Storage Channel Pipeline » data backup

Smart VARs pay attention to small operational efficiencies, as well as the big ones

Eric Slack — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:57:56 +0000

I recently had lunch with a good friend I used to work in the VAR space. He was my head SE and currently works at another storage VAR. I asked him something about backup, and he commented that backup is one of those areas that’s not important enough at a lot of companies to garner much budget but is important enough to get you fired when it doesn’t work. Only projects that are compelling get funded, and unfortunately, making something work better, like backups, doesn’t fit that definition.

There usually is budget to fix things that are truly broken, but waiting until things break isn’t a very good way to upgrade the infrastructure — nor a sound career strategy. Being proactive makes for great conference table discussion, but in order to get funded, a project must present a cost saving (or revenue) opportunity that’s dramatic. Incremental improvements just don’t make the cut, but unfortunately, home runs are few and far between.

Given the staff shortages that IT has had to deal with over the past several years, there are lots of places within the environment that probably need attention. As is often the case, problems like this can present an opportunity for smart VARs.

IT needs to find a way to get better without asking for big project dollars. Improving operational efficiency can save admin time, and improving storage efficiency can save space or postpone a capacity upgrade. One idea is to simply replace the boot drive in a server with a small SATA SSD on a DIMM. Replacing a hard disk boot drive with a solid-state drive can improve performance, and using the available drive slot for a higher-capacity disk drive can add a terabyte or more of net-new (local) storage space to the server.

Another area is backup. It’s typically the job that the newest IT person gets stuck with. This means there are probably a few things about the backup system that the current admin doesn’t know — maybe a lot of things. It could be something as simple as tuning or configuration, or a minor upgrade. I’m not saying VARs should go around giving away PS time; just get creative and find a way to get your technical folks into an account, even if there isn’t a PO this time. Call it an investment, but getting into the data center is a great way to find out what’s broken and likely to get the budget. And showing your value up front is a great way to get a call when those projects do come up.

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RDX storage technology powers strong backup and archive solutions

Eric Slack — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:28:26 +0000

For VARs unfamiliar with RDX storage, it’s an innovative technology that may deserve a place on your line card. It’s essentially a removable hard disk drive that’s close to the size of an LTO cartridge. The drives are ruggedized, not from a Mil-Spec sense, but they’re made to be handled like a tape cartridge and can facilitate off-site data movement for backup and DR. Being a true random-access device, they also offer a way to extend an archive by storing cartridges on the shelf but can support much faster searching and file recovery than can linear tape. The other advantage they have in an archive use case is longevity. The dock essentially provides only power and connectivity — the disk drive is in the cartridge — so old RDX storage “media” doesn’t require users to keep older-generation docks around to replay them.

RDX was invented by ProStor, a Boulder, Colo., company that licenses the technology to a number of OEMs, including iMation, Tandberg and BDT. ProStor markets a line of NAS devices called InfiniVault, which incorporate RDX with spinning disk drives to create a tiered storage device for archiving fixed-content, digital assets. Last week ProStor sold the RDX storage technology to backup manufacturer Tandberg Data and will focus on its InfiniVault business as an OEM partner for RDX.

Tandberg won a Bronze award from Storage magazine for Products of the Year in 2010 for its AccuVault RDX. This solution is focused at the backup market, with embedded AccuGuard software, which offers backup and source-side deduplication to increase effective backup capacity and reduce LAN bandwidth requirements. With the off-site portability of RDX storage cartridges, this system is an all-in-one data protection and DR solution for SMB/SME customers.

RDX is a truly unique technology that can give you something different to show an existing customer or a way into a new account. Initially, RDX was used as a simple backup target for companies that required data be taken off-site or in archive applications that had a compliance requirement (RDX shelf life meets the retention time periods and can be used as WORM to replace optical storage). AccuVault greatly enhances the first use case as a complete backup solution in an appliance form factor, enabling users to safely carry backups off-site, as many have been doing with tapes or USB drives. InfiniVault can get you into accounts that use optical media and are looking for a way off that obsolete technology. The new Model 70 can support up to three disk drive shelves, in addition to RDX, making it a good shared-storage NAS solution, in addition to an archive.

