SEPATONtag:,2007-09-06:/412010-03-10T14:57:17ZSEPATON is the only disk-based data protection with a scale-out backup and recovery system built to achieve the performance and capacity requirements of the most data intensive organizations. Built on it's patented scale-out architecture, SEPATON products enable data intensive enterprises to deduplicate, back up, replicate, and restore petabytes of data at wire speed without disruption to their existing infrastructure.Movable Type 4.1New Midrange SEPATON VTL Hits all of Today's Enterprise Deduplication Hot Buttonstag:sepaton.dciginc.com,2010://41.12742010-03-10T11:00:00Z2010-03-10T11:00:00ZIt is 2010 and time to deduplicate, at least that's what 60% of the respondents in a recent IDC survey had to say. However once an enterprise has said it is going to deploy deduplication is the easy part. It gets a little tougher to find a deduplication solution that meets their diverse needs of affordability, high availability, scalability and simplicity. It is these enterprise hot buttons that the new SEPATON S2100-MS2 seeks to hit.Jerome M. Wendthttp://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
survey had to say. However once an enterprise has said it is going to deploy deduplication is the easy part. It gets a little tougher to find a deduplication solution that meets their diverse needs of affordability, high availability, scalability and simplicity. It is these enterprise hot buttons that the new SEPATON S2100-MS2 seeks to hit.
The fact that 60% of respondents said they are looking to deploy deduplication in 2010 indicates that the business case for deduplication has effectively been made at the executive level. Executives are now sufficiently convinced that:
Disk fixes current enterprise backup problems by shortening backup windows and ensuring successful backups which frees up staff time to focus on other tasks
Deduplication fixes the new problems that disk creates by minimizing backup data stores which keeps the cost of disk on par with tape
Deduplication enables them to cost-effectively replicate backup data offsite by keeping the size of WAN connections to a minimum
Now with the business case behind us, the real job of implementing deduplication begins. This is where it gets dicey. The evidence indicates that enterprise organizations are ready to adopt deduplication. But there is no evidence to suggest that they are ready to commit to it across their entire enterprise on a wholesale basis Day 1.
Rather they want a step-by-step deployment that gets them where they want to be without putting current operations at risk. Doing so requires enterprises identify a solution that:
Is simple and safe to deploy
Provides an affordable entry point
Scales to meet anticipated workloads and higher capacities
Works with their current backup software
Meets their high availability requirements
These are the challenges that the SEPATON S2100-MS2 meets. Prior to the release of the S2100-MS2, SEPATON had two products. Its high end S2100-ES2 VTL intended for use in enterprise data centers and its Rack Ready VTL for use in small environments. However these two products left a gap in its set of product offerings for a highly scalable midrange solution that delivered a multi-node configuration at a compelling price with a clear path for enterprises to scale up.
The SEPATON S2100-MS2 fills this gap by delivering a number of other features that should make it attractive for enterprises ready to begin a strategic deduplication initiative.
Simple and easy to deploy. The S2100-MS2 is configured and deployed as a VTL. This makes the MS2 relatively straightforward for enterprises to re-configure their existing backup software to discover and use the MS2 as a backup target in lieu of their existing physical tape library. Further, the S2100-MS2 is powered by the same software found on its enterprise S2100-ES2 that is already in production in hundreds of enterprise accounts. This should give IT managers a high level of assurance that the MS2's software will work and perform as expected.
Enterprise solution without "bet the farm" pricing. Enterprises understand that they have to spend money to get an enterprise solution; they just as often do not want to spend all of their budgeted funds on a solution that only addresses their current needs and does not meet an attractive five year total cost of ownership (TCO).
I say five year TCO because with flat IT budgets and the need to backup and protect what Gartner Group projects to be 650% growth of data assets in the next five years has made it essential for IT to make prudent investments for the long haul.
The MS2 gives them a compelling entry point that allows the customer to flexibly pay as they go with modular upgrades of storage for capacity growth or additional nodes. This can then be upgraded into the ES2 family for accelerated performance and deliver on a compelling ROI along the way since all these upgrade options protect 100% of the existing investment in SEPATON product.
