I've always been surprised by how much of an effect the "Buy One, Get One Free" slogan has on my psyche. For example, I lived in New York during grad school and whenever it rained, within minutes a small cottage industry of street vendors would pop up like daisies all around the city. All of these vendors would be selling umbrellas, with most offering a two-for-one deal. Sometimes if I was already out and about and unprepared for the rain I'd feel compelled to purchase an umbrella, but then since the second one was free, I'd take the second one too so that I was then carrying two umbrellas. After this happened a few times, I owned a half dozen umbrellas, and really, how many umbrellas does one man need?
I was recently reading an article by Alan Radding for SearchStorage about VMware backups, and he described how one of the industry's...
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."
Warren Buffet
The idea of risk management is in the news lately, given the turmoil in the financial markets. Working in data protection, we think long and hard about risk management. Our data protection products give an enterprise significant protection in the case of an actual disaster, man-made or otherwise. Disasters, while an important factor when considering data protection in an enterprise, are in actuality low probability/high impact events. The 2007 Symantec State of the Data Center report shows that datacenter managers know that downtime is not generally caused by a disaster.
Myth #6: Backing up Virtual Machines Require Multiple Point Products
Just in time for VMworld this week, I'd like to debunk one last myth around data protection-the myth that virtual machines automatically require an additional set of tools to properly protect them. The move to virtual environments and all of the benefits they afford has been widely addressed. However, a recent Symantec survey found that of all the customers planning a move to virtual environments, over 65% were re-examining their data protection strategy.
Sounds like increased complexity, doesn't it? Isn't the potential for less complexity one of the major value propositions of moving to a virtual server infrastructure? We think that with the right strategy, IT groups can implement a data protection strategy...
As we make our way through common data protection myths, we have talked quite a bit about how innovation has advanced data protection technologies over the last few years. In fact, until fairly recently data protection was all about backup. How fast can we backup our data? What is the success rate of backups? These were the primary concerns for IT administrators.
Now, recovery is the star of the show. It's not simply about backing up the data. The data must be recoverable-usually quickly and at the right granularity. Therefore, recovery is largely viewed as the most important aspect of data protection. If an organization cannot recover the data when they need it, what is the point of backing it up in the first place?
Here's an example. Imagine that you are a small business that relies heavily on IT functions for sales, operations, and day-to-day communication. Perhaps you run a law firm...
In Myth #2 we talked about granular recovery as a main driver for implementing disk into the backup infrastructure and a good way to help IT meet today’s RPOs and RTOs. As I mentioned, granular level recovery is one technology that enables IT to meet those RTOs and RPOs. However, I didn’t talk about some of the perceived challenges of granular level recovery, so I’d like to debunk the myth that it takes too long to restore data at this level.
Advanced granular recovery technology enables businesses to quickly restore individual emails, files, or documents from one backup pass, saving significant time and money. Up until now, backup and recovery procedures have been arduous, requiring multiple agents and multiple backups. For...
Myth 3: Upgrading to a New Data Protection Solution is Painful and Expensive
In part three of our series on data protection myths, I thought we could take a look at the dreaded upgrade. Upgrading your data protection software is generally perceived as a painful process among the IT crowd. At the same time, that crowd is seeing the need to upgrade. Gartner research from July 2008 proved this. In a survey of 70 IT managers, 66% of respondents said they were planning major redesigns of backup and recovery systems within 12 months, according to analyst Alan Dayley. That is a lot of frustrated IT managers.
Fortunately, we think this is yet another data protection myth. While the process might seem daunting, in actuality, upgrading to the right solution will eliminate headaches in the long run. Today's data protection technology will save time and...
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks travelling through Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and the one commonality between my experiences in each of these three countries is that I don’t speak the local language in any of them. In high school, I studied French, not Spanish, and Portuguese wasn’t even taught. So, at restaurants I can never read the menu and I usually attempt, in very broken Spanish, to ask the waiter for a recommendation (“Que es bueno?”). Then he says something and I nod enthusiastically and smile.
The process reminds me a bit of what backup administrators face when they are trying to figure out how to back up their VMware environments. There are many ways to do it and often they don't know which is best. The easy and obvious way is to run a backup client from inside each virtual machine. In some cases that works fine, but in other cases, all the backups running simultaneously overloads the physical server (the challenges of sharing I/O and...
Myth 2: Disk-Based Technologies Are Too Complicated
Late last week, we kicked off a blog post series looking at the common myths that exist around data protection technologies. I tried to convince users that scalability can be realized with the right data protection strategy, thanks to the innovative technologies that exist today.
Technological advancement with hard disks has been a tremendous driver for data protection technologies, yet some users think disk-based technologies are too complicated. We don't advocate that users replace tape entirely; in fact, there is a place for tape backups in most IT environments. However, don't shortchange yourself by overlooking today's new disk technologies. Some of them might be intimidating, but in actuality they will help administrators reduce storage capacity and IT...
Myth 1 – Data Protection Solutions Do Not Scale with my Business
Plenty has been said about the challenges that exist today for IT and data center managers. I will spare you the typical descriptions about the increase in mission-critical data, plain old exploding volumes of data, and data distributed across a dispersed workforce. We’re all well aware of these issues.
Let’s talk about the good news. There is a tremendous about of innovation in data protection technologies today. Take a second to think about everything you’ve heard about granular recovery, data deduplication, cloud-based storage, SaaS, innovative data protection technology for virtual environments, and continuous data protection. These are all technologies that can be applied to solve specific challenges in the context of a larger data protection platform, and IT folks are beginning to catch on to most of them. However, this innovation has come with quite a few...
Symantec has just released its 2008 Disaster Recovery (DR) research report. This is the fourth year that Symantec has issued this report and the overall results are compelling-a real wake up call for enterprise customers who believe disasters only happen to other companies. There'll be more to come on that later, but the press release for the report can be found here.
One big addition to the survey for this year was virtualization. Well, great timing. This is a technology that impacts many aspects of a company's business. It didn't surprise me to see some of the actual results regarding virtualization: 55% of respondents said that virtualization in and of itself would cause them to re-evaluate their DR plan. And, in North America specifically, the number was 64%. Again, I was not too surprised-more validation than anything. In the backup and recovery I see the enterprise...
Every person that looks at backup reporting has different requirements. Usually the first requirements that people want to see are what the most common errors are, what their success rate, is or how much data is being protected. However, it seems that more and more people are looking at storage costs that are associated with backup. This goes a little bit deeper than the basic activity information. It looks at things like how much data is being stored in the backup environment, when it will expire and how it gets moved around (often called the lifecycle).
The better the storage and backup environment is understood, the more informed the decisions about what and how much to purchase. The ultimate goal of all of this is to have just enough storage to do what is needed—no more, no less. Luckily, a theory has already been developed to meet this challenge called “just-in-time.” Just-in-time has been used to match the supply and demand in lots of industries, from automobile...
