data backup

CommVault fires back at EMC’s Slootman

Former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman, now president of EMC’s data backup and recovery division, sat down for a Q&A with SearchDataBackup.com that’s been getting some attention from the industry, particularly other deduplication competitors.

Among those competitors, one with a contentious relationship with EMC/Data Domain is former partner CommVault, with whom Data Domain had a messy breakup after CommVault introduced its own deduplication with Simpana 8.

Here’s what Slootman had to say about them:

SearchDataBackup: Will you continue to work closely with Symantec Corp.’s OpenStorage (OST) API now that you’re EMC?

Slootman: Yes. I’m not throwing my partners under the bus. We’ll compete, but we’re all competitors and partners these days. We won’t screw them. We’ll screw other companies, like CommVault. We {Data Domain] treated them as a good partner and they came after us.

In an email to Storage Soup this week, CommVault vice president of marketing and business development Dave West had this response:

As I said back in June, I applaud Frank and Data Domain’s ability to create momentum for deduplication and a tremendous return for its shareholders. In the Dave Raffo piece, Frank calls out CommVault simply because we’re giving them a run for their money. Simpana, with built-in dedupe, works really well, and we are winning business. Now, I find it ludicrous to suggest a product vision that forces a customer to deploy 3 or more disparate products to achieve basic data protection. (Pile on more products for replication, encryption, archive and SRM).  At the end of the day, customers want less complexity, improved operational efficiency and ultimately, to spend less money. That means fewer, not more solutions. Less hardware and smarter software. EMC’s product portfolio is both complicated and costly for customers, so buyer beware. Also, in our opinion, this interview should raise some serious flags among the thousands of already nervous NetWorker customers out there looking for reassurance in the wake of the Data Domain acquisition.

I asked West to elaborate on the “red flags” about NetWorker, and he pointed to this statement by Slootman in another part of the interview:

SearchDataBackup: If Avamar is the future of data backup software, where does that leave NetWorker?

Slootman: Well, Avamar is augmenting NetWorker in a lot of places. People are moving a good part of their workload to Avamar, but not all. They’re still running applications like big, fat databases on traditional backup software. NetWorker can support conventional backup on tape and mixed media and people can integrate it with Data Domain.

“Former EMC customers are telling us that there is no real investment or innovation going into the Networker product and they’re tired of it,” West added.

This dedupe feud will get really interesting if CommVault partner Dell Inc. starts selling Data Domain, which is a likely scenario because Dell sells much of EMC’s storage products. CommVault’s Simpana is currently a big piece of Dell’s deduplication strategy.

Zmanda spruces up Windows cloud backup

Open-source data backup software company Zmanda Inc. is releasing version 2.0 of its Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) for Windows today.

New features include:

• Geography control - customers can tag data so that it’s backed up to a cloud data center in a certain region. For ecample, users in Europe can specify data that has to stay in Europe per European Union regulations. Customers can also choose to send data to data centers closest to their location for better performance of data migrations and retrieval over the network.
• Selective restore - the ability to restore one file from a data set; not new for Zmanda’s main backup product, but new for ZCB.
• Windows Security Certificate Encryption - Previously data sent to the cloud through ZCB was encrypted using standard AES encryption; support for the Windows certificate “is the highest level of encryption for Windows systems,” said Zmanda CEO Chander Kant. “It means they can use the same certificate they’re used to if they encrypt files on their Windows server and can make bare-metal restores for DR easier.”

Zmanda Cloud Backup 1.0 was first released last December. Kant said there are currently about 100 customers using it to backup systems to the cloud.

Zmanda opens up cloud backup API

Open source backup software vendor Zmanda Inc., among the first to offer customers a direct link between its backup software and cloud storage, is opening up its API for connecting backup software with cloud storage service providers to other vendors, including competitors.

CEO Chander Kant says Zmanda is sponsoring a new open source project called ZCloud, which offers an API to show how backup sofware connects to storage cloud service providers to avoid duplicating work as more backup vendors offer the option. “Today every backup softrware has to talk a different language,” Kant said. “This will get rid of those idiosyncrasies and make interoperability easier.”

The subject of standard cloud APIs and interoperability is a hot one in the still-nascent cloud computing market. While some are already calling for or developing standardized cloud interfaces, others say it’s too early to establish industry-wide standards without quashing differentiation.

Kant points out that an API specifically for backup tools isn’t the same as industry-wide, homogenizing standardization. “This is how standardization is actually going to happen — not an overall set of specs, but specific ones based on specific use cases,” he said.

He added that while the API specifies common aspects of connecting backup to the cloud, there’s no reason a backup software vendor can’t add its own differentiators to the integration. “The API allows for discovery of the underlying storage clouds, keeping developers from having to repeat basic stuff,” he said. At this early stage, he says “most people are first trying to get to a basic level of functionality.”