So at a starting price of just over $300,000, the MS2 gives them the enterprise solution that they need without forcing them to "bet the farm" on it.
Scalable. The MS2's scalability is what should really grab the attention of enterprise IT managers. In its base configuration, it comes with two (2) nodes, supports 30 TBs of useable capacity and 1200 MBs/second of ingest performance. But what is more notable is that it can scale up to 160 TBs of usable capacity and provides a non-disruptive upgrade path to the enterprise S2100-ES2 so enterprise organizations can continue to leverage the investment that they make in the MS2 even as they grow the solution.
Further, when looking at the competitive landscape, there is a minefield of "gotchas" with systems that have no upgrade path, require forklift upgrades to grow or necessitate the purchase and management of a plethora of multiple boxes just to keep up with the data growth.
High availability. High availability is now a top priority in enterprise deduplication deployments for two reasons. First, more organizations are replicating data from remote sites back to their main data centers which increases the importance for highly available solutions that can receive this replicated backup data. Second, the backup of large production databases cannot withstand periods of downtime. The 2-node MS2 meets both of these emerging enterprise hot buttons.
However these issues are not the only enterprise hot buttons that SEPATON hits this week. SEPATON also announced new integrated deduplication support for EMC NetWorker as well as better deduplication support for very large databases.
Its new support for NetWorker across its entire product line gives SEPATON integrated deduplication with most of the major enterprise backup software products (HP Data Protector, IBM TSM and Symantec NetBackup). Further, it even gives SEPATON a competitive advantage over EMC's own Data Domain product which, as of right now, does not have any specific integration with NetWorker.
The recent IDC survey indicates that 2010 will be "The Year" that enterprise organizations start down the deduplication path. However just because they are starting down this road does not mean that they are throwing caution and reason to the wind. They still need to exercise fiscal and operational restraint as they deploy deduplication.
The SEPATON S2100-MS2 gives them the opportunity to meet these sometimes competing objectives. The MS2 offers them the enterprise features and functions that they need to get started with deduplication while the MS2's scalability enables them to grow the solution as their demands increase. This combination of features should hit all of the hot buttons that enterprise IT managers are anxious to push. ]]>
Best Practices for Building an Enterprise Disaster Recovery Playbooktag:sepaton.dciginc.com,2009://41.12182009-12-22T11:00:00Z2009-12-22T11:00:00ZAbout a year ago I started to contemplate writing a book on the topic of 'Backup Redesign for Enterprise Organizations'. I even went so far as to register the domain name www.backupredesign.com in anticipation of writing and releasing a book on that topic. Fast forward to today and I am still examining how to best tackle the specific subject of disaster recovery (DR) in such a manner that it meets the needs of enterprise organizations.Jerome M. Wendthttp://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
www.backupredesign.com in anticipation of writing and releasing a book on that topic. Fast forward to today and I am still examining how to best tackle the specific subject of disaster recovery (DR) in such a manner that it meets the needs of enterprise organizations.
Having once been responsible for hundreds of TBs of storage (which was a lot not that long ago) and mission critical applications at an enterprise data center, I do not think it is possible to write a book that can authoritatively and comprehensively cover everything that every enterprise data centers can collectively use to successfully execute on a DR plan.
Enterprise organizations have far too much data with diverse DR requirements for me to believe that such a universal playbook can be written that addresses all of their concerns. In fact, many of them would be happy just to have an internal playbook that meets their specific DR needs.
However enterprises that seek to put together their own playbook struggle to do so. A wide variety of DR technologies are now available but these technologies often solve only a specific segment of their overall DR problems and do not provide them with a comprehensive DR solution.
This suspicion was recently confirmed again by SEPATON. It has been talking to end users from large organizations and the majority of them are still grappling with developing DR strategies and then deploying the right technologies that address their particular sophisticated requirements for DR.
