Around the Storage Block Blog : SMB

Better data protection for SMBs

CalvinZ — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:08:00 GMT

On today's podcast, we talk about the HP Total Care announcement with HP StorageWorks Marketing Manager Chris McCall. The announcement today has three StorageWorks components:

HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions - new application integrated snapshots that integrates the P4000 replication software with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This integration ensures application quiescing when creating point-in-time copies, simplifying the process
HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System - new NAS target for backup allows customers to create and backup to a CIFS and/or NFS-based file share and its provided free of charge. While many customers will find NAS-based backup a desirable feature, small and midsized customers will find this most useful.
HP StorageWorks DAT 320 Tape Drives - this is the seventh generation of DAT with 2X the capacity, 75% higher performance and around 50% less power than the previous generation DAT.

So with that, here's the podcast:

Here's a link if you trouble with the embedded player and a link to download the MP3 (right click and select "save as")

Announcing the X510 Data Vault podcast with Microsoft guest blog

CalvinZ — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

I have a ton of things on my list to blog about in the next few days as there's still much to say about the HP Tech Day. For this post, I'm going to take a slight diversion to share with you a podcast and guest blog from Microsoft's Mark Pendergast. On Tuesday morning, we announced two new StorageWorks products: the HP StorageWorks X510 Data Vault and the HP StorageWorks X3000 High Availability bundles. I have a podcast ready to go for the X3000 as well but this post will focus on the X510. First, here's the podcast I did with Bill Johnson, the product manager for it. (NOTE: X500 is the new family - and yes, we're planning more in the future - while the X510 is the product we announced).

(NOTE: Adding a link for those browsers that can't play the embedded podcast: click here to listen)

Here are a few links to help you go deeper:

Article about the X500 Data Vault titled, "Think data storage has to be complicated? Think again"
Here's a link to the U.S. product page

And here's a short video demo of it:

(NOTE: If this video doesn't work, go to the article "Think data storage has to be complicated? Think again" and there's a link to it on the right side)

And now here's the post from Mark who is part of the Windows Home Server team at Microsoft:

By Mark Pendergrast

We're thrilled to have been invited to share the Microsoft perspective on the Hewlett-Packard DataVault launch with readers of the HP Around the Storage Block Blog. But we're even more excited to celebrate this important new milestone for the Windows Home Server ecosystem - a dedicated product entry into the Small Office Home Office (SoHo) and micro business space!

As we've posted about before on the Windows Home Server team blog, there is significant value for having a Windows Home Server in a SoHo or micro business. From backing up client PCs to offering remote access to their server (and the files on the Data Vault ) when they're away from the office, a Windows Home Server-based product offers a great solution for a business that doesn't have - or want - a sophisticated IT infrastructure. We thought this was such a good match that we recently added a dedicated 'Windows Home Server SoHo' page on our product website (lots of good info up there, including some compelling case studies). But Microsoft and HP aren't the only ones who recognize this value, as business pubs SMB PC Magazine and Inc have caught on to this fact as well.

So we congratulate HP on making the first entry into this market with their dedicated line of Data Vault line of products. Because HP has built in the right set of features, hardware specifications, branding, and of course channel/marketing support, we're confident that they're on to something big here! We look forward to partnering with them on the launch and beyond.

Mark, Windows Home Server Team, Microsoft

So there you have it - a jammed pack post with a podcast, a video and a Microsoft guest blog. Phew!

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Usability Corner Interview with Chris McCall: Usability, Virtualization and SMB

CalvinZ — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:38:00 GMT

By Mike Moroze, HP LeftHand Usability Corner

I sat down with Chris McCall the manager of product marketing in our Unified Storage Division (a part of HP's StorageWorks Division) to discuss how small and medium sized companies are looking at virtualization. What we're seeing is that more and more small and medium sized companies are finding that their virtualization requirements are similar to large enterprises. I asked Chris some question to help me understand the SMB and virtualization market better.

Usability Corner (UC): Virtualization seems to be taking off in the enterprise business space, do you see a similar trajectory for the Small-Medium Business (SMB)? If so, why?

