DavsDisorder

I just shot off a quick email to a prospect who is about to submit an internal review of the backup tools on the market in view of a possible company wide change...trying to get their attention (so as to deliver some consulting for them :)))) I quickly spun together a quick list of current backup players off the top of my head (the list is pretty big these days compared to the 90s!!), so I thought I would share it with you and welcome additions or comments...note that this was not a thoroughly researched email and we as a company certainly do not sell/integrate all of these (probably not even half)...but the majority of them we have either tested or had exposure to in customer environments.

I may consider making this a more formal listing one day complete with known OEM arrangements and licensing model overview. Get in touch if you'd find such a thing useful.

I assume you have surveyed the major Enterprise solutions ?

• Symantec NetBackup (dedupe from PureDisk or external target device)
  
• EMC Networker (dedupe from either Avamar or Data Domain or other external target device)
• IBM Tivoli (dedupe from built in storage pool dedupe or external target device)
• Commvault Simpana (built in dedupe or external target device)
  

But then there are other players...

The fringe Enterprise players?

• CA ArcServe (built in dedupe or from Commvault Simpana (built in dedupe or external target device)
  
• Quest Bakbone (dedupe from external target device or their VTL software)
• Syncsort BackupExpress (dedupe external target device)
  
• Arkeia Network Backup (built in dedupe and from external target device)
  

The SMB Specialists (some which can play in some Enterprise spaces) ?

• Symantec BackupExec (dedupe from PureDisk or external target device)
  
• HP Data Protector (your incumbent I think you said ...?)
• Novastor NovaBackup (dedupe from external target device)
• Amanda Backup (dedupe from external target device)
• Yosemite (now Barracuda - built in dedupe or external target device)
  
  

The service provider/cloud delivered/charge-back-able players ?

• Asigra
• Seagate eVault
• Vembu StoreGrid
  

And then the niche/specialists (usually Windows only or virtual only or imaging only - can be used with other traditional backup tools)

• Veeam
• Acronis
• PHD Virtual
• StorageCraft
• Microsoft DPM
• Druva - Phoenix and Insync (think KPMG already use InSync for Laptop protection)

Just came across this quote from EMC Asia Pacific President, Steve Leonard;

Leonard said the use of one company to approach market would help to win business over competition, and provide better servicing.

“What we’re trying to do is position Vblock as an architecture, and VCE as a company that can bring that with one support number, one architectural campaign, and we think that if we can do that faster, we think we can win,” he said.

“We want to be the guys who help put the engines in the data centres." (my emphasis)

So, do we Steve, so do we...oh, its in our company name!

I refer here to a recent article penned by Tony Pearson of IBM discussing a recent catastrophic failure of an EMC Symmetrix within the State of Virginia's IT environment. Aside from some cheap inter-vendor point scoring, Tony mentions as one of the 'lessons' from this event; "Lesson 4: This can serve as a wake-up call to consider Cloud Computing as an alternative option". There is a faint tinge of irony here in that this post of Tony's was written in Australia in early September. At the end of that month the IT community (and the broader travelling public) witnessed how a 'cloud' provider can be just as exposed to downtime as your now unfashionable internal IT team. Virgin Blue's ticketing and reservation systems were brought offline due to an as yet unidentified systems failure within the storage data path. Virgin Blue do not own/operate their own ticketing and reservation system, but source such a service from Navitaire (disclosure: Navitaire are an old client of my firm). It took Virgin Blue (and I assume Navitaire) almost 7 days to return this service to normal operation. I wont call these observations 'lessons', rather just 'comments;

1. I agree with Tony (and probably every other seasoned data storage professional)...storage systems fail, that's why we have backup systems. These systems in turn are definitely only as good as their last successful test...if regularly testing is too much of a burden then you ought to at the very least audit the environment according to some baseline.
2. Whilst the person in question at the State of Virginia may be a little ashen faced currently, I can assure you that the "service delivery manager" (as they were called in the hey day of outsourcing), at Virgin Blue for the reservation and ticketing system will be feeling the same churning in the lower part of the stomach...his contact at Navitaire probably likewise. Just because a cloud provider is 'big' or ' branded' or, (inserted alarm bells), 'multi-tenanted', does not mean for one second that they can do better/cheaper job of helping you meet your SLAs for service uptime and/or data recovery.

I advise strong governance of how storage systems are used in medium - large organisations, as well as a strict focus on 'recoverability' in governance of backup systems.

In the former instance remember that 'speeds and feeds' as Tony puts it indicate in my experience the 'bleeding edge' of what a product can reliably do...divide by 2 and set that as your peak load. The more complex the data storage layout on a disk array (fragmented RAID  groups, meta-LUNs, concatenated LUNs, etc, etc), the longer your restore/rebuild will be. Remember that in the never ending race toward better storage performance, there is a necessary compromise around recoverability.

In the latter instance, just 'think' in terms of recovery, not 'did it get backed up'...build backup systems that focus on the process of data restoration (we talk only of data availability here, compute availability is a whole different story). It is far better to have a backup run for 8-10 hours, complete, validate and be easily restorable than a backup that runs in half that time but require multi-step, error prone recovery procedures.

A friend (Carl, thank you), just sent me this...a little reminder of how far data storage technology has come in 50 years.



In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the  first 'SUPER' computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored a 'whopping' 5 MB of data. Not even big to hold a digitised MP3 of John Coltrane's 'Blue Train' recorded the following year.