However this does not mean that enterprise organizations have to assume their situation is hopeless. There are some best practices that they can follow in order to develop an appropriate strategy then will them select the right technologies for their environment. These best practices include:
Plan for enterprise class performance and capacity requirements. Enterprise organizations tend to habitually underestimate the number of applications in their environment that they need to protect and recover. While IT architects are understandably trying to be conservative and not waste precious IT dollars and resources, once a DR solution is proven successful, everyone who was standing on the sidelines comes forward and wants to take advantage of the solution.
This is why it is imperative that enterprises select solutions that can scale to meet the enterprise performance and capacity requirements that will surely be thrust upon it. Look for architectures that can scale nodes for performance and storage for capacity. These solutions like those from SEPATON can deliver a 5 year DR plan that actually makes sense.
Ensure you can meet recovery time objectives (RTOs). Successfully protecting and then recovering data is not necessarily good enough if it cannot be done in a time frame that meets defined RTOs. Organizations need to ensure that whatever DR solution or solutions that they select align with the RTOs of the many applications for which they are responsible for protecting. This can be particularly challenging with deduplication solutions which often negatively impact recovery performance. You should consider solutions that use forward referencing or SEPATON's DeltaCache Recovery™ which provide the fastest restore performance on the newest data.
Monitor changing requirements. This may prove to be one of the most challenging aspects of implementing an appropriate DR solution or solutions. The status of neither DR strategies nor applications being protected is static. The criticality of applications changes over time such that some become more important to recover quickly while others decrease in importance. Whenever possible, organizations should look to use a single platform that meets the recovery requirements of as many of their applications as possible to minimize the need to change what approach they use for recovery.
Pay as you grow. This has become one of the emerging requirements for DR solutions in the last decade - the ability to start small, prove it can work and then scale it out so enterprises can pay as they grow. Look for products that offer grid storage architectures that can independently scale either capacity or performance.
Aim to reduce OPEX for IT administrators. IT administrators are already pulled in multiple directions and, with the uncertainty surrounding Cap and Trade and Healthcare Reform at the federal level, most organizations are hesitant to hire more employees. This makes it even more important for enterprise organizations to select solutions that are familiar to IT administrators and require little time to setup and manage. Automation is no longer a luxury but now a necessity. Your DR playbook should look to robustness in storage management with thin provisioning, dynamic capacity expansion and the kind of reporting tools that truly help to monitor and plan the storage environment.
Know your bandwidth requirements. An excerpt from a recent Q3 2009 Forrester Research study revealed that the majority of enterprises have at least one data center, are increasing the distance between their production and recovery data centers and are using their recovery data center for multiple purposes.
That's great news but that only works if there is sufficient network bandwidth to handle passing all of the data from one site to the other. Technologies that measure the rate of data change can give enterprises insight into how much network bandwidth you need while other technologies like deduplication can reduce the amount of data that they need to send while more effectively using what bandwidth is available.
Test early and often. Enterprises need to have defined testing plans and then stick with them. This is often easier said than done but the best way to ensure this happens is to automate and simplify as much of the DR process as possible. Part of this includes making sure the data needed for testing is where it needs to be in advance of the start of the test using technologies such as replication.
There is still no secret DR playbook that enterprises can yet pull out of their back pocket and expect it to magically work for their environment. However best practices for developing a workable DR strategy do exist which organizations can leverage to help them build a DR playbook that works for them. In so doing, they can remove the confusion that persists around DR and use that to build a strategy and select the technologies that will work for them. ]]>
The Choice of Inline versus Post-Process Deduplication and How it Affects Business Objectivestag:sepaton.dciginc.com,2009://41.12022009-12-03T11:00:00Z2009-12-03T11:00:00ZIn the last year or so a number of articles and blogs have appeared on the topic of inline and post-processing deduplication in an attempt to answer the question, "What is the best approach for deduplicating data during disk-based backup?" Unfortunately what these pieces fail to quantify is, "What objectives are enterprise organizations looking to accomplish with disk-based backup and recovery?" The problem this creates is that without first establishing these objectives, it makes it very difficult to arrive at any sort of meaningful conclusion about how to best proceed with deduplication.Jerome M. Wendthttp://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html In my experience, there are three main objectives that enterprise organizations are trying to accomplish in regards to solving their backup and recovery problems:
Stop the backup pain. They want their IT staff to focus on higher level IT issues rather than focusing on the traditional backup-centric questions such as what backups jobs failed, why they failed and how to fix them.
