W. Curtis Preston launched his own series of Backup Central Live! seminars for 2011

Last week, after the Exec Event in Palo Alto, I joined my friend W. Curtis Preston for his first Backup Central Live! event. Curtis has spent years educating IT pros about data protection, this was the first week of a new series of self-produced events. And let me tell you, although I’ve seen him present dozens of times, Curtis was really in his element here. He held the packed room enthralled, and the vendor sponsors I talked to were very pleased about the event!

Introducing Backup Central Live!

The Backup Central Live! series are day-long seminars across the USA in 2011. Each event includes over 3 hours of content from “Mr. Backup”, W. Curtis Preston, as well as presentations from Jacob Farmer and the sponsoring vendors. The seminars are free for qualified end-users, which includes most of the readers of this blog!

Curtis and company will cover the challenges of backing up and recovering data in a variety of settings:

• Virtualized servers (e.g. VMware, Hyper-V, Xen)
• Very large servers and data centers
• Remote offices and laptops
• Data retained for multiple years

The session also includes technical detail about key products and technologies:

• Cloud Backup Services
• Deduplication
• Continuous data protection (CDP) and near-CDP
• Archive software
• Tape and its proper role

Attendees even get free breakfast and lunch, which was of a good hotel caterer quality in my opinion.

Stephen’s Stance

The Backup Central Live! crew does a great job putting together a professional event

I knew Curtis could put together quality backup content, but the crew deserves credit for such a professional and successful event. They attracted some great sponsors, too, including AppAsure, Aptare, FalconStor, NEC, Quantum, Spectra Logic, and Cirtas. And Jacob Farmer’s involvement was a pleasant surprise, too: I’ve always enjoyed the deep technical conversations I’ve had with him!

If you enjoyed my own backup, archiving, and storage seminars in the past, I know you’ll love this event. The next Backup Central Live! cities are as follows. If you’ll be around, you really ought to attend!

• Orlando, FL Feb 1 Register here
• Houston, TX Feb 8 Register here
• Chicago, IL Feb 22 Register here

My only suggestion for the crew is that they get a bigger room next time!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | See W. Curtis Preston’s Backup Central Live!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although deduplication of storage is nothing new, with Data Domain and other making hay with the technique for years, it has never been ready for prime time – reduction of active primary storage applications like email and databases. Instead, deduplication has been relegated to second- or third-tier status, deduplicating archives and backup data. But change is in the air, and deduplication vendors are starting to bustle towards the bright lights of primary storage.

Stone Knives and Bear Skins

We have all been here before, of course. Back at the dawn of the personal computer era, data compression was a hot topic of conversation. I recall being so impressed by an article in Byte (1986:5, p99) outlining Huffman coding that I tried cooking up an implementation in Atari BASIC. Lossless compression has a magical pull to the geek in many of us – redundant data just wants to be eliminated!

Stacker dominated the disk compression world - until Microsoft introduced DOS 6.0

Companies soon applied compression to primary storage, especially the limited storage in personal computers. Stacker was a hit after 1990, until Microsoft built a workalike, called DoubleSpace, into DOS 6.0 in 1993, leading to a historical lawsuit. I personally used the ADDSTOR disk compression built into DR-DOS 6.0 to stretch two more years out of the 20 MB MFM hard drive in my AT&T PC6300 at WPI.

But something funny happened in the late 1990s: Compression began to lose its luster. Compressing data always takes quite a bit of CPU power, but this was offset somewhat by the truncated data transfers and more-efficient file system layout afforded in early PCs. But as disks got larger and faster, using precious CPU time to save space seemed less and less compelling. Today, although nearly every operating system includes built-in compression of files, folders, or perhaps disks, these features are rarely used. And compression was never popular in the performance-sensitive enterprise space.

Deduplication Has a Nice Ring

Although traditional fine-grained compression has not been very successful in the enterprise, its lanky cousin, single-instance storage, has long found niche jobs. Applications from databases to email systems to file servers have long had the ability to recognize to requests to store the exact same file or record, and to store just a single instance in this case. Even file systems have the ability to do single instance storage through the use of links, though this is initiated by the user rather than in an automated fashion.

In the late 1990s, FilePool began developing a content-addressable storage device, which was acquired by EMC in 2001. This device, later known as the Centera, was one of a number of storage platforms targeted at the archiving market introduced this decade. At the same time, virtual tape libraries made the jump from the mainframe to open systems. Both devices, being outside the critical path of performance but offering massive capacity, were well-suited to implement advanced capacity optimization technologies that combined the concepts of compression with single-instance storage. Thus was created the modern world of data deduplication.

