Around the Storage Block Blog : backup

Data Protector for VMware podcast

CalvinZ — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:47:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

An often overlooked gem in HP's storage portfolio is HP Data Protector. I sat down to talk data protection of virtual machines and more specifically of VMware with Billy Naples, the HP Data Protector Product Marketing Manager. Billy knows data protection and this was a fun discussion for me to have, especially with VMworld next week.

If you have any issues with the embedded player, click here to listen to the podcast. If you want to download the MP3, right-click here and save the file.

Here are a few links where you can learn more about HP Data Protector:

HP Data Protector software product page: www.hp.com/go/DataProtector (now, that one is easy to remember)
Assuring Business Continuity in Virtualised Environments paper (someone is obviously British!)
Complete Protection for VMware environments with HP Data Protector software webcast (requires registration but it's well worth it - it's 16 minutes)
HP Data Protector 6.1 software VMware Integration Installation Best Practice technical white paper (Must read if implementing Data Protector with VMware)

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Changing the economics of storage infrastructure with virtualization

CalvinZ — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:30:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Yesterday I talked about the announcement that our Technology Solutions Group did and briefly mentioned the part HP StorageWorks had in that announcement. Today, I'll drill down a bit more into the StorageWorks news.

The current economic conditions are affecting everyone but we all know that the information explosion that we've all been talking about for over a decade doesn't seem to care much about the economy. Many customers are attempting to take costs out to free up capital for their core business processes but the continued information explosion creates specific challenges for IT to efficiently store, protect, optimize and manage data. Adding to this, many data centers are not optimized for agility; a good portion of the IT budget is spent in maintenance and operations. IT is expected to help the business take advantage of opportunities that arise in this new economic era by reacting quickly to deliver new services that help drive growth. Really nothing new here, but I wanted to set the context.

We believe that the next generation data center is core to meeting these challenges. We call this the Adaptive Infrastructure. One of the core tenants of the Adaptive Infrastructure is helping customers move from their current state of high cost IT islands and siloed people resources to low cost pooled assets with more predictable service levels. Virtualization is key to that. Many customers have already virtualized their servers and as a result there's been improvements in utilization, service provisioning and disaster recovery/availability of those servers. If the rest of your infrastructure (e.g. storage, network, etc) isn't virtualized, then you still have limited flexibility. I just saw a post by my colleague in BladeSystem Jason Newton diving deeper on this topic and it's worth a read.

These virtual server environments have unique storage challenges around capacity management, storage provisioning, and data protection/management. And that gets me to the heart of what the announcement this week is about.

Our goal is to reduce the complexities and inhibitors of virtual server environments through the intelligent use of storage virtualization. We're making investments in this technology to optimize capacity, simplify storage provisioning and improve data management across virtual IT environments.

This week's announcement was focused on Fibre Channel storage networks. But we're not suggesting this is the answer for every application or customer environment. We have a very deep (and I know at times confusing) portfolio of products and solutions. But you really don't need an infrastructure vendor who only has a hammer because then every problem looks like a nail. You need an infrastructure vendor who has the breadth of portfolio to match the solution to your specific problem and data types at the lowest cost possible. So again, this announcement is focused on Fibre Channel based solutions - as we continue to integrate LeftHand Networks into our portfolio, we'll have more to say about storage virtualization with other storage networks (Shared SAS, iSCSI, etc.).

So that brings me to the news. There were three new or updated solutions we announced:

HP StorageWorks EVA6400 and EVA8400 virtual storage arrays helps customers save up to 50% in storage management costs for common storage administrative tasks compared to competitive traditional arrays
HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) can lower TCO by pooling and sharing of heterogeneous storage resources. You can improve your capacity utilization by 300% and manage 3X the storage capacity per administrator.
The new Data Protector 6.1 software combined with the EVA offers the industry's best (and we think only) replication based Zero Downtime Backup and recovery for VMware environments and is up to 70% less expensive than other enterprise backup products.

I'll go into more details over the next several days but let me leave you with a pointer to a video by our VP of Marketing, Stephan Schmitt. Stephan is at FOSE this week and was interviewed at the event just yesterday. This video is a nice overview of the announcement.

One last footnote I have to make as I can't wait until tomorrow's post where I'll drill down on the EVA6400 and EVA8400. One of our competitors has tried to make their pre-announcement of solid state drives a year ago as a proof point of their innovation. The funny thing is that we source those drives from the same OEM partner. This competitor had made bold and frankly ridiculous predictions that we would not have SSD drives until late this year or maybe in 2010. Well, I've got news for you Chuck - we have SSD drives in the EVA now and have had them in the XP Disk Array for a few months and in our BladeSystem for even longer.

More on SPC-2

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:47:00 GMT

Last month we announced a world record SPC-2 number by the XP24000. At the same time we extended yet another challenge to EMC to join the rest of the world in publishing benchmarks. They continue to decline the offer, arguing “representativeness”. I thought I’d clear up the “representativeness” question.