Use disk without breaking the bank. It is no longer any secret that using disk as a primary target and source for backup and recovery is now almost universally viewed as the right way to stop the pain. However the amount of disk that organizations need can be a significant obstacle to the adoption of disk as a backup target.
Consolidate backup data stores. Consolidating their backup data stores eliminates the costs and overhead associated with managing backup processes at each individual site, results in more effective utilization of the disk storage, better management of the data and new options for disaster recovery.
It is for these last two reasons that the topic of deduplication quickly becomes part of the backup conversation, especially in enterprise shops since they have so much data to backup and deduplication's benefits become clearly evident. Using deduplication makes the adoption of disk financially viable, facilitates the consolidation of their backup data stores and creates the new options for disaster recovery that enterprises want.
However what can sometimes occur in an organization's excitement of being able to deliver on these last two objectives, the organization can forget about or downplay its primary goal: Ending its backup pain.
This is why selecting the appropriate deduplication approach for an organization's environment is critical. If the end user only focuses on the last two points and does not put equal weight or ignores the first one, organizations are right back to where they started: daily morning meetings troubleshooting problems from the previous night's backups.
It is for these reasons that enterprise organizations should give preference to post-process solutions. These technologies do not limit ingest performance with CPU intensive deduplication processes. By first storing backing up data directly on disk and then deduplicating it, a post-process algorithm avoids the performance impact of inline approaches.
This is not to imply that the other two business objectives should be ignored or discounted. They should not. Enterprises that need to get backup data offsite as quickly as possible after the backup is complete will find solutions such as what the SEPATON S2100-ES2 offers meet these multiple requirements well.
Unlike some other post-process solutions, the S2100-ES2 can start deduplicating and replicating data as soon as a specific backup job completes. Using this more advanced approach, data is offsite and ready for recovery much more quickly than if one had to wait until all of the backup jobs were complete before these two tasks could begin.
The S2100-ES2 provides a unique grid architecture that enables scalability through the addition of computing nodes and disk shelves. This scale-out design enables SEPATON to address any concerns about an end user's ability to ingest, deduplicate and replicate data within required time constraints.
This architecture gives organizations the flexibility to introduce more nodes for additional performance to expedite deduplication, replication or even reconstruct deduplicated data without impacting either production backup jobs or the time needed to recover the data.
It is not surprising that so many articles and blogs are trying to answer the question of whether inline or post-process deduplication is a better choice. However before organizations can arrive at any meaningful answer to this question, they should first remember what business objectives they initially set out to accomplish and then verify that whatever solution they select accomplishes these objectives.
The deduplication decision becomes even more difficult for enterprise shops. Not only do distinct differences between inline and post-processing deduplication solutions exist, but within each general deduplication approach, individual solutions handle processes such as deduplication and replication differently.
It is for these reasons that enterprise organizations should give preference to post-process deduplication architectures and solutions from providers such as SEPATON that are designed to solve the specific challenges they face and are architected to deal with the unique challenges of enterprise backup and recovery. ]]>
Slootman Responds to SearchDataBackup.com Interview; Post Process Deduplication Still Perceived as Safer Option by Manytag:sepaton.dciginc.com,2009://41.11822009-11-11T11:00:00Z2009-11-11T11:00:00ZPerhaps the biggest industry buzz coming out of the October 2009 SNW show was not any product announcement or new technology but an interview with EMC's Frank Slootman that appeared on SearchDataBackup.com. Minimally this interview made a number of revelations about EMC's current strategy and future direction for its Data Backup Division. But of greater concern for those enterprises planning to use EMC's products, it revealed a lack of understanding on Slootman's part in terms of what enterprise organizations are looking for in disk-based backup and deduplication solutions.Jerome M. Wendthttp://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
SNW show was not any product announcement or new technology but an interview with EMC's Frank Slootman that appeared on SearchDataBackup.com. Minimally this interview made a number of revelations about EMC's current strategy and future direction for its Data Backup Division. But of greater concern for those enterprises planning to use EMC's products, it revealed a lack of understanding on Slootman's part in terms of what enterprise organizations are looking for in disk-based backup and deduplication solutions.
