The Backup Blog

EMC World Wrap Up

Post EMC World 2009 I thought I would offer a couple of observations on what I saw, and what customers were asking about.

The show was very well attended, and we were busy in the backup and dedup booth.

Two key trends emerged.

The first is that Avamar is becoming more and more mainstream. I saw interest in the technology from companies both small and large. Moreover--and this is just a subjective impression--I would saw interest was as strong in Avamar as it was in target based deduplication solutions. People are absolutely considering making the transition from their current backup application to Avamar where it makes sense (ROBO, VMware environments, and file servers primarily).

R.I.P. Data Domain

Wow. Did anyone see this coming? I mean besides the two Dutchmen and their respective M&A teams? (Well, the Data Domain M&A team was probably one guy with a role that chiefly consisted of repeating: "Somebody, anybody, buy us. Please. Pretty Please. With a cherry on top." Complete with the ritual lighting of prayer sticks and any other shamanistic practice remotely likely to speed that outcome.)

So now that it is done--barring, I assume, the obligatory shareholder vote--what is my take on the NetApp acquisition of Data Domain?

1. That is a lot of money to pay for a feature you already had and were giving away for free...
2. I expect the respective sales and technical folks to get along about as well as a bunch of hungry speed crazed wolverines fighting over a meal. Not pretty. They have each spent the last two years calling each other every hateful and almost slanderous name in the book. How can they possibly turn around and kiss and make up? And how can the sales people do a complete 180 in front of a customer and say that what was complete junk a day ago is now great technology?
3. The NearStore VTL will meet a demise faster than you can say guaranteed data loss. Secondary prediction: it won't be missed.
4. NetApp will struggle to make this pay, technically or financially. Their track record of acquisitions is dismal: Alacritus failed to produce any significant positive result (they sure didn't sell very many VTLs, and see point #3 above); the Spinnaker acquisition happened 3+ years ago and they still don't really have anything to show for it; Topio a couple years back, at $160m, and NetApp just pulled the plug on the product line; Decru can't have paid for itself--that was $272m with virtually no payback. How will the Data Domain buy be any different?
5. NetApp gets a company with virtually no backup experience. That may sound like an odd claim, but in my experience, DD field personnel really didn't understand backup at all. They were really good at selling small boxes to small customers out of the trunk of their car. Coincidentally the customers happened to deploy them for backup, but darned if DD could ever really figure out how they did that. Their lack of knowledge on backup, SLAs, disaster recovery, backup windows, and all the operational nuances of backup penetrated virtually to the top of their marketing and sales organization from what I could see. So... see point #6.
6. NetApp still has a critical case of multiple personality disorder, and if anything, it just got worse. They still can't figure out if backup is good or bad. They still don't know whether to say that backups are unnecessary (just use snaps) or if backup is good and snaps are bad. And if snaps are good and backups are bad (which is the message the traditional sales force has been comfortable with for years, even if it is dead wrong) how is acquiring Data Domain going to get them to change their minds or their story?
7. So now the company with a "unified storage" product line has no less than 3 backup platforms. Each with a different OS.
8. Data Domain was never a company to let reality stand in the way of a good story. On the contrary, they were particularly prone to irrational exuberance when spewing FUD, misdirection, and bizarrely incorrect "facts" (nobody can scale a deduplication appliance past 30 TB? really? c'mon, really?). Will NetApp rein in that sort of behavior? We can all only hope.

Final score: anybody that held DD shares prior to yesterdays announcement - 1, NetApp - 0.

EMC DL and Oracle RMAN Filters

The second new feature of the DL that I would like to highlight this week is even more straight forward than the last: Oracle Filters. These Oracle Filters give the DL a nearly 2:1 capacity advantage over competitive systems when backing up Oracle RMAN data streams.

To understand what the Oracle Filter is, we need to step back a second and understand how deduplication works. When a data stream is sent to a deduplication appliance, to achieve optimal deduplication efficiency, that appliance should apply a filter that is specific to the type of backup application and data type that is being backed up.