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Next step in backing up virtual machines: Run VMs from the backup area

Eric Slack — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:59:00 +0000

Over the past several years, alternatives to traditional backup software products have been developed for backing up virtual machines. These image backup solutions leverage the fact that VMs encapsulate the entire application, OS and server configuration state in a single file — like a VMDK for VMware. This allows the entire server backup process to be reduced to a single (large) file backup and removes the complexity involved with traditional backups, which usually had to understand file structure, application data objects, etc.

But, even with image-based backups, returning applications to operational status requires several steps. First, data must be restored from the backup storage area, where it’s typically in a format proprietary to the backup software. This restore process involves converting the data into its original file format and physically copying it back to the primary storage area. This recovery transfer step can be significant with large files, and recovery transfer time can adversely impact the RTO. Another issue is restoring individual data objects specific to the application, like email messages. Most data backup products require either agents be installed on the application or a special backup process be run to support this granular restore. Message- or mailbox-level restores, as an example, often required a more complex backup process than would restoring the entire email data store.

New technologies in image-based backup solutions now enable hosts to run VMs directly from the backup area, without first restoring these files to primary storage. By allowing a VMDK file to be accessed and run while it’s still a “backup file” eliminates the entire recovery transfer step and shortens the time to data significantly. Another feature of these new image backup solutions is recovering application-specific data objects without agents or special backup steps.

The ability to run VMs from the backup area also enables another key improvement to image-based backups: recovery verification. These solutions can, as part of the backup process, run a recovery verification step, to make sure the VM can be restarted. Instead of simply confirming that data can be returned in one piece, this process can assure that the application, or the entire application stack across several VMs, can be recovered.

For storage VARs, server virtualization is a fact of their customers’ lives. And, like their physical server predecessors, the topic of backing up virtual machines comes up often. For customers already using image-based backup solutions, features like backup verification and in-place recovery of VMs can support some compelling discussions. For those still using traditional backup solutions, this may be the tipping point to making the switch to image backups.

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‘Converged storage’: Primary storage, data backup in one box

Eric Slack — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:50:26 +0000

Data protection is like insurance; it’s something you need and something you do but something you probably won’t use — at least, not very often. Obviously, this is more true when using a DR system to recover an entire data center than when restoring a single file from last night’s backup, but you get the idea. Data backup is an overhead process that doesn’t create any revenue and probably doesn’t represent a real competitive advantage. Essentially, it’s a cost to be minimized.

Dedupe has helped by effectively compressing backups into a smaller physical space, and server virtualization has simplified the process by encapsulating a server’s data into a single file. Snapshot and cloning technologies have reduced the impact of taking backups in real time and restoring them, and the cloud has provided nearly unlimited capacity and a ready-made off-site target.

Most backups today are done with these innovations, which improve performance and reduce costs. But most still involve a separate backup application moving data to separate storage in coordination with the primary storage infrastructure to get that process accomplished without too much disruption. But what if the backup application itself could be eliminated?

There are “converged storage” systems available that combine primary storage and data protection into the same systems, using onboard SSD and SATA drives. They use a log-based file/block architecture that maximizes data reduction and provides intelligence to keep data on the appropriate storage tier (flash or SATA), producing the performance required by primary storage. With integrated snapshot technology and extended effective capacity to store several months of snapshots, these converged storage systems provide internal data protection that can replace the backup process — and the requirement to implement a separate backup system. Replication to a second unit is available for local redundancy or a remote DR system.

This approach represents another alternative for companies looking for a way to simplify storage infrastructures. Instead of just improving the backup process or incrementally reducing its cost, converged storage systems can eliminate dedicated backup altogether. The result can be a storage system that protects itself, reducing the time and resources required to do so.

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