Chris McCall (CM): No, I see a different trajectory for SMB. Virtualization in the SMB space is not growing as fast as in the enterprise space because virtualization puts up a few roadblocks that make it difficult for SMB's to implement. They can limit the full potential of virtualization. The biggest roadblock to virtualization is storage; for many SMB's, it's too expensive and requires too many resources to manage and implement. However, VMWare HA (high availability), and VMotion - require shared storage.

UC: Why would an SMB customer choose an HP LeftHand virtualization solution over another vendor's solution?

CM: For SMB customers that expect their virtual environment to grow, HP LeftHand solutions provides a very cost-effective entry point which is massively scalable. Purchase what you want to today and grow it to whatever size you want -- maintaining HA. And for customers that don't want to deal with external storage we have the VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) which transforms server disk drives into iSCSI SANs with the same level of scalability.

UC: Usability can bring several competitive advantages to a product. Can you comment on what advantages you see our customers relying on in terms of the usability of the HP LeftHand solution?

CM: Virtual Server environments provide a very dynamic application environment. Customers can roll out new applications, change configurations, and move workloads around very easily. So what does that mean from a storage manageability perspective? It puts pressure on being able to change storage configurations more often. Any product that allows simple on-line storage configurations so your storage needs can change quickly and frequently is not only a competitive advantage but a requirement. Our HP LeftHand P4000 Centralized Management Console allows us to do that easily - the GUI (Graphical User Interface) makes it simple without any downtime with your volumes.

UC: What key usability advantages do you believe that the HP LeftHand solutions have over the competition?

CM: Non-disruptive configuration changes, non-disruptive performance scaling, simple GUI requires less time to manage; Our solution provides for easy thin provisioning - there are no setting of thresholds, growth increments, etc. --- same with snapshots, you don't have to set reserves and there's no guesswork - the system takes care of all that for you.

UC: In the context of SMBs and virtualization - virtualization typically provides a fairly high ROI. Would you agree that ROI is an important decision criterion for virtualization? What other criteria are important for SMB storage decisions?

CM - ROI used to be the number one criteria; improving business continuity has become number one over the last year. For SMBs, business continuance has become more important because with virtualization, you're putting more eggs in fewer baskets.

UC: ROI of usability is also frequently referenced as a reason to ensure usability is considered in product development. Would you agree? What other reasons would there be to include usability in HP LeftHand solutions?

CM: Yes absolutely - usability is all about ROI. Customer satisfaction and troubleshooting are also critical -- the easier it is to understand what's going on, the more likely you are to avoid potential downtime.

UC: How would you rate the usability of our solution for the SMB customer compared to our competitors?

CM: Considering the comprehensive feature set provided in addition to simplicity, I honestly believe HP P4000 is the best- take a look at the Windows IT Pro article from by Michael Otey which just posted. [Note: UC tracked down this link after Chris suggested it and you can click here to read the article: http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/article/articleid/102478/hp-lefthand-p4300-48tb-sas-starter-san-solution.html ]

UC: What are the 3 or so main pain points that virtualization is solving for the SMB customer? How does our solution help alleviate these pain points?

CM:

First - Cost - you can run more apps on less servers. However, this means you're putting more of your eggs in fewer baskets, which leads to the next issue;
Second - Maintaining high availability
Third - Improve IT environment flexibility

HP LeftHand addresses the cost issue by providing a solution that allows you to buy only what you need to today and grow it non-disruptively. Also, thin provisioning cuts initial outlay, and for customers that want to leverage server disk drives, VSA eliminates the need for external storage hardware. High availability is achieved by HP LeftHand's highly redundant and highly available solutions that leverage Network RAID in addition to the traditional HW RAID. These solutions protect against more than just disk drives and controller failures. Our system can stay online during full node failures, air conditioning failures, power outages, etc. - applications never lose access to their data.

Our solutions improve your IT environment's flexibility. All configuration changes, and increasing performance and capacity can be done non-disruptively which delivers a flexible storage environment which you need for flexible IT environment.

UC: Any thoughts on how HP LeftHand can improve its customer focus in designing and developing solutions that meet our customer needs?

CM: Ultimately, we don't want users using our UI, we want it so simple that it rolls into the IT environment and you don't have to manage storage as a separate entity, everything just works... Storage tasks are automated with higher level IT tasks -- like rolling out applications or increasing application performance.

UC: Thanks Chris!