Slootman's interview was one that I had to reread a few times just to make sure I got it right as the statements he made about the products in EMC's Data Backup Division opened up more than a few eyes (and mouths) in the industry. So prior to responding to anything, I wanted to get Slootman's reaction to this interview to verify he was accurately quoted and this was a response I received from EMC/Data Domain via email:
"I was not accurately quoted in every instance of the write up; some of my statements were not nearly as colorful as they appeared in print. That said, most of the positions represented in the write up are substantially mine."
So with this disclaimer in mind, the interview seemed to imply that Avamar, not NetWorker, is the future of enterprise backup software at EMC. He also stated in the article that EMC is swapping out existing deduplication solutions it previously sold with its newly acquired Data Domain boxes at zero revenue.
Neither of those statements is likely to sit too well with current enterprise customers. It appears Slootman did not get the memo that the way the game works in enterprise accounts is that you let your enterprise customers know ahead of time under NDA what your new strategy is before you go public with it.
The last thing enterprise organizations want (or any customer wants as far as that goes), is to read about strategic changes in product roadmaps from their provider on SearchDataBackup.com. Enterprise customers prefer to hear about changes in direction from their provider first and then have them confirmed in the press later on. It appears Slootman got it backwards in this case.
But this faux pas aside, more disconcerting are the statements that he makes about using post-process VTLs to deduplicate data. He implies that VTLs are not well-suited for deduplication and then goes on to say, "No post-process junk. Post-process deduplication takes all day to land the data for backups. I'm on the beach having a margarita before they land the data on disk."
These statements reveal a lack of understanding on his part as to how post-process deduplication algorithms work as well as customer perceptions about inline versus post-process technology.
First, post-process algorithms do not take all day to land the data on disk for backups as he alleges. In fact, chances are good that a post-process algorithm may land data on disk before an inline process does. Post-process algorithms do not seek to compress or deduplicate data in any way until after the data is first stored to disk and some vendors take advantage of the post-process method to keep an undeduplicated volume ready for faster restores.
Second, not every customer is comfortable doing deduplication in-line, especially those with enterprise FC SANs. Enterprise customers in these environments tend to be conservative and want to understand every step of the process and how any changes, no matter how minor, will impact their production workloads.
In the debate over using in-line versus post-process, post-process is generally simpler to understand and tends to be viewed more positively by many risk-averse customers that I speak with. Their initial objectives when introducing disk-based backup (deduplicating or otherwise) are to ensure their daily backups complete successfully and on time every day. So while I regularly hear that post-process approaches allow them to accomplish those goals, I still from time to time receive reports that in-line cannot.
In-line deduplication is making some significant strides and providers of post-process deduplication VTLs such as SEPATON need to be on their guard to make sure they match the technology innovations that companies like EMC-Data Domain are making. However to suggest that "post-process is junk" fails to take into account the many enterprise customers see post-process VTLs as a safer and often faster first step into disk-based backup and deduplication than what in-line deduplication might deliver. ]]>
Five Distinct Reasons Why Enterprises Will Continue to Use VTLs Versus NAS for the Foreseeable Futuretag:sepaton.dciginc.com,2009://41.11572009-10-13T10:00:00Z2009-10-13T10:00:00ZThe lines between NAS and VTL have started to blur. More NAS solutions can now scale to hold more than one petabyte of deduplicated data, deliver sustainable aggregate throughputs of more than one TB/hour and handle multiple concurrent backup loads. This combination of features may make it seem like a face-off between upper end NAS and VTL solutions is looming in enterprise environments.Jerome M. Wendthttp://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html NAS solutions solve problems in enterprise organizations that are very different than those solved by VTLs and this trend will not result in NAS solutions encroaching on the specific problems that VTLs serve anytime soon.
