVY HITTERS NetBackup cruised to a win among enterAverage amount of data backed prise products by posting the highest ratings up weekly using these midrange backup applications. for five of the seven statements in the category en route to an average 6.34 rating, which AVERAGE TBs BACKED topped EMC NetWorker (6.06) and HewlettBACKUP APP UP PER WEEK Packard (HP) Co.’s Data Protector (6.02). NetEMC Avamar . . . . . . . . . 34.7 Backup’s strong scores came for “This product Symantec uses tape efficiently” and “This product Backup Exec . . . . . . . . 11.0 delivers good value for the money”—a key statement. CA ARCserve Backup . . 9.7 Ironically, IBM’s scores for those two Microsoft Data statements were just a bit higher, and it came Protection Manager . . . 5.9 out on top for the other two statements. HowAcronis Backup & ever, its overall 5.93 score was pulled down by less impressive ratings for “This product did Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 not require professional services,” as well as configuration and ease-of-use issues. For midrange apps, Avamar led the category with a 6.32 rating, putting it ahead of Symantec Backup Exec’s 6.13. Avamar had the highest scores for six of the seven statements, highlighted by a 6.86 for “This product delivers good value for the money.” Its margin of victory could have been greater but for a relatively low 5.14 for the professional services statement; Acronis Inc.’s 6.00 was the highest rating for that statement.
FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS A slick sales experience and a painless deployment will fade fast if the product ultimately doesn’t deliver as promised. For a backup application, that means satisfying specific needs and meeting current and future requirements. IBM’s TSM topped the enterprise app charts with a product features category score of 6.66 that edged out NetBackup (6.59) and CommVault Systems Inc. (6.48); CommVault scored highest for three statements related to management features, file system backup and archiving. But all the enterprise products fared well, with those three leaders closely followed by EMC NetWorker (6.41) and HP Data Protector (6.21) for a remarkably strong showing. It’s clear the spec sheets of enterprise backup applications are very well appointed with needed features. The midrange products didn’t fare quite as well, with the exception of EMC
STORAGE June 2011
QUALITY AWARDS VI • BACKUP SOFTWARE
6.69 EMC
n Acronis Backup & Recovery n CA ARCserve Backup
5.96 Symantec
n EMC Avamar
5.71 CA
n Microsoft Data Protection Manager
5.63 Acronis
n Symantec Backup Exec
5.62 Microsoft 4.00
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
SALES-FORCE COMPETENCE
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
5.00
5.50
6.71 EMC
6.32 EMC
5.91 CA
6.13 Symantec
5.90 Symantec
5.95 Acronis
5.83 Microsoft
5.65 CA
5.44 Acronis
5.50 Microsoft
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.00
6.50
7.00
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.83 EMC
6.01 Symantec
5.84 Symantec
5.71 Acronis
5.68 CA
5.71 CA
5.62 Acronis
5.54 Microsoft
5.60 Microsoft
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.50
7.00
6.00
6.50
7.00
6.00
6.50
7.00
90
100
PRODUCT RELIABILITY
6.79 EMC
4.00
6.00
INITIAL PRODUCT QUALITY
PRODUCT FEATURES
Quality Awards: Backup apps
4.50
6.00
6.50
7.00
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
BUY AGAIN?
TECHNICAL SUPPORT
6.78 EMC
100% EMC
5.90 Symantec
75%
5.63 Microsoft
66%
Acronis
5.61 CA
63%
Microsoft
5.44 Acronis
61%
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
6.00
6.50
7.00
40%
50
Symantec
CA 60
70
80
(Percent)
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STORAGE June 2011
Based on a 1.00 to 8.00 scoring scale
MIDRANGE
OVERALL RANKINGS
STORAGE
ENTERPRISE HEAVY HITTERS Average amount of data backed up weekly using these enterprise backup applications.
BACKUP APP
AVERAGE TBs BACKED UP PER WEEK
Tape’s comeback
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . 50.9
Centera users: Short shrift?
Symantec NetBackup . . . . . . . . . . 44.0
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
40
Avamar, which notched four 7.00-plus statement scores on the way to a sweep and a 6.79 for the category, which handily outpaced Symantec Backup Exec’s 6.01. Avamar’s impressive run through the product features category was highlighted by a staggering 7.37 for a new statement, “This product works well with virtualized servers.”