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Not your grandfather’s NAS…

CalvinZ — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:30:00 GMT

By Dirk Kunselman, Product Manager

If I ask you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind when I mention NAS, you might reference high-end (and expensive) file serving appliances. Or you might mention consumer-class devices that are becoming more prevalent at your local electronics retailer. Or you might say that you know it's like a SAN, only different. You might even reveal that he's your favorite rapper. Oops, you lost me.

Fact is, NAS (Network Attached Storage) is often misunderstood and more frequently underappreciated. Most folks associate it with files, but as NAS has evolved, it's taken on more than just file protocols and print services. The term is now almost synonymous with (and sometimes even replaced by) unified-or combined file and block-storage. It's a great story, especially for small environments: why just network and consolidate one type of data when you can serve files for your clients and blocks for your servers all from the same storage system?

That's where the new HP StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 Network Storage Systems come in. They're NAS devices, yes; but moreover, they're unified storage systems since they all include an iSCSI Target standard. An X1000 model can be that single storage consolidation platform by itself, while an X3000 Gateway can turn an existing array or SAN into a unified consolidation solution (utilizing both SAN and Ethernet connections) by adding IP-based file and/or iSCSI protocols to it.

NAS isn't just about sharing files any more--it's about sharing information.

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The complexity of choice

CalvinZ — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:44:00 GMT

Editor's note: The last three posts have focused on the storage consolidation for SMB announcement we did last week. We have posts from Carol Kemp, Lee Johns, and Charles Vallhonrat. Here are links to those posts if you want to read today's post in context:

New Storage Consolidation Solutions for SMB by Carol Kemp - An overview of the announcement
Tales of cold dead fish by Lee Johns - discusses the new HP StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 Network Storage Systems
Why all storage isn't in a SAN by Charles Vallhonrat - talks about shared SAS storage with the new MSA2000sa G2

So with that context, here's today's wrap up on the announcement, focusing on the new HP Virtualization Bundles.

The Complexity of Choice

By Lee Johns

Last week before going on a business trip to the Middle East, I wanted to get a small digital camera. My wife said those immortal words "That should be easy - there is so much choice today". Two days of web research and 4 store visits later I had it narrowed down to 6 possibilities from 4 different manufacturers and none had all the features I now wanted having seen all of the different specifications.

Why am I writing about this here? Well I was thinking how tough the IT industry makes it for customers, with all of the choice we offer. It's not just that we have so many different makes and models from so many manufacturers but in addition to that you have to make them all work together in support of your business goals. With that said I do see a move toward converging different elements of the infrastructure to deliver IT infrastructure solutions that are easier to consume. Last week, HP took another step in this direction with the announcement of HP Virtualization Bundles for SMB customers starting out with virtualization. The solutions bring together networking, servers, storage and both server and storage virtualization software into pre-tested configurations that can scale with additional building blocks as their businesses grow.

SMB's don't always choose the elements of the solutions they deploy. A reseller partner or integrator will recommend configurations to them. Regardless, anything that makes it easier for a reseller to recommend or a customer to buy fully featured solutions with built in investment protection is a step in the right direction. There may be other features available if you want to spend the time doing work on integration and configuration but ,believe me, the HP solutions are well rounded, have unique features, you will be happy with the solution, and save some time and money.

By the way I ended up buying the first camera I was drawn to. I could have saved a lot of my own time If I had just purchased the product that met my top three criteria (size, price and battery life). I'm sure I will get great pictures and I doubt I will miss having blink recognition.

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Why isn't all storage in a SAN?

CalvinZ — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:09:00 GMT

By Charles Vallhonrat

Despite many years of strong growth in storage migrating to SANs, we still live in a world where a huge amount of storage is still directly attached to servers. Why have we not seen all storage move external for any environment with multiple servers? Surely the SAN offers lower cost, higher data protection, and better utilization.

The fact of the matter is a lot of data remains inside servers or directly attached via a JBOD because that is the best place for it. Maybe there is a specific performance need, or certain local control of data and access that leads to customers keep storage directly attached. Customers are savvy and until the SAN offers a better solution for their specific need, they are keeping certain storage infrastructure close to the server.