EMC Disk Library Adds Path To Tape

First up of several unique features that are being announced for the EMC Disk Library (DL) family this week is Path To Tape (PTT). The feature of adds significantly to the functionality of the DL1500 and DL3000 in NetWorker and NetBackup environments.

Path To Tape effectively gives the two members of the DL family that lack the embedded storage node (ESN) and embedded media server feature exclusive to the DL4000, a way to achieve similar functionality. PTT gives NetWorker and NetBackup a way to instruct the DL1500 and DL3000 to create a tape with a directly attached tape drive that contains the same save sets as can be found on a virtual volume.

Information and Storage Management Book From EMC

Thought I would point this out: EMC has published a book "Information and Storage Management" which includes, naturally, material on backup, recovery and archive. You can find more information at the EMC Education website, with links there for ordering too. (As an editorial aside: unfortunately no Kindle or Sony Reader version is available yet, just the dead tree model.)

NetWorker and Oracle

Preston de Guise has been consistently turning out excellent material on NetWorker on his blog: NetWorker Blog. (Judging by the name of the blog, Preston apparently went to the same school for imaginative marketing geniuses that I did). His latest post on NetWorker and Oracle is really good stuff. If you care at all about NetWorker, you should subscribe to Preston's blog.

A Comprehensive Misunderstanding

Data Domain is at it again: they have made another plea to please, please (please!) think of them as an enterprise solution. And boy are they ready to do disaster recovery. Honest.

Except that what they call disaster recovery, well, isn't.

Not by a long shot.

Now I am not sure if I care if they don't get it. Bummer for them, but ultimately, so what?

Well the so what in this case is I think they are unfairly dumbing down the collective discussion on backup and disaster recovery. In other words, they can make whatever claims they want, but when they attempt to redefine common understandings of backup and recovery and disaster recovery, in such a way that these terms mean less than they did before, they are doing themselves and the market a huge disservice.

I Am Feeling Underwhelmed

A recent post by somebody over at Data Domain's Dedupe Matters (Especially When That Is All You Do) Blog waxed enthusiastic about their ability to leverage deduplication for disaster recovery.

Reading through the post, I couldn't help but feel a little underwhelmed. The way the issue is discussed it reminds me more of Inspector Clouseau than Sherlock Holmes.

The analysis seemed to me to indicate that Data Domain is very much a hardware company struggling to understand the nuances of software, and the critical role operations and process play in a backup and recovery operation.

Digging a little deeper, the post claimed that using Data Domain appliances for disaster recovery is:

1. Cost effective and efficient;
2. Easier and offers faster recovery SLAs compared to primary storage replication

Now I will be the first to admit that I think that data deduplication for backup has two major attractions: reducing the amount of disk required to store backups, and reducing the amount of network traffic required to replicate backups.

Having said that, I think that Data Domain's position pretty badly misunderstands the process and operational components involved in using backup for disaster recovery. Further, I think their hardware only approach fails to deliver on the real promise of remote deduplication (for remote office sites).

Make Me Suffer

Disclaimer: what follows has absolutely nothing to do with backup, EMC, or anything else of a professional nature.

Having said that, this is an open invitation to make me suffer. Physically and financially. This summer I have elected to ride a foolishly long distance on my bicycle: 540 km in 3 days in support of the 2009 Tour For Kids Alberta cycling adventure. (Note: If you work for a competitor, see the end of the post for a special offer.)

The purpose of this post is to ask you to consider supporting families and children whose lives have been affected by cancer, and by extension, incent me to suffer (c'mon! 540 km in 3 days?!? What am I thinking?).

Deduplication Efficiency

There are a lot of different deduplication choices these days. And lots of ways to shove these technologies into places they weren't meant to go (or shouldn't have been). Even if we focus just on deduplication for backup--and this is the backup blog!--then there are still a couple big choices to make.

The biggest choice, of course, is do you want to deduplicate at the source or the target?

In EMC product terms, do you want to use Avamar or DL3D? Just for fun, lets note that there are no real significant alternatives in the source deduplication space these days (as it is my perception that Symantec's PureDisk is retreating to a target based model). On the target side, Data Domain retains a strong position but continues to lose significant market share to EMC.