Over the last few years, the roles of deduplicating NAS and VTL solutions have been pretty well defined by analysts and vendors alike in the industry. VTLs were reserved primarily for enterprise environments while NAS solutions belonged in the midrange space. In fact, VTL providers even went so far as to say that if they were competing in an environment where a NAS solution was also being bid, either they or the NAS provider did not belong there.
Yet over the last couple of years, the lines between NAS and VTL have started to blur. More NAS solutions can now scale to hold more than one petabyte of deduplicated data, deliver sustainable aggregate throughputs of more than one TB/hour and handle multiple concurrent backup loads. This combination of features may make it seem like a face-off between upper end NAS and VTL solutions is looming in enterprise environments.
While this may certainly occur in a few environments, there are five distinct reasons why enterprise organizations will continue to use VTLs as opposed to NAS for the foreseeable future:
Keep backup traffic on FC SANs. Enterprise environments have to backup tens if not hundreds of terabytes (TBs) of data nightly and weekly. FC SANs are better equipped to facilitate these high levels of throughput (these were the original implementations of FC SANs) since the FC protocol is specifically designed to handle the block-based, sequential nature of backup traffic. This results in higher throughput and faster backups.
Overhead of NFS and CIFS. One of the primary problems of sending backup traffic over an Ethernet LAN and using NAS as a backup target is that there is still processing overhead associated with NFS and CIFS on the NAS solution. While backups will occur faster and achieve higher success rates than if backing up to tape, the performance and throughput on NAS solutions cannot approach that achievable on VTLs used on FC SANs.
Server overhead. The NAS interface is not the only place where a performance bottleneck can slow transfer speed. To send data to a NAS target requires that a server read in its data, encapsulate it in a TCP/IP packet and then send it over an Ethernet LAN to the NAS solution. While this overhead may be acceptable for many LAN-attached servers since they may not do any processing during off-backup hours. The same scenario can create unacceptable levels of processing overhead for busy application servers that run 24x7 where backup windows are limited or do not exist.
Fast, successful backups, not deduplication ratios, are the top priority. NAS providers are much quicker to promote their high deduplication ratios for the simple reason that the audience they are selling to is most concerned about cost reduction. VTL providers also talk about their ability to achieve high deduplication ratios but enterprise FC SAN environments put a higher priority on making sure each night's backup completes quickly, successfully and within the application's backup window. So while enterprise shops are thrilled if they can achieve high deduplication ratios; fast, successful backups are still the first priority.
Better backup software and tape support. Backup software now easily recognizes both NAS and VTLs but many enterprise organizations still plan to use tape as part of their overall data protection strategy in some capacity. Using NAS solutions, data typically has to be re-read (and reprocessed) by the backup software before it can be stored to tape.
Using VTLs, the data is already stored in a format that is conducive to copying the data from disk to tape and back again. This task can sometimes even be executed and performed by the VTL and, once the copy is complete, the backup software is notified by the VTL that a physical tape copy has been created so the backup software can update its index.
NAS solutions are taking on enterprise capacity and performance characteristics. But the forces driving the introduction of these features into NAS solutions are intended to solve different enterprise problems than what VTLs are intended to solve. It is because of this and the five reasons listed above, that enterprise VTLs like the SEPATON S2100-ES2 should continue to have a long, viable future in enterprise environments.
That said, enterprise NAS solutions will begin to show up in enterprises in roles that are complementary to the functions that VTLs fulfill now. In the future, expect a consolidation of NAS and VTL interfaces onto one system and I anticipate that solutions like those from SEPATON will assume that role. ]]>