Enter shared SAS. It looks and smells like shared storage yet offers the simplicity of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and has no requirement for a switch or to manage a network in smaller configurations. HP introduced a shared SAS solution - The MSA2000sa - in August 2008 and quickly SAS became 25% of the interconnect mix for MSA. Now with the release of a generation 2 model (or G2) there are a number of improvements that will likely boost usage still further. The G2 products is faster than the previous generation, supports more drives, supports more snapshots, supports more LUNs, supports more servers...and on and on. But, one of the most important new features is support for 2.5" inch (aka Small Form Factor) drives. Yep, the same type of drives used in many ProLiant servers. In fact, with the MSA2000sa G2, the small form factor drives are same drives that are used in our HP ProLiant servers. Talk about keeping the simplicity of DAS...

By the way, once customers get the benefit of shared storage using SAS, the MSA architecture allows them to upgrade controllers to iSCSI or Fibre Channel if they wish. Maybe we have finally found the catalyst to remove storage from servers.

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New StorageWorks consolidation solutions for SMB's

CalvinZ — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:39:00 GMT

By Carol Kemp

In case you missed it, HP came out with several new products and solutions designed for SMBs to help them survive and thrive during this tough economy. To read the full press release, click here. Headlining the announcement are new storage consolidation solutions designed to help SMBs do more with less - less money and less time...

Think of the advantages of having one network storage device that doesn't care what kind of data you're storing, whether you have more files than you can handle or block-based application data including gigantic databases. Think of the convenience of having one device to help you manage, protect and grow your business as your data grows. The new HP StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 Network Storage Systems enable customers to easily manage and optimize their storage capacity by consolidating file and block data into a unified storage solution. These new solutions increase performance by up to 30 percent over previous HP file and unified storage solutions. As a result, companies can reduce costs and simplify data management by improving capacity optimization of storage resources.

For SMBs who are making their first move into shared storage from direct attached storage, their requirements won't be the same as enterprise customers and in fact most SMBs will seek to reduce the level of complexity usually associated with installing their first SAN. The HP StorageWorks 2000sa and 2000i G2 Modular Smart Arrays are designed to provide low cost and high performance entry level SAN storage. These solutions deliver 33 percent more storage capacity per unit of rack space for SFF SAS drives over 3.5" drives. The capability of using small or large form factor SAS or SATA drives, combined with a scalability of up to 99 SFF drives is unmatched by ANY entry-level array product in the market. The MSA2000sa G2, with its' four SAS ports per controller or eight per dual controller system allows the customer who is moving from a single-host DAS environment enjoy the benefits and economies of a SAN without building a switched infrastructure. Four dual-path or eight single-path hosts can directly access a single MSA2000sa G2.

What if HP combined everything you need to realize the full potential of virtualization into one package? The HP Virtualization Bundles are the industry's first integrated solution that allows SMBs to more easily and cost-effectively deploy virtualization by transforming existing server disk drives into highly available shared storage. The bundle allows customers to reduce costs up to 35 percent by eliminating the need for external storage to support application high availability. The bundle includes HP server, storage and networking technology as well as integrated virtualization software from HP and VMware. To take advantage of some of the most critical features in VSphere (HA, VMotion, SRM, Live Migration), customers need to implement highly available storage area networks (SANs). For many midsized customers this is a challenge as adding external storage increases their hardware costs and impacts overall IT management. The HP Virtualization bundles allow an organization to pool all of the storage that is either inside or directly attached to HP ProLiant G6 servers into one virtualized pool of storage. Combined with HP ProCurve data center networking solutions, this allows an organization to quickly implement a fully virtual infrastructure, with all of its benefits, using pre-tested building blocks.

To get more information, go to our announcement day page on hp.com.

(Editor's note: Carol is my colleague and is the category manager for StorageWorks with an SMB focus)

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Customer feedback on disk-based backup for SMB

CalvinZ — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:24:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

My good friend Sal Simili is a jack of all trades at Compass Public Charter School in Meridian, Idaho just outside of Boise. Sal has been the IT manager (initially as a volunteered when the school was first starting) and also teaches a technology class at Compass.

He was an early adopter of our HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System. A couple of weeks ago, Sal and I were catching up over coffee at a local Moxie Java. During the conversation, he mentioned to me that he had to restore a file from the D2D. He told me that he has the D2D set up to do regular, nightly backups of his data using HP Data Protector Express. This all happens automatically, which was the cool part of what he talked to me about. It's all so automatic that he forgot the D2D was there. He told me that he does a weekly full backup to a removable disk drive that he takes offsite so ait was easy to forget about the D2D.