EMC’s argument that this XP is too costly starts from the assumption that SPC-2 only represents a video streaming workload. To quote, “128 146GB drive pairs in your 1152 drive box? A pure video streaming workload?” We actually see a widely diverse set of workloads used in the XP. The power of having both SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark results is that they provide audited data that applies to almost any workload mix a customer might have. But if one had to pick a most common workload it would probably be database transaction processing by day, then back up and data mining workloads joining the transaction processing by night. SPC-2 models the back up and data mining aspects, with SPC-1 representing the transaction processing. SPC-2 is about a lot more than video streaming.

When people need bullet proof availability and high performance for transaction processing they turn to high end arrays like the XP24000. It’s probably the most common use for a high end array. Our data indicates that on average the number of disks in an initial XP purchase is right around the 265 in our SPC-2 configuration. Some of those won’t have the levels of controllers in the SPC-2 configuration. But an increasing number use thin provisioning. In those cases they will often get all the controllers they’ll need up front, delaying the disk purchases as you’d expect with thin provisioning. So the configuration and workloads look pretty representative.

Then consider a real use of the benchmark. A maximum number is key in assessing an array’s performance. Below that you can adjust disks, controllers, and cache to get fairly linear performance changes. But when you reach an array’s limit, all you can do is add another array. So once you know an array’s maximum number you know its whole range of performance. By maxing controllers we provide that top end number, giving the most useful result. For sequential workloads like back-up and data mining maxing disk count isn’t necessary, whereas it generally is for random workloads like transaction processing.

Now let’s discuss how one might use XP’s SPC-2 results. Let’s say you need a high end array for transaction processing. The most common case we see requires backup and data mining operations at night in a limited time window. Since the XP’s SPC-2 result is twice that of the next closest high end array, you can expect it to get the backup and data mining done with half the resources of the next fastest array. But with SPC-2 you can go further. You can look up the specific results for backup and data mining workloads which are around 10GB/s for the XP24000. Knowing how much data you need to backup and mine you can estimate how much of the system’s resources you’ll need to get those things done in your time window and therefore what’s still left for transaction processing during that window. You can scale that for the size array you need for transaction processing. And you can compare to other arrays that have posted results. All using audited data before you get sales reps involved.

SPC benchmarks are all about empowering the storage customer. XP24000’s SPC-2 result is important to the most common uses for high end arrays, as well as for less common uses like video editing. The configuration we used looks pretty typical, with choices made to make the result most useful to customers. The cost is pretty typical for this kind of need. At HP we expect to continue providing this kind of useful data for customers. And our challenge to EMC to publish a benchmark result still stands, though they’ll probably continue inventing reasons not to.

Hurricane Ike: Need for Disaster Recover and Backup Strategy

jasontreu — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:32:00 GMT

By Lee Johns

I live in Houston and this week we had an event that really brought home the importance of a good disaster recovery & backup strategy for storage. Hurricane Ike came through and took down the power to more than two million people. In Galveston businesses had over nine feet of water in them but even 70 Miles in land people are still without power five days after the storm. A friend of mine has been sitting guard over the generator powering the datacenter for his small business. The whole office has been standing guard to ensure it does not get stolen and keeps theire Datacenter up and running. They are a services business and have over 30 customers relying on them. You never know when a disaster will hit. Now may be a good time to reevaluate your strategy.

I've been personally impacted by lost tapes

jim hankins — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Hi Folks,

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail at home that started off:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to let you know that computer tapes containing some of your personal information were lost while being transported to an off-site storage facility by our archive services vendor. While we have no reason to believe that this information has been accessed or used inappropriately, we deeply regret that this incident occurred....

So the first question I have is how does an archive vendor lose tapes? How hard can it be to take the tapes from your customer put them in a secure truck and drive them to the storage facility? Isn't that your whole business model - you will pick up, transport and store these tapes safely and securely 100% of the time?

Now I understand that any activity with humans involved cannot be guaranteed to work 100% of the time. So what really happened? A bit more of an explanation would have been helpful, such as the truck was in an inadvertent accident and the contents of the truck were spilled into a river or all over the highway and could not all be recovered. Without more details I'm left wondering did someone make off with the tapes by accident or on purpose? Or was this just sloppy work by the company?

Anyway, I hope this is a call to action for this company to do at least two things to prevent such an incident in the future.

1. Look into tape encryption such as the LTO-4 offers. I would have been more much pleased if that second sentence read "While the tapes were physically lost, the data they contained cannot be accessed or read by anyone because the data on the tapes is securely encrypted with sophisticated technology requiring encryption keys to make the data readable. Our security policy ensures that these keys are always stored in or transported to physically separate locations from the computer tapes."

2. Consider the use of replication and electronic vaulting for moving data off-site for archiving. With new technologies such as deduplication and low-bandwidth replication, this company would perhaps be able to reduce the amount of data that is stored on tapes and physically transported to archive storage. Again, I don't know the specifics here, but as an example let's say this company had four sites that they were backing up to data to tape and transporting those tapes to off-site archives. With replication and electronic vaulting, they could replicate data from three of their sites to just one site for backup to tapes and then only have to move tapes from the one site to archive storage thereby reducing their risk exposure by 75%.

