All The News That Is Fit To Print?

I have to admit that humor is a bit hard to come by in the world of backup and recovery sometimes. Let's face it: it is not like the everyday person finds this stuff as entertaining as Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears. Heck, backup isn't even that interesting to a lot of people in IT. Which I, of course, find shocking. Which, in turn, just gives my wife more grounds to think that I am really weird...

So, when three funny stories all come along at once, I thought I would take a bit of a break from the pace, and cover the news that is (sort of) fit to print this week in the world of backup.

First, we have the announcement that Highly Reliable Systems is making a "cartridge" made of disks--what they are calling a 3 TB removable drive for backup. Now I just have one question: seriously? No, really. Seriously?

What is the point of this? About the only thing that type is really good at is providing lots and lots of removable storage really really cheaply (but see story #2). They also claim that backing up to the device is faster than IP. But so is fiber channel. The good folks over at Brocade or Cisco would be happy to fill you in on that one boys, since you seem to have missed it.

All in all, this one is just funny peculiar: there doesn't seem to be any good rationale at all for this. But if you can think of one, by all means add a comment or email me.

Second, we have the story of a monitoring service for tape. Apparently Fujifilm thinks that tape is no more trustworthy that a troubled teenager with a set of car keys and a shiny new drivers license--which is to say not at all. Although they have a point in that the number one mechanism for data loss is loss of physical tapes (not those nefarious "hackers"), it still seems a little silly to have to track them by GPS. And since the tracking device is so easily separated from the cartridges, what we really have here is just a system that ensures your courier will promptly fess up about letting the tapes fall off the back of the truck.

Hrm. Well, just like troubled teens, lets hope they grow out of it. Only when tapes grow up, they become evaulting solutions (or electronically transmitting your backup data to a second site) and if they are lucky, they get to use data deduplication to reduce the bandwidth. The better analogy might therefore be tape is to caterpillars as deduplication is to butterflies?

Okay, so #2 belongs firmly in the funny sad category.

Finally, #3, is NetApp's announcement that data deduplication is really really important to them as a company. Honest. So important that they will have it in their VTL "later this year." Oh. Okay. By the way, "later this year" is usually marketing speak for "December." But apparently--according to the press release--they are they only company to offer "end to end" data deduplication. Unless of course we consider EMC, which has Centera, Avamar, Networker, EX, DX, Data Store, Mozy, etc.

Naturally, I don't begrudge a competitor a bit of chest pounding. We all do it. I think it is natural. But I wish that there was at least a dose of reality in it. After all competition is competition, but there is no reason why it can't be honest competition. So lets just omit the "only" because that is just ridiculous.

Thus, story #3 gets the funny sad label too.

(Let me one more thing about competition here: it has been said before, but we welcome competition at EMC. We believe it improves us all. I delight in it personally. But if I could have one wish, it would be that we all compete honestly. That we speak the truth about our competitors and our own products. There is no need to make stuff up or misrepresent ourselves or others to look better. That is the spirit in which I started this blog, and that is the spirit in which it will continue, for as long as I am writing it!)

Comments

[Darren McBride]

As someone who works for High-Rely I'll try to shed some light. Maybe you missed that each removable RAIDPac has a RAID 5 controller integrated into it? So one (of many) reasons for it's existence would be a nervous customer who likes the idea that his 2TB removable media is redundant(can survive a single drive failure). This product is targeted to small business networks and priced as such ($2300). Does EMC have *anything* for backup in this price range??? Believe it or not, there is a psychological barrier to splitting backup data onto multiple media. Many people prefer not to do it for fear one of the media gets lost or damaged...rendering the whole thing unrestorable. As for eSATA connectivity, it is WAY cheaper than fiberchannel and yet faster than Gig ethernet. Putting Fiberchannel on a product like this would make it cost prohibitive and is totally unnecessary since the drives can't keep up with 3Gbps eSATA as it is. This product exists to provide a huge removable media and high speed backup with RAID0 OR with RAID5 for reliabiity. If you could share specifically reasons for your incredulity/amusement about why we would bother to create such a product, I'd be happy to address them.

[Scott]

Darren: I really appreciate the comments, and thanks for taking the time to get your story out. I am glad that you stopped by and clarified the positioning.

My only observation is that from an EMC perspective, we absolutely have products that would address this market segment: Avamar and Mozy. I will grant that they take a fundamentally different approach to the issue though: allowing the end user to replicate their backup data electronically (and cheaply) to another site. I would distinguish the two at this level primarily by the fact that Avamar is a software and infrastructure that you own, Mozy is software as a service.

So a very different approach than using physical anything (disk or tape). I think both will have their place in the short/medium term. Long term, my hunch is that this is like HD-DVD vs. blu-ray. Blu-ray may have won the battle (and I liken *any* build it/own it yourself infrastructure to blu-ray in this market segment) but they will lose the war to internet based distribution (remote backup services in this example). But it is just a hunch--my crystal ball is no clearer than anybody else's that far into the future!

[Darren McBride]

Internet backup products like Mozy do indeed hit the "S" (small business) market and are awesome. (I dislike the term "SMB" because I don't think small & medium should be lumped together - a key mistake I think large vendors make). Mozy is awesome for many shops. However Internet backup products aren't good for everyone:
1) small customers with large data sets (say bigger than 200GB). graphics and video shops are one example.
2)Those whose data changes a lot during the day such as SQL and Microsoft Exchange datastores, making the incremental backup with "small changes each day" argument invalid.
3) Those who need to restore quickly from bare metal if the server fails ( mission critical servers in small businesses who need same day recoverability)
4) Those with Exchange, SQL, active directory, Sharepoint or other "always on" databases. These generate havoc for lots of Internet backup software, especially when "granular restore" is needed (i.e you want to restore 1 email from a 16GB MS exchange priv.edb file.
5) customers with small internet pipes. DSL is still very common and has very limited upload speed. Plus overhead "cost" for most internet connections is at least 50% so a 1.544 Mbps connection can only move about 772Kbps of real data over time.
5) Customers who don't understand encryption and don't trust their data to leave the building. (Don't laugh -there are lots of these)
6) Cheap customers who dislike monthly infrastructure costs.

Highly Reliable Systems on-site hardware addresses most of these issues and provides a viable alternative to these admittedly "niche" markets.