I asked Sal to send me an email describing what happened and here's what he said: "I had to restore a file that was lost (for the first time in a long time). I had almost forgot that the D2D was there because I rarely need to restore a file. I was able to get my file back with no problem. Then I decided to take a look at the web interface to see how the D2D machine was doing. It had been running for 378 days without a reboot. I checked through the logs and it had kept backing up our data every night without a glitch. That's kinda bad because I should check it more often but we really use it as a disaster recovery more than normal file recovery. I was very impressed that the machine had been running over a year without reboot and without errors! Tell your friends at StorageWorks that you guys are building some pretty awesome machines."

Here's a video that gives a good introduction to the D2D Backup System.

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HP BladeSystem and StorageWorks Synergy

CalvinZ — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:26:00 GMT

By Lee Johns

I often get asked why HP BladeSystem and StorageWorks are such a compelling combination. There are multiple reasons and it starts with the cost of connecting to existing fibre channel storage which can be reduced by up to 50% with the reductions in cables, single failure points and administration when you use a technology like HP Virtual Connect. You of course also benefit from the infrastructure savings you get from implementing blade servers in terms of time, energy, change and cost.

Today there is a new reason. Direct connect storage! Think the simplicity of DAS with the resource sharing of a SAN. With HP BladeSystem you can now implement up to 192TB of shared storage across 16 blade servers using a simple, but high-performance 3Gb SAS interconnect. What's more the Storage offers all the management features and capabilities of the HP MSA 2000 but without the requirement to manage a fabric (Fibre Channel or iSCSI).

Now don't get me wrong. Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage are every bit as important as they were yesterday with BladeSystem. In fact HP also announced a technology called Virtual Connect Flex-10 for BladeSystems today that will offer great benefits for future iSCSI storage solutions for our EVA and MSA as well as future products from our acquisition of LeftHand Networks. The difference today is that if implementing Fibre Channel or iSCSI was not the right choice for me as a customer, I now have an alternative that offers breakthrough simplicity. Direct connect storage is perfect for Server Administrators who want to implement a simple shared storage environment for boot infrastructure or other server administrator controlled data. It is ideal for small and medium businesses or remote sites who are looking to implement there first SAN but want a simpler solution. It is great for VMware infrastructure and supports VMotion. It is great second tier storage for Enterprises.

Customer excitement in HP early previews has been very strong. In fact it has so much utility for new implementations or existing SAN environments it make me wonder why the traditional storage only vendors are not offering it. After all it simply offers customers more choice.

Lee Johns, Director of Marketing for Entry Storage

Top Ten Reasons Why DAS Will Grow!

jasontreu — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:17:00 GMT

By Lee Johns

For a number of years now the relentless growth of SANs has overshadowed the Direct Attached Storage market (DAS). Indeed market studies have shown that while still a large market, DAS is shrinking. However, recent advances in SAS drives and SAS connectivity, along with market shifts are pointing to a resurgence of DAS.

I thought I might put forward 10 reasons why over the next 18 months DAS will grow! SO HERE WE GO (drum roll)...

1) SAS connectivity offers much more functionality that older SCSI cable connections. Indeed major systems manufacturers, like HP, have introduced SAS connected arrays that can provided a shared storage environment for multiple servers just like a SAN. For smaller environments this offers SAN functionality without the headache of managing a network.

2) Server Blades are the hotest growth area of the server market. By consolidating servers in a single enclosure, SAS based arrays will in the near future be able to share storage across more servers without using a network with traditional server architectures.

3) Server Virtualization is the hotest SW growth story in the market. Using products like VMware forces customers to have to consider how to implement shared storage, and for many using fibre channel storage is too expensive. SAS connectivity offers a lower cost alternative and is easier to manage, especially for server administrators. SAS products like the HP MSA 2000sa are VMware certified.

4) Although SAN's have consolidated a huge amount of data there still exists an extraordinary amount of drives in servers today that have not been consolidated for a variety of reasons. SAS offers a lower cost consolidation play for the drives that have not today been moved to SANs.

5) Ongoing management costs are one of the major issues faced by IT organizations today. If you don't already have a Fibre Channel SAN and just require shared storage for a few simple applications why look at managing a new fabric and hiring expensive SAN administrators?