New utility backs up PCs to iPods and iPhones

Consumer appliance maker Storage Appliance Corporation, makers of Clickfree-branded portable backup drives, launched a new connector today that will allow consumers to use their iPod or iPhone as the storage device for PC backups.

As an iPod user myself, I find this a pretty cool concept, especially since it requires no software — according to the website, you plug it in to your computer, plug the iPhone or iPod in, and it starts syncing automatically. The iPod or iPhone can be used in raw disk mode for a similar effect, but in the consumer world, people are generally willing to pay for convenience. This also makes it possible to use the free capacity of the device for data while retaining a music and video collection on the rest of the device simultaneously. The maximum capacity of an iPhone 3G currently is 32 GB; iPod Classics are available in up to 120 GB sizes.

The product, called the Transformer, is available now for $49.99. A device that syncs with external USB hard drives (for truly tiered home backup, I would presume) for $89.99 will be available next month.

The press release also contained this intriguing tidbit:

The new Transformers will also allow customers to retrieve music collections back off their iPhone or iPod. Instead of “orphaning” the content, the new Transformer allow you to retrieve your content quickly and easily.

Apple’s Digital Rights Management encoding makes it impossible to do this with either device by default, in order to prevent unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content among users with a sneaker-net of iPods and iPhones as ‘go-between’ devices. A Storage Appliance Corp. spokesperson said that files protected by Apple’s DRM would need to be re-activated in iTunes after transfer, meaning unauthorized transferred files would be unplayable.

Enterprise storage managers could still find this a good forensics tool for accessing the content on a portable device that might otherwise be automatically wiped when connected to a PC with iTunes; I can also picture it being used at very small companies or home offices for portable backups and file transfers.

In general, though the iPhone seems headed for a business role alongside the BlackBerry, the real Holy Grail for enterprise IT will be the ability to virtually provision applications to mobile devices from the cloud on-demand. Citrix has already demonstrated a form of this; Symantec has also talked in the past about offering such capabilities.

Symantec and CommVault tussle over TheInfoPro results

Nothing like a good vendor fight to keep the week interesting. This time, it’s Symantec and CommVault who have been going at it in press releases and statements after TheInfoPro released its Wave 12 Storage Study on Monday.

CommVault put out a press release shortly after the study was released trumpeting the findings that were flattering to its Simpana product (as virtually all storage vendors do when reports like this come out). The statement that drew Symantec’s ire was this one: “CommVault garnered a top spot in attracting new customers from competing solutions, according to TheInfoPro™ Wave 12 Storage Study. Twenty percent of respondents reported they had switched to CommVault from another vendor in the past year.”

Symantec responded by firing off this statement to press through its PR agency:

The actual figure is 0.2%, since TheInfoPro’s sample size was 848 and only 2 had switched. Also, only 10 respondents mentioned Commvault. For comparison, 66 mentioned Symantec, 86 mentioned NetApp, and 194 mentioned EMC. The full report with a chart and list of vendors and customer sample size is available from TheInfoPro.

Roughly 5 out of the 66 Symantec customers reported switching to Symantec solutions.  Clearly, this is not an accurate comparison, or a valid statistic and CommVault seems to be clutching at straws in an attempt to seem relevant to the market.

Rowr! Saucer of milk, table two!

Responded CommVault VP of marketing and business development Dave West:

This study is indicative of what we are seeing in the market and reflects historic trends within our customer base. In addition to sustaining strong customer loyalty, CommVault is experiencing notable year on year growth. We continue to see strong Simpana software adoption by former customers of competitive offerings. In May we announced we surpassed 10,000 customers; more of half of these previously were Symantec customers.

 
I don’t know how many CommVault customers came from Symantec, but it’s worth noting CommVault’s revenues actually dropped a bit year-over-year last quarter although it did grow for its entire fiscal year.

As for the spat over TIP numbers, TIP spokesperson Bernadette Abel clarified in an email to Storage Soup:

The percentages noted on this data point are per vendor and not an overall comparison among all vendor mentions. 20% of current CommVault customers interviewed said that they switched to CommVault from a competing vendor.

The press release put out by the organization said that it garnered a top spot, not the top spot as based on the 20% conversion rate.

Bottom line? Regardless of the statistics, these guys are clearly under each other’s skin. CommVault has been aggressive about taking share from competitors, and it would appear it has at least succeeded in getting some attention from them. The real winners in all this should be end users, who stand to benefit from better pricing when competition is intense.

BakBone repackages Asempra

Fresh from its fire-sale acquisition of Windows CDP partner Asempra Inc., BakBone Software Inc. has released a new series of software-only versions of Asempra’s Business Continuity Appliance dubbed NetVault FASTRecover (NVFR).