DAY IN, DAY OUT
Product features are fine . . . as long as the product continues to chug away without stumbling too often. In the product reliability EMC NetWorker . . . . . 38.0 rating category, we capture impressions related HP Data Protector . . 32.3 to things like platform support, software bugs, CommVault Galaxy patching and upgrades. (or Simpana) . . . . . . . . 30.4 The enterprise apps were all closely bunched in this category, with NetBackup’s 6.34 nudging out HP Data Protector (6.27), which ended up in a virtual tie with IBM TSM (6.26). But CommVault, with a 6.13, and EMC NetWorker, at 6.05, also scored very well. Top statement scores were also distributed, with CommVault getting one, IBM two and Symantec the remaining five. It was another story for the midrange group as EMC Avamar scored highest for all statements to win the category by nearly a full point, 6.83 to Symantec Backup Exec’s 5.84. All the scores were solid in the category, but Avamar stood out with a 7.20 for platform support and scores of 6.95 for both “The product meets my service-level requirement” and “Vendor provides comprehensive upgrade guidance.”
ONGOING APP SUPPORT The difference between a software bug and user error may be tough to define at times, but when help is needed with backup software, it’s usually an emergency situation. All vendors in our survey are doing a good job of providing technical support and advice, as exemplified by the highest-ever scores in both the midrange and enterprise groups. The enterprise leader for technical support was NetBackup, which led the field for all seven support statements for a very solid category average of 6.52. NetBackup scored high marks for delivering support per contractual
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
agreements and providing good training and support documentation. IBM TSM was a strong second at 6.38, followed by EMC Networker (6.17). There was no suspense in the midrange group as EMC Avamar scored another impressive category win. Avamar’s 6.78 average was buoyed by a 7.10 for providing support as agreed and a 6.95 for training. Second-place Symantec Backup Exec (5.90) had three 6.00-plus statement scores, led by a 6.17 for providing support as contractually specified. Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
WITH 20/20 HINDSIGHT Asked if they would buy the same product again now that they have some experience with it, most respondents showed loyalty to their backup apps. But sometimes we see a disconnect between these “buy again” sentiments and the other product ratings. In the enterprise group, IBM’s buy-again percentage was slightly higher than that of overall winner Symantec NetBackup—82% to 80%, respectively, with the other three products in the group ranging from 70% to 79%. Among midrange products, Avamar netted an unprecedented 100% of users who said they would buy the product again today—not surprising given the consistently high marks the product received across all categories. Seventy-five percent of Symantec Backup Exec users said they would buy it again; for the remaining products, the range was 61% to 66%. 2 Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the Storage Media Group.
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
41
STORAGE June 2011
Manage data differently with Fluid Data storage. Always put your data in the right place at the right time for the right cost.
See a live webinar featuring Fluid Data technology at compellent.com/ttdemo.
Don’t have time for a webinar? Scan to see a snapshot of customer success with Dell Compellent storage. For scan app visit get.beetag.com
hot spots | lauren whitehouse
What about the little guy? Data protection for smaller organizations.
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
43
Small- and medium-sized businesses should know their options when it comes to backing up and protecting data. Here’s a list of product choices and some vendors who have SMB options worth exploring.
t
HE ONLY BIG difference between the computing environment of a large organi-
zation and a small one is scale. The paradox is that any type of disruption to computer systems or loss of access to data for an extended period of time— while a nuisance in a larger company—could be detrimental to a small- or medium-sized business (SMB). In either case, it’s imperative to protect system and data assets. But what’s the best approach for smaller organizations? While less likely to be challenged by the “backup window” and recovery time objective (RTO) issues faced by larger counterparts, smaller organizations are characterized by limited IT staff and budgets. Therefore, keeping data protection simple and cost-efficient is crucial. There are a number of solutions and approaches that meet these criteria for smaller firms.
A SWITCH TO DISK
Leveraging disk in backup processes not only speeds backup and recovery, it opens up a lot of options for capturing copies for system and data protection.
Storing backup copies on tape is still a preferred method in smaller firms. In a survey of 441 data protection professionals, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that a tape-only backup strategy in companies with fewer than 1,000 employees is more predominant than in firms with more than 1,000 employees (by a 3:2 margin). Tape is a cost-efficient, long-term storage media, but its use can slow recovery and require operator intervention. Leveraging disk in backup processes not only speeds backup and recovery, it opens up a lot of options for capturing copies for system and data protection. While the adoption of disk storage requires a CapEx investment, OpEx savings make tape replacement with disk more palatable. For that reason, more SMBs should focus on the cost justification for a switch to disk.