6) Applications like Microsoft Exchange are moving more and more storage services inside the application. They are even recomending DAS for performance.

7) Web 2.0 companies are having to think differently about storage implementations b/c of new scale out applications. They can not afford traditional SAN's and the promise of architecting Storage based on DAS is compelling.

8) Server purchasers can not buy SANs without engaging Storage teams. They can buy shared SAS storage though and get the same effect.

9) Choice is always important as a consumer. Products like the HP MSA 2000 offers the choice of Fibre Channel, iSCSI or SAS interconnect, while providing the same basic functionality and management interface. This means you can buy into SAS connected storage with a simple migration path to a future SAN based on iSCSI or Fibre, if you need the future scalability.

10) AND FINALLY......... COST, COST, COST. It is an easy way for SMB's to implement shared storage and have you seen the economy lately?!?

What do you think?

Do SMBs Really Need Tape? Good Question!

jasontreu — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:27:00 GMT

By Bob Conway. I recently saw an article in InformationWeek after the our recent DAT announcement. I wanted to share my thoughts on the subject.

DAT/DDS The Tape Format That Will Not Die

Posted by Howard Marks, Jul 23, 2008 11:07 PM
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/datdds_the_tape.html
After an absence of five or six years, and two generations, DDS trademark owner Sony (NYSE: SNE) is rejoining HP (NYSE: HPQ) in supporting the seventh generation of DDS/DAT drives, DAT320, targeted at the SMB market. DAT320, like HP's DAT160s abandons the Digital Auto Tape cartridge, and its 4mm wide tape, using 8mm tape in a two reel cartridge instead. My biggest problem with DAT320 is that I don't think the SMB customer with one server should be backing up to tape. I've seen too many SMBs fail at making a good backup every day, and getting one offsite occasionally, with a tape drive. They don't change tapes, don't notice with the backup program fails, don't take tapes offsite and, since they're not IT professionals, generally don't understand how backups work and don't care to know till something goes wrong. A combination of a local backup to a USB hard drive and an online backup makes more sense to me for these folks.

The real question to me is do we need a tape format specifically for low end use. Even if you disagree with me and think SMBs can handle tapes effectively why have tape formats specifically for the low end. Why can't SMBs use earlier generations of LTO? I just opened the CDW site to see what the street prices for SMB backup devices really are and right there on the front page are an HP DAT160 drive for $849 and a Tandberg LTO-2 drive for $760. Paying more for a drive that has less capacity (200 native GB/tape vs. 80 for DAT160) and no automation upgrade doesn't make any sense to me. Unlike DAT160 drives which can mount and read DDS-4 tapes the new DAT320 drives are only backwards compatible with DAT160 so there aren't many organizations that will get any real benefit from backwards compatibility.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Howard offers some interesting views, and no doubt they do reflect real life experiences for some people. We at HP have a different take on this issue. Also, while I can empathize with the comments on people not changing tapes, not noticing when the backups do occasionally fail etc., we should not conclude that the technology solution is at fault when it is generally poor operating processes or practices which are actually to blame. After all, automobiles crash every day because of poor drivers, that doesn't necessarily make the motor car a poor solution?

We feel we need to continue to offer choice to our customers so that they can work in a way that feels right for them and that mitigates their risk at an acceptable cost. Online backup may be viable for some people, but if the data set is big the bandwidth needed can be prohibitive, or the local infrastructure may not always be reliable enough to depend upon for the time it takes to complete the data transfer. And yes, a USB hard drive can be used in many environments to meet the basic needs of data protection. That is why HP supports the use of both these methodologies within our product lines. We also offer RDX based removable hard drives as another cost effective backup and disaster recovery solution for people who want even lower cost, but can manage with fewer pieces of removable media in their rotation scheme.

So, why continue with the DAT product line which is targeted directly at SMB customers? Our DAT 160 drive has been shipping successfully for just over a year now and in the first twelve months of shipment we have sold an average of 6 data cartridges on each drive. This suggests that thousands of customers continue to see a need for removable backup using multiple copies or versions of their data in a structured media rotation scheme at a relatively low cost.