BakBone VP of marketing Jeff Drescher said Asempra always shipped its software on appliances, whether the Business Continuity Server, which attached in a clustered configuration to a SAN, or the standalone Business Continuity Appliance launched earlier this year. BakBone also plans to release new appliances this summer, but this week launched new software-only deployment options for the Asempra software.

BakBone also plans additional integration between BakBone’s NetVault Backup software and FASTRecover, like controlling the export of CIFS traffic through Asempra from NetVault, and adding SQL 2008 and Microsoft SharePoint support. “There’s a lot more we can do going forward to bring the companies closer together,” he said.

But the first priority is repositioning Asempra to go after small businesses and the midmarket more aggressively, which BakBone officials said was the goal at the time of acquisition earlier this month. For those purposes, it’s introducing new configurations of Asempra’s software targeted at different market segments according to company size.

NetVault FASTRecover WorkGroup Edition includes licenses to protect 3 servers and up to 2 TB of storage; Data Center Edition covers 6 servers and 5 TB; Enterprise Edition scales beyond 6 hosts and 5 TB. Workgroup Edition is priced at $2995; Data Center Edition at $8,995; and Enterprise Edition at $19,995. This is lower than Asempra’s previous entry pricing for BCA at $30,000. Appliance versions that correspond with each of the editions will be available in July. Pricing was not yet available for the new appliances yet.

“I think that is a great idea. It allows you to get the hardware you want to use so if you are a Dell shop you can get Dell,” wrote Asempra  user Derek Kruger, IT and communications supervisor for the City of Safford, Ariz., in an email to Storage Soup. “I know that a lot of the vendors are pushing the appliance angle but having a ‘black box’ that does something so critical is kind of scary.”

Tandberg hitches hopes to new VTL

Tape backup company Tandberg is battling to establish a new foothold in the disk-based data protection market following the bankruptcy of its parent holding company in Europe.

Late last month Tandberg Data’s Norwegian parent holding company filed for bankruptcy and was sold to creditor Cyrus Capital after it couldn’t repay a lapsed loan. The holding company, Tandberg Data ASA, along with an R&D arm called Tandberg Storage ASA, were an umbrella over four regional sales offices in the U.S., Germany, Singapore and Tokyo. Nothing has changed yet for those regional subsidiaries in the bankruptcy.

McClain Buggle, product manager for Tandberg Data Corp. U.S., says the U.S. organization has its own development team in Boulder, Colo., and “we are moving forward with the development of our product line and expanding our offerings.”

Today, Tandberg launched a virtual tape library (VTL) called the DPS1000 series. The VTL offers features like virtual tape stacking, in which data is stacked on virtual tape cartridges before being exported to physical tape for maximum tape utilization. Customers have the option of policy-driven tape export or native tape export that matches virtual tapes to physical tapes created by the backup application.

Tandberg’s legacy is tape, and this is one of its first forays into disk-based backup. The product will face hurdles in a market that’s been busily shoring up checkbox features/barriers to entry for some time now. The DPS1000 doesn’t allow the backup application to control writes to tape, a feature that has been problematic for some users of VTLs for years. APIs such as Symantec’s OpenStorage (OST) have been developed to overcome the issue with other VTL vendors.

Another key feature for VTLs today is the ability to deduplicate backup data. The importance of this feature for VTL users was the impetus for the partnership between EMC and dedupe VTL maker Quantum last year as well as IBM’s acquisition of Diligent. Buggle said Tandberg wants to offer dedupe, but is still wrestling with the “limitations on writing to tape,” which require either a method of deduping data on tape or a way to quickly reinflate data into its native format before writing it to a physical tape device. There have also been moves made elsewhere in the market on this issue, by backup software vendors CommVault with Simpana 8, and CA Inc. with ARCserve 12.5, which can both dedupe data sent to physical tape.

The DPS1000 is an iSCSI based appliance, and Tandberg is looking to use it to appeal to midmarket shops, according to Buggle. “We’re not trying to compete with the enterprise guys,” he said. Buggle said the company is aware of another trend in the VTL space, of a move among small and midsized companies to disk-only interfaces such as those offered by Data Domain and ExaGrid.

According to research by IDC, VTL is an $877 million market, with the overall data protection market placed at $2.6 billion. “I understand the trend, but I don’t think the VTL fades off completely,” Buggle said. Users may yet find that adding processes at the backup software level problematic for performance reasons, he said.

Still, storage analysts say there are table stakes in this market that Tandberg will have to catch up with if it hopes to gain significant traction. “I don’t know what hope a VTL has at this point without deduplication,” said backup expert W. Curtis Preston. “I also can’t imagine what it’s like for a company to begin developing a new dedupe product now.”