What we think of as deduplication is neither fish nor fowl: It assesses larger “chunks” of data than compression technologies, delivering greater capacity savings and potentially reducing performance impact, but is more flexible than single-instancing, recognizing the similarities within files or objects.

But it is still maddeningly difficult to scale deduplication while maintaining performance. Rather than fight to maintain reasonable write throughput, most deduplication products have switched to post-processing, deferring their work to quieter times.

It’s Not Just for Breakfast

Regardless of their methods or underlying technology, no deduplication vendor has stood up to support challenging low-latency or high-throughput production applications, however. NetApp was the first to raise the issue of support for production applications, but although they tout the technology for VMware, they haven’t exactly been shouting from the rooftops to get their A-SIS deduplication technology deployed in other high-I/O applications. And I haven’t seen Hifn’s card yet.

Yesterday, I mentioned that greenBytes was adding deduplication to their ZFS-based storage array for primary data. And now Riverbed has fired another shot over the bow, repurposing their (deduplicating) WAN accelerator product for primary (file) storage. They might be able to pull it off, too, since they have a long list of customers who are already enjoying the technology in production. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Riverbed’s appliances can scale to handle production data loads. Although it’s file-only, I can imagine quite a few scenarios where this tech could really yield benefits. Could we come full-circle, with deduplication finally reaching the enterprise storage world?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Features, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Overall, I was impressed with many of these products this last year, but certainly CommVault, HDS, ProStor, Xsigo, and Akorri (winners all) stood out with important products. I too was surprised to see the absence of some heavyweights: Symantec’s strength in archiving and backup didn’t net them an award, and both Emulex and QLogic were skipped for the 8 Gb FC market. EMC was overlooked, too, but I’m certain that will be remedied for 2008 after the flurry of excellent new products announced these last few months.

Backup Software

• Winners: CommVault’s Simpana 7.0 – an impressive product that brings a very wide range of data protection features in an integrated package. They’d be in my top three! Next was the intriguing RecoverGuard from Continuity Software, a product which intrigues me. Finally, Yosemite’s amazingly priced FileKeeper Professional took bronze – I definitely would have put this up there, too!
• Strong contenders: EVault’s solution would have been my pick since it effectively tackles a real need – mobile and SMB data protection! Also, Symantec’s strong NetBackup 6.5 upgrade deserved more attention.

Backup Hardware

• Winners: NEC’s HydraStor HS8 isn’t a platform I’m familiar with – I’ll have to take the judges at their word! But I can’t argue with silver and bronze winners, Copan and ProStor’s cool RDX – both are truly revolutionary products and deserve the spotlight.
• Strong contenders: I would definitely have added Gresham’s Clareti VTL to the list – it’s much more than “just a VTL” and I hope it gets some more attention!

Disk and Disk Subsystems

• Winners: Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 deserves considerable attention, bringing built-in hardware encryption to the mobile data market – every mobile disk should have this technology! NetApp’s FAS2000 (silver) is nice enough, but I was much more impressed with the bronze-winning USP V from HDS this year.
• Strong contenders: I would have given the USP V the top prize for 2007, but I can’t argue with the little Seagate disk. The AMCC 3ware 9600 RAID adapter deserves some attention, too.

Storage Management Software

• Winners: Akorri’s BalancePoint (gold) impresses me much like bronze-winning Onaro’s Application Insight does. Both make the big leap from “storage” to “application data”, and both are worthy winners. I’ve never used the silver-winning Finisar NetWisdom product, but it looks like others are impressed with it.
• Strong contenders: This was a crowded field, and Symantec, WysDM, Quantum StorNext, and the rest probably came close. I agree with the Akorri placing, but would have picked one of these instead of the potentially mis-categorized Finisar product.

Networking Equipment

• Winners: Xsigo took the top honors with their InfiniBand-based VP780 platform. This is truly a next-generation product, and it is getting serious attention and traction, and deserved a spot on the list! Riverbed’s excellent Optimization System (silver) also deserved its ranking, but I’m not familiar enough with the Storwize product to know if it’s truly bronze-worthy.
• Strong contenders: I would have tipped either QLogic or Emulex‘s 8 Gb offerings for a spot. Despite my jokes, 8 Gb FC is an important element of the modern SAN and both companies have carved out a compelling product, but apparently neither shipped in volume until this month…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Reacting to TechTarget’s Storage Products of the Year
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.