We also need to respect the investment protection imperative of the many current DDS/DAT users who are still out there in the installed base. After all, since the first DDS drives were shipped in 1989 over 18-million DDS/DAT drives and over 400-million cartridges have been shipped. Of the total number of drives shipped 7.4-million have been sold since the year 2000, and that supports the notion that there is still a very healthy body of very satisfied DDS/DAT users, who like what the core technology offers. And while DAT 320 may be seen by some to offer somewhat limited backwards compatibility, it is still one generation more than switching to any different technology presents.

These are the major factors compelling us to continue to support this very successful tape format for SMBs.

Examples of Data Deduplication Ratios for File Serving, SQL and Exchange

jim hankins — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:46:00 GMT

By Jim Hankins

If you remember back in my HP Deduplication - Part 1 post when we announced our new deduplication products back in June, I said that the deduplication ratio you can expect from a product can vary based on a number of factors. We now can share with you deduplication test results from our D2D4000 Backup System conducted by a 3rd party, Binary Testing Ltd.

Binary Testing conducted testing that backed up and deduplicated data for file serving, SQL and Exchange environments with various data change rates over a simulated three month backup period. The results can be found here: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA2-0799ENW.pdf

Again, your mileage may vary but this report should give you some idea of what's possible if your business runs these types of applications.

EMC: HP's Whac-A-Mole VTL (& HP Reponse Part 1)

jasontreu — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:55:00 GMT

I wanted to share a response I made on an EMC blog called, "The Backup Blog."

We will also be sharing a response for our VLS product as well. There was too much to respond to in one post! Stay tuned!

__________________________________

As a Product Manager for the HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System product line, I wanted to respond to your blog entry on July 16th, 2008, entitled "HP's Whac-A-Mole VTL".

First, I would like to agree with you that our D2D Backup Systems may be limited in scalability and capacity - that is, depending on one's perspective. For a large Enterprise or data center, this is certainly true. However, these products are positioned for small and mid-range businesses (SMB), as well as for remote/branch office sites (ROBO), that require improved backup and restore capabilities over traditional backup to tape (disk-to-tape) data protection schemes.

Rather than take the approach of many other storage vendors, including EMC, which try to "tweak" higher-end solutions to meet the needs of smaller customers (think square peg, round hole), HP has designed a portfolio of disk-based data protection solutions specifically for customers that have smaller budgets and storage requirements.

Our new D2D Backup Systems, which you reference, range from 3TB to 9TB, offer comparable (if not better) performance than other solutions within the same class of disk-based storage products, and are priced starting at $6500 for a complete system (including the deduplication software).

Additionally, by using inline, hash-based deduplication (which you fail to mention), we are compatible with a wide range of backup applications that customers already have installed - unlike the EMC Avamar solution which requires customers to "rip and replace" their current backup applications.

HP's D2D Backup Systems are easy to install (typically, in less than an hour) and are just as easy to manage, requiring little, if any, need for expensive installation/service/support contracts (ala EMC, IBM, Data Domain). Also, HP's D2D Backup Systems utilize target-based deduplication (again, which you fail to mention) which is far less dependent on client resources and much less likely to impact the availability and performance of client applications - unlike source-based deduplication solutions such as EMC Avamar.

For years, I have seen press releases and heard EMC executives tout their dedication to providing SMB solutions. EMC purchased Dantz Retrospect, partnered with Dell, and created the Insignia product line - all in the name of garnering market share in the fastest growing IT customer segment - the SMB segment. Yet, EMC continues to build Enterprise solutions, then remove a few hard drives, take away a bit software, and then claim it has solutions for the SMB segment. Sorry folks, that's not how it's done. You can't claim to cater to small businesses when your pricing starts at $20K to $50K for a low-end data protection solution. While EMC may sell some volume in the mid-range segment (everybody and their brother competes there!), I think you have missed the boat on smaller businesses which comprise 80% to 85% of worldwide businesses. Probably time to check your market research...

Lastly, on the topic of product names, as you so thoughtfully pointed out how bad "D2D" was, I think the uninformed IT customer would find EMC's product names quite amusing - Avamar, DL 3D, Centera, Clariion, and Celerra. My bet is that the uninformed IT customer would think that your either selling pharmaceuticals to middle-aged men (if you get my point) or selling props from an episode of Battlestar Galactica.

Thanks and look forward to our future conversations.

Mike Ewell
Product Manager for the HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System product line