Quantum survives rough fiscal year

Quantum completed what its CEO called a “challenging” fiscal year at the end of March, and the fourth quarter was similar to the entire year for the backup vendor. Quantum continued to increase year-over-year disk backup and software sales around its deduplication products while its tape sales declined. But its disk backup sales decreased from the previous quarter, leaving Quantum with a long way to go to accomplish its goal of becoming a market leader.

“I think that the emphasis you heard on the [earnings] call is that it’s very much about getting through [fiscal] ’09 while making a lot of changes in the company,” CEO Rick Belluzzo said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday afternoon. “We think our business model was demonstrated last quarter that this can be a very solidly profitable business. There is a lot of cash generation potential. But we really need to focus on building revenue with our new model, with new products focused on tape of course, but as well aggressively on our disk systems and software business.”

Quantum lost $356 million for the year — including a $339 million one-time, non-cash charge for goodwill impairment — and its revenue for the fourth quarter and full year were down substantially from the previous year. It did show a $4 million non-GAAP profit for last quarter, discounting amortization of intangibles, stock-based compensation charges and restructuring costs. But while its $24 million revenue from disk and software last quarter was nearly double the previous year, it’s a far cry from the $79 million recorded by dedupe leader Data Domain.

Belluzzo said over the next year Quantum will have two major software releases and a new hardware platform for its DXi deduplication VTL family. He didn’t get specific, but emphasized the importance of replication and increasing the scale of the systems. He said Quantum also plans a “significant” new release of its StorNext software that moves data between storage tiers.

“[Our] vision includes our ability to deliver a single scalable disk-based architecture with deduplication and replication that can scale for protecting and managing a terabyte of data and remote office to more than 200 terabyte at a data center, and is also compatible with solutions from multiple vendors such as EMC,” Belluzzo said.

EMC has been selling Quantum’s deduplication software in its disk libraries since around the middle of last year. Dell has also said it will OEM Quantum’s dedupe software, although it has yet to announce any products.

“We are working with Dell on our deduplication technology. When are they going to launch a Dell-branded product? I can’t say,” Quantum CFO Jon Gacek said of when pressed about Dell on the earnings call.

Online services bite the dust

Two online data sharing services failed this week — one from a computing giant, and the other a small social bookmarking website.

That’s the trouble in this wild and wooly world of the cloud–especially in its early days. Not every service is going to make it, and then you’re going to have to figure out what to do with your data if your service fails.

Hewlett-Packard pulled the plug on HP Upline, and according to our Australian affiliate, ma.gnolia went under. SearchStorage ANZ reports that “in late January, ma.gnolia experienced a catastrophic data loss event and turned to backups to restore its database of users’ bookmarks. Both the primary and secondary backups failed irrevocably.”

Said a friend of mine who’s a Digg addict (I’m more a del.icio.us woman myself), “Losing my bookmarks would *hurt*.”

In the case of HP’s Upline online backup service, users will at least be able to get their data back. HP confirmed this afternoon will be discontinued as of March 31. In a statement, an HP spokesperson said:

HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.

HP will no longer be backing up customer files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for customers to download any files that have been backed up to Upline.

Blogger AppScout wrote disappointedly, “And so goes the story of one of the slickest online storage and backup services to launch in the past year.” Among Upline’s unique features was the ability for users to tag content for later search and share, and to publish files online using the service through a feature called the Upline Library. However, Upline crashed right out of the gate, drawing opportunistic marketing for competitors.

Everything you always wanted to know about data backup but were afraid to ask

Who you gonna call when your computer’s toast?
Originally uploaded on Flickr by alexmuse 

Guess which IT discipline the experts expect to be the most resilient in the face of the recession? You guessed it: good ol’ backup. Perhaps the least glorified job in the data center, at times among the most poorly understood–and still chugging along, as the growth of corporate data waits for no man or stock market.

As we begin to look forward to time off for the holidays the New Year, then, what better perspective to take on the storage industry than a careful look at backup, the technical advances that have made it vastly more complicated (but potentially vastly more efficient as well), and the people who are making it work in different environments? This week we’re running a feature piece by yours truly at our SearchDataBackup.com site that examines all of the above…and more.

Part I is up today, covering everybody’s favorite topic: disk vs. tape. There’s even a little NAS disk vs. VTL disk for those who like things a little spicier. Tomorrow will see Part 2, focused on software. Thursday’s Part 3 will examine outsourcing and the cloud. Friday’s finale will address the ways parts 1-3 still won’t get on top of the data growth rate at big companies any time soon. Yay!

Hope everyone who made the venerable disk vs. tape debate so lively on this blog will tune in, and offer their own views.