The Backup Blog

Making My Escape

I will be away until October 14th on vacation. Until then, this will be my view. Notice the absence of cell towers, power lines, satellite dishes, etc. In other words: paradise! We shall see how long it takes for me to start experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

       

Mozy Family Grows

I am an enthusiastic supporter of Mozy. I have been since before EMC acquired them. I think they offer a fantastic service, at a fantastic price. Frankly, I don't think there is any other reasonable solution to the problem of home and small office backup. Carrying tapes/disk/CDs/BDs/DVDs offsite every day? No thank you. Setting up a bunch of scripts and custom nonsense to x-copy stuff to a cloud storage service? Yeuch.

So when Mozy did off-site backup easily and cheaply, I was in. Think of it as insurance for your data. And I don't mean all the cruft that litters up home systems these days, I am thinking about the stuff that counts: tax records, pictures, the sort of things that mean stuff to us, and we would really care about if we lost.

On that note, one of the things that I find most interesting is how the Mozy family is growing. Lenovo is now shipping Mozy with some of its laptops. And now Staples is offering the service to its customers under the Thrive brand. Additional coverage here.

To me, this just makes sense. I think every PC and Mac should come with Mozy. To me, this is just as important as being offered the choice of whether to use Google or MS for my searches, or Firefox or IE or Chrome or Safari for my browser. Someday soon, the data on every home and small business system will be protected this way.

More Webinars

This time, with an archiving focus. Remember: it doesn't matter how good your deduplication is, it doesn't matter how fast your VTL is, it still makes good sense technically and financially to archive data first. Better than deduplication, better than fast, is not to have to back it up at all!

The upcoming sessions include:

• EMC Live - October 9th - The Importance of Archiving to Manage Growth
• EMC Live - October 16th - How EMC Completes SAP Archiving - joint EMC/SAP Webcast

Enjoy.

Deduplication Deception

When EMC first entered into the target deduplication market last spring, one of the things that I was really looking forward to was the opportunity to bring some honesty to the discussion of deduplication. In particular, I had longed watched various parties claim that with their technology you would get 25:1 deduplication. Or 50:1. Or whatever number seemed to strike the fancy of the sales rep and the marketing department.

The thing that strikes me now, in the fall, is that not much has changed in terms of the behavior of those vendors. And we now have a new set of folks claiming specific ratios (ahem, Sepaton, I am talking about you and your ridiculous "guarantee" on Exchange).

Frankly, it is time for the insanity to stop.

Backup and Recovery Webinars

Thought a few people might be interested in these. Yes I am advertising. But I am advertising for knowledge. This is all good stuff if you need to worry about VMware or bare metal recovery. If you don't? Nothing to see here, move along...

The sessions are:

1 ) A Smarter Approach to Server Recovery

Thursday, September 18, 2008 – 3:00 pm ET. How to implement a complete solution to quickly recover from server hardware failures.

2) Best Practices for Backup and De-duplication in a VMware Environment

Thursday, Sept 24^th, 2008 – 3:00 pm ET. With VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and EMC Avamar de-duplication, EMC provides leading-edge backup methodologies for virtual environments. Backup that reduces bandwidth contention, improves availability of CPU and memory resources, performs faster backups, and saves you time and money. EMC Avamar quickly and efficiently protects virtual machines with global data de-duplication technology.

3) The Ideal Solution for Protecting Physical and Virtual Environments.

Thursday, October 9, 2008 – 3:00 pm ET. How to optimize your backup system by Integrating deduplication into your VMware environment.

CDP vs. Backup

Chris Mellor wrote an interesting piece over at El Reg recently, introducing the proposition that CDP could render backup obsolete. First, welcome to the new digs Chris, I am sure Blocks and Files will miss you. Now that you are at The Register, I am expecting a bigger serving than ever of wit and irony from your keyboard.

The premise of the article was that "Continuous data protection could render dedupe, virtual tape libraries (VTL) and backup software redundant." And just for accuracy, I will note that it was really Alexander Delcayre of Falconstor that was making the claim. Irrespective of the source of the claim, however, we can ask: is it true? Can we really throw away (in some cases, with a considerable sigh of relief) all that tape, all those traditional backup applications, and all the headaches and stress that accompanies backup?

Well, perhaps... But probably not.

Fun With Tape, Part 2!

A fun little video from the good guys in marketing at EMC. I now have definitive proof that there are at least two of them with a sense of humor. Who'd have thunk? :)

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It is just a little riff on the whole "I'm a Mac... And I'm a PC!" thing, involving disk with deduplication and tape. Enjoy.

Deduplication and Replication

One of the most compelling features of EMC's DL3D appliances are their ability to schedule deduplication. Now, competitors are fond of portraying this flexibility as a weakness, but the truth is far different. In fact, this flexibility let your choose your priorities. What do you want to finish first? Backup? Or replication?

Lets take a look at how the systems behave, and see what the consequences are.

First, some background and assumptions. All numbers are real, achievable, and realistic in normal backup environments:

• In-line deduplication is 1.44 TB/hr over IP (true for both the DL3D 3000 and the DD690)
• Scheduled deduplication is 2.5 TB/hr over FC (for the DL3D 3000)
• IP replication runs at 250 GB/hr (this is really bound by link speed, latency, and so on, so I have chosen a modest figure representative of a single Gigabit IP link with low-ish latency)

In addition to this, to clarify the terms:

• In-line deduplication happens as the data is written to disk. This is an option you can choose for each VTL or NAS share you emulate or have available on a DL3D 3000. It is the only choice on a Data Domain box.
• Scheduled deduplication means that the data will be written to disk, and after the backup is complete, a deduplication process will begin that reduces the amount of data stored by deduplicating it.
• With either approach, replication cannot begin until deduplication does. Only data that has been deduplicated is eligible for replication. For our purposes, I have assumed that replication will slow down in-line deduplication modestly to 1.2 TB/hr.