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
SIMPLIFY BACKUP AND RECOVERY PROCESSES
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
44
Keeping things simple starts with the way backup and recovery is accomplished. One approach is to capture a complete image of the system, including the operating system, application software, system state and data. Image or system-level backup accelerates the process vs. a file-by-file inspection. The real advantage, however, is in the recovery process because the system can be rapidly recovered from “bare metal.” Vendors such as Acronis, CA and Symantec offer disk-imaging products that allow IT to clone a whole disk image and rapidly restore it as a whole. For virtual environments, Veeam and Quest Software vRanger offer similar functionality. Continuous data protection (CDP) technology is another appealing approach for smaller organizations because it can capture data modifications continuously to enable recovery from any previous point in time. CDP captures block- or filelevel changes, mirroring data to the CDP server, which is typically an appliance. The beauty of CDP is that in the event of disruption on a primary system, the technology eliminates the need for a mandatory restore. The CDP appliance can operate as the primary vehicle temporarily. CDP solutions vendors include CA, FalconStor, IBM, Quest Software and SonicWall. Some backup solutions offer semi-continuous backup in seconds-to-minutes intervals. Microsoft, Symantec, Syncsort and Unitrends deliver CDP-like functionality as they’re based on snapshot technology rather than continuous capture. These solutions take snapshots at intervals as frequently as every few seconds, but for small organizations even hourly capture is reasonable and more cost-effective. A snapshot-style approach to backup isn’t limited to software-based solutions. There are plenty of storage systems vendors promoting backup via snapshot, including Dell, NetApp and Nimble.
PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL APPLIANCE PACKAGING Packaging data protection in an appliance form factor simplifies the procurement and deployment of backup and recovery. Appliance-based solutions are pre-assembled with the necessary compute, storage, software and network interface components, taking the guesswork out of configuring and acquiring piece parts, and offering a more plug-and-play installation and configuration experience. And, since appliances are purpose-built for processing, they don’t disappoint on performance. Arkeia, Barracuda Networks, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hewlett-Packard, i365, QuorumLabs, SonicWall, Symantec and Unitrends are just a few of the vendors enabling appliance-based data protection deployment. A virtual appliance eliminates the need for physical appliance packaging, and delivers the ultimate simpler and cheaper data protection experience. It’s a pre-installed, pre-configured, fully tested application with an operating
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
system tailored to run that application—delivered in a virtual machine. The aim is to eliminate the materials, installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software. A virtual appliance is an attractive approach to deploying applications because it improves resource utilization vs. physical hardware approaches and offers more flexibility in configuring high availability, load balancing and business continuity. Virtual appliances for data protection include those from Arkeia, EMC, FalconStor and PHD Virtual Technologies. Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
45
SaaS AND CLOUD STORAGE The discussion of a simpler and more cost-efficient data protection strategy would be incomplete if it didn’t include a cloud option. Backup Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based storage are emerging as go-to solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses. Why? Backup SaaS requires no up-front capital investment in backup infrastructure and little to no administrative overhead. This approach takes advantage of on-demand resources available from a third-party provider on a subscription basis. Similarly, taking advantage of on-demand cloud-based storage—rather than on-premises storage systems—for backup copies reduces storage capacity requirements and lightens the load of storage administrators, lowering costs. There’s no shortage of vendors offering backup SaaS. Those catering to the commercial sector include Axcient, Carbonite, i365, IBM, KinecticD, SunGard, Symantec, VaultLogix, Venyu and VMware/Mozy. For cloud backup storage, Amazon, Microsoft and Nirvanix have partnerships with a number of backup vendors to provide the backup destination for copies made with in-place backup software.
DON’T COMPROMISE No business should skimp on system and data protection, least of all one that could suffer some adverse impact on revenue or customer relationships due to system downtime or data loss. There are countless vendors, solutions and approaches aimed at minimizing this risk, while keeping complexity and cost to a minimum. 2 Lauren Whitehouse is an analyst focusing on backup and recovery software and replication solutions at Enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, Mass.