If you're worried about how a similar incident could impact your company and what risks are involved HP is here to help. We can work with you to significantly reduce your data security exposure from the desktop to your data center. On the storage side, we offer a FREE storage security risk assessment. For more details on HP's other data security options beyond storage please check HP's Security web page.

Tape is Dead! - And here's the timetable

jim hankins — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:02:00 GMT

When there are no more natural disasters!

When electricity is free!

When hardware never fails!

When software is bug-free!

When people no longer make mistakes!

When there are no computer viruses or other malicious code!

When all people are honest!

When government regulations (SarbOx, SEC, HIPPA. etc.) have gone away!

And even though disk-based backup is set to revolutionize the retention of short-term backups and recovery, don't forget that in that last item some records will need to be stored for many, many years. In the case of HIPPA think about keeping a patient's records over a lifetime which could be 70 to 80 years or beyond. So for some businesses disk, tape and other longer term achival mediums are going to be a mandatory part of the data life cycle architecture.

I'm going on vacation for a few weeks so no posting for a while. I hope you've been having a great summer.

Talk to you in September,

Jim Hankins

The Real Story on tape storage

jim hankins — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:26:00 GMT

The Real Story on tape storage

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

Simply Business Protection for small and midsized IT environments

brad.parks — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:23:00 GMT

- by Brad Parks

We’re all well aware that data protection equates to business protection and some of the recent posts on this blog go into detail on how HP is fundamentally changing the rules of the game with our deduplication technologies embedded in our disk based backup solutions.I’d like to expand on some of these topics while specifically looking at the needs of small and midsized customers. A key challenge midsized businesses share with enterprises is the need to reduce the cost of protecting their data but there are unique challenges as well. Small and midsized businesses are some of the most exciting and dynamic environments to work in because there can be wild swings in customer demand and therefore data growth. IT Managers in these environments must wear a lot of hats and be as flexible as their IT environment in order to respond to changing business conditions. Consolidating backup and moving from pure tape based backup strategies to multi-tier disk to disk to tape (D2D2T) methodologies is one way that IT managers can be less reactive and more intelligent with regards to their data protection.As mentioned earlier, one of the most significant new advances in storage technologies is data deduplication. This backup technique eliminates redundant blocks of data from storage, by saving a single copy of identical data and replacing any further instances with pointers back to that one copy.

HP recently announced several new disk-based storage systems specifically designed to meet the needs of different business environments. For midmarket customers, HP is radically changing the economics of data protection in smaller business environments and remote offices 45% less cost than comparable products and can retrain up to 50x more backup data on the same amount of raw capacity.

Key benefits of these new HP StorageWorks D2D Backup Systems:

Maximizes disk space via synchronous backup operations that deduplicate data as it is stored to the disk.
Reduces the amount of disk and memory required to deduplicate data by leveraging proprietary technology created by HP Labs, the company’s central research and development arm.
Improves productivity and eliminates the need for training with a fully functional graphical user interface that does not require complex command lines for configuration.
Optimizes investment of primary backup system through compatibility with new versions of software and applications.

Read more about our announcement: www.hp.com/go/deduplication In addition to the deduplication products, we’ve also recently released an exciting new series of products for smaller customers who want the benefits of disk based backup for individual servers. Backup of standalone servers is still a significant challenge for those with only a few servers; you may not be ready to consolidate your backup to a centralized device but you still are looking for a technology that provides pain-free backup and rapid file restore. The HP StorageWorks RDX Removable Disk Backup System delivers an easy to use, affordable and rugged data protection solution for workstations and entry level servers. In fact, you can protect your entire system with the included continuous data protection software. Cost of ownership is reduced with long lasting removable disk cartridges and a forward and backward compatible docking station that does not require a costly upgrade to accommodate future higher capacity cartridges. The RDX Removable Disk Backup System offers fast disk based performance with the ability to store 160 GB or 320 GB of data on a single removable disk cartridge. Read more at www.hp.com/go/rdx

Five ideas to reduce cost of managing and protecting data

CalvinZ — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:46:00 GMT

Our own Patrick Eitenbichler recently discussed a list of five things customers should focus on to reduce the costs of managing and protecting data. The full article is in Processor Magazine and you can read it at this URL: http://tinyurl.com/593qrm

Here's a summary of the five points Patrick made:

1. Consolidation. Moving data onto centralized storage systems can help administrators avoid the fragmented capacity that leads to extra maintenance work, low disk utilization, and huge backup headaches.

2. Centralized backup. SMEs should look at disk-to-disk-to-tape backup solutions that initially store data on disk drives and eventually migrate it to tape for long-term data retention. Ensuring successful backups on a nightly basis is "mission-critical," says Eitenbichler.

3. Deduplication. Using de-duplication allows administrators to drastically reduce the amount of data stored on disk-based backup systems at data reduction ratios of 20:1 or even 40:1.

4. Thin provisioning. This technique eliminates wasted capacity by automatically sizing storage capacity needed by application requirements.

5. Data life cycle management. It sounds simple, but keeping an inventory of storage devices onsite, available capacity, and growth trends can allow administrators to delay additional purchases for several months.