STORAGE June 2011
SAN Health Problems?
helps you diagnose the early warning signs Virtual Instruments helps you diagnose and proactively prevent SAN I/O problems. With VirtualWisdom™, a real-time performance monitoring solution, you can experience dramatically increased application performance, infrastructure utilization, and overall availability. Learn how we help when no one else can:
www.virtualinstruments.com/SAN-Health Š2011 Virtual Instruments. All rights reserved.
read/write | jeff boles
Storage innovation is moving up the food chain
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
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47
The classic scenario where enterprise storage technology filters down to small- and medium-sized companies is being turned on its ear, and some of the coolest developments are happening in mid-market systems.
i
F YOU CAN get past the clamor of the recent cloud buzz and other “new” storage
technologies, you might notice some big changes in the mainstream storage market. And in a reversal of recent history, the change is filtering up from small- and medium-sized business (SMB) and small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers, rather than the usual pattern of new technologies chasing after the enterprise first. As a result, mid-sized companies have an enterprise-sized menu of data storage choices to select from, many of which are poised to change business capabilities in big ways. One example is the kind of scalability that makes storage more adaptable and cost-effective than ever before, which we call “adaptable capacity and performance.” This scale-out approach to storage allows companies to add more capacity or performance independently and as needed. But adaptable capacity and performance is about more than just reacting to new demands. It can also make planning for and acquiring storage much easier, paving the way for a sustainable approach that does away with cyclical re-planning and replacement. Scalability offers the premise of pay-as-yougrow storage, so you can start small with an infrastructure built for current needs and add storage as you need it. When new technology becomes available, the “new-tech” storage nodes can be added to the existing system with the older ones getting phased out over time. And it’s all done nondisruptively. A few block storage vendors have stood out in this area for some time; Dell EqualLogic and HP LeftHand are certainly leaders. They differentiated themselves by taking advantage of standardized hardware and focusing attention on software innovation for things like automated pooling, tiering and load balancing. That combination of standard hardware and software innovation has evolved into “intelligent infrastructure integration,” which includes integration on multiple levels. The most basic is hardware integration with the infrastructure; instead of dedicated storage locations, standard hardware and Ethernet connectivity lets storage be installed and scaled anywhere, or even in different places for increased availability. The next is workload integration in which
STORAGE June 2011
STORAGE
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Sponsor resources
sophisticated block management allows storage solutions to peer into the data they store. In a server virtualization environment, this has allowed these systems to connect storage features like optimization, protection and replication to virtual servers without kludgy workarounds. These next-generation vendors have rapidly harnessed every new virtual infrastructure integration point from hypervisor vendors, including Citrix’s StorageLink and VMware’s vStorage APIs, such as VAAI. But the idea of intelligent infrastructure integration also includes physical integration. Industry standard hardware results in a form factor that looks and acts much like a server, which means adding storage in the infrastructure no longer requires dedicated storage racks or aisles. A new crop of storage startups is also stirring things up. Scale Computing, for example, offers a highly scalable commodity-based clustered storage system. Scale Computing’s storage is scale-out and deeply integrated, and makes use of an intelligent block layout engine to create a single clustered storage system from many nodes, with RAID 10-like features built in and automatic rebalancing and mirroring of data as new nodes are added. Its systems are multiprotocol, supporting both block and file storage (iSCSI, CIFS and NFS). Storage innovation isn’t confined to the SMB/SME space. Companies like 3PAR, EMC Isilon, IBM, NetApp and Pillar are evidence that innovation still lives in the enterprise world. NetApp’s WAFL, for example, is about intelligently laying out data on disk and across different components of the storage subsystem for ongoing storage optimization and deeper storage capability integration. The point is that it takes more than slick storage hardware to deliver intelligent data storage. For the coming private and public cloud architectures, intelligent storage will be a mandatory part of any solution that hopes to scale, stay efficient, be uniquely available and deliver complex sets of functionality like granular partitioning, federation and multi-tenancy. 2
These next-generation vendors have rapidly harnessed every new virtual infrastructure integration point from hypervisor vendors, including Citrix’s StorageLink and VMware’s vStorage APIs, such as VAAI.
Jeff Boles is a senior analyst at Taneja Group. He can be reached at jeff@tanejagroup.com.
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STORAGE June 2011
snapshot
Dedupe performance is effective if not remarkable
Tape’s comeback
Centera users: Short shrift?
Storage for virtual servers
Contrary to recent reports, data deduplication isn’t the only big news in storage these days. But its dramatic effects are still being felt and appreciated in many organizations. Slightly more than 60% of res pondents use dedupe in backup. A few years ago almost all dedupers used an appliance, but this group is split fairly evenly among the prevailing methods: appliances lead with 20%, but deduping with backup software (19%) and virtual tape libraries (15%) aren’t far behind. Yet dedupe is still a relatively new technology, as evidenced by the two-thirds of users who have been deduping for less than two years. Nearly 75% are seeing dedupe ratios of 20:1 or less, with the average hovering around 23:1. One of the few knocks against dedupe is that restoring data isn’t so easy, but 73% say it’s easier or the same as restoring non-deduplicated data. And how about those non-dedupers? Fifty-seven percent expect to succumb to dedupe within the next two years. —Rich Castagna
Do you currently use data deduplication technology in your backup process? Yes, with an appliance 20%
No dedupe yet 40%
Yes, with backup software 19%
Primary storage data reduction
Other 6% Quality Awards: Backup apps
Yes, with a VTL 15%
On average, what data deduplication ratios are you achieving? Greater than 100:1
1%
50:1 to 100:1
6%
30:1 to 50:1
20%
20:1
26%
10:1
26%
5:1
21% 0%
Backup not just for the big guys
How would you describe the process of restoring deduplicated data? 53% The same as restoring non-deduplicated data
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
20% Easier than restoring non-deduplicated data 15% A little more difficult or time-consuming than restoring non-deduplicated data 10% We haven’t had to restore any deduplicated data yet 2%
Considerably more difficult or time-consuming than restoring non-deduplicated data
10
20
30
43
%
Average backup disk capacity savings from using data deduplication.
Sponsor resources
“Data duplication not only allows us to take extra backups and hold them for longer, but the replication between our dedupe appliances . . . requires mu ch less bandwidth than if all data needed to be transferred.”
—Survey respondent
50
STORAGE June 2011
TechTarget Storage Media Group
STORAGE Vice President of Editorial Mark Schlack
STORAGE
Editorial Director Rich Castagna Senior Managing Editor Kim Hefner Executive Editor Ellen O’Brien Creative Director Maureen Joyce Contributing Editors Tony Asaro, James Damoulakis, Steve Duplessie, Jacob Gsoedl, W. Curtis Preston
Executive Editor Ellen O’Brien Senior News Director Dave Raffo
Tape’s comeback
Senior News Writer Sonia Lelii Features Writer Carol Sliwa Senior Managing Editor Kim Hefner
Centera users: Short shrift?
Associate Site Editor Editorial Assistant
Megan Kellett Allison Ehrhart
Storage for virtual servers
Primary storage data reduction
Senior Site Editor Andrew Burton Managing Editor Heather Darcy Associate Site Editor John Hilliard Features Writer Todd Erickson
Quality Awards: Backup apps
Backup not just for the big guys
SMBs spawn innovation
Dedupe still big backup news
Senior Site Editor Sue Troy Assistant Site Editor Francesca Sales
Senior Site Editor Sue Troy UK Bureau Chief Antony Adshead
TechTarget Conferences Director of Editorial Events Lindsay Jeanloz
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Editorial Events Associate Jacquelyn Hinds Storage magazine Subscriptions: www.SearchStorage.com Storage magazine 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 editor@storagemagazine.com
51
STORAGE June 2011
COMING IN
JULY
Backing up virtual servers There are an array of backup choices tailored for virtual environments, including built-from-the-ground-up backup apps that focus solely on virtual servers and tried-and-true traditional backup apps that take advantage of new hooks into virtual server environments. We tell you what to consider and offer best practices.
Soup up your storage It’s hard not to focus on disk storage capacity these days, but array performance is often just as critical. To cope with capacity, you can add more disk, but kicking up performance usually isn’t that easy. We identify performance-sapping bottlenecks in storage environments and offer tips for speeding up storage systems.
Turn your data center storage into a storage cloud There’s been a lot of talk, and confusion, about private clouds. Just what constitutes an internal cloud and what are the benefits over traditional storage infrastructures? We list the characteristics that turn traditional storage into cloud storage, and describe the tools and products that can help you turn your data center storage into a private cloud storage service. And don’t miss our monthly columns and commentary, or the results of our Snapshot reader survey.
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• Webcast: Learn how to manage data differently with Fluid Data storage. Register today! • White Paper: iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel SANs: Three Reasons Not to Choose Sides
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• Storage Usability a Critical Requirement for IT in Small and Medium-sized Businesses and Remote Offices • Implementing a Unified Storage System in a Small Business Environment
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• Quantum DXi Validation Report • Deduplication for Dummies
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