Managing the information that drives the enterprise

STORAGE
APRIL 2013
VOL. 12 | NO. 2
TAP INTO
CLOUD BACKUP
WITHOUT FEAR
KEEP TABS
ON DISK USAGE
CASTAGNA:
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
TOIGO:
OPEN SYSTEMS STYMIE
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
BUFFINGTON:
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
TANEJA:
DATA DEDUPES EVOLUTION
SNAPSHOT:
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
Unchecked data growth, server virtualization
and the need for more speed are new demands that
traditional storage systems may not be able to meet.
IS YOUR.
.STORAGE ARRAY.
.OBSOLETE?.
FROM OUR SPONSORS
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OPEN SYSTEMS
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ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
seems to be following a similar arc. The marketplace
grew up fast and was populated with a slew of products
in a variety of form factors, but four or ve years into this
surge our surveys show that two-thirds of users havent
implemented any solid-state storage.
Dedupe and solid-state are pretty disruptive technolo-
gies, and if they cant ratchet up the data storage indus-
trys typically slow evolution, nothing can. Maybe were
just expecting too much change too soon. Or perhaps
were looking at the wrong indicators of change.
Take, for example, some recent end-of-the-year re-
ports that indicate hard disk drive (HDD) sales are down
and will continue to drop this year. One report says HDD
sales dipped by 7% in 2012, while another predicts ap-
proximately a 12% drop in HDD revenues in 2013. That
seems strange given the spiraling growth of data and how
Storage techs new evolution
Storage technology may not seem to be moving very quickly when measured
by old criteria. But a new perspective shows its actually developing quite briskly.
EDITORIAL | RICH CASTAGNA
I
T MAY SOMETIMES seem that you need a seismic instru-
ment to detect the subtle shifting of storage tech-
nologies. A faint tremor might indicate that the data
storage industry is heaving slightly in a new direc-
tion, but only at the glacial pace were accustomed to.
New storage techs may burst on the scenelike
dedupe about a decade ago, or solid-state over the last few
yearsbut then they ease into a fairly leisurely pace of
adoption. Its like enjoying a big, glitzy opening night and
then waiting a couple of weeks, months or years until the
next performance.
Deduplication is a case in point; while its arguably
a mature technology and it practically monopolized the
attention of the storage market for years, our research
shows that more than 60% of companies arent using
dedupe in their backup operations. Solid-state storage
4 STORAGE
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TAP INTO CLOUD
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FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
theyre using their installed capacity these days. In last
falls survey, 47% of respondents said they now use thin
provisioning to help them avoid squandering disk space.
Thats nine percentage points higher than just a year be-
fore. If you look at the newer efciency techs, the up-
take there is just as impressive: 31% have tiered their
storage, while 29% and 27%, respectively, have imple-
mented primary storage dedupe or compression.
With all these efciency tools in place, data storage
managers are using only 54% of their installed storage
capacity according to another survey we elded recently.
No wonder hard disk sales are sinking. With effec-
tive belt-tightening it looks like a lot of companies have
plenty of room to grow so theyre purchasing less (if any)
new disk capacity. And if they do need something speed-
ier and more up to date than what they have, a little solid-
state storage and some caching or tiering software can
handle new performance demands without having to re-
place or radically rework existing systems.
So the storage industry may actually be advancing at a
fairly lively clip, once you consider the drastic and lasting
impact of economic forces and the resulting pressures on
corporate IT teams. Storage managers appear to be adjust-
ing well and actually setting the agenda for storage tech-
nology development. I hope the vendors are listening. n
RICH CASTAGNA is editorial director of TechTargets Storage Media
Group.
EDITORIAL | RICH CASTAGNA
the big data mania is causing companies to hoard more
data than ever before.
Still another industry report tells us that the number
of solid-state devices shipped in 2012 grew by 129% and
speculates that the growth of solid-state drives (SSDs)
will continue in 2013 at 113%. That means twice as many
solid-state units were shipped last year versus 2011, and
by the end of 2013 that number will double again. Is that
why hard disk sales are agging?
Maybe not. A lot of that solid-state is going to places
HDDs have never been and never will be, such as in
phones and tablets. And given the premium price of solid-
state, you have to assume that replacing hard disks with
SSDs is still a performance maneuvereven with new
relatively high-capacity SSDs, solid-state isnt about to
be used for bulk storage.
So the rise of solid-state is pretty straightforward;
its gaining more converts as its price dips and reliabil-
ity rises. But if thats not the main reason why fewer hard
disks are being sold, there have to be other factors at work.
Those other factors are the lessons we all learned
when the economy headed south and storage budgets
contracted, namely that we had to manage storage better
and gain greater efciencies. We had to make better use
of the storage we already had andhopefullybuy less
new stuff. Hence the decline in disk sales.
Our Purchasing Intentions survey offers some proof
that storage pros are paying a lot more attention to how
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OPEN SYSTEMS
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TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE REVOLUTION | JON TOIGO
Not-so-open systems
stymie storage management
With few standards and little inclination to give up their proprietary ways,
storage vendors make managing storage tougher than it should be.
L
AST MONTH I talked about the present situa-
tion in storage infrastructure management
using a term derived from ancient Greek:
anarchy. Anarchy is a convenient catchall
for the challenges that have existed since
rms began abandoning mainframe computing, with its
centralized approach to managing storage and data assets,
for a more decentralized model.
While unseating IBM as the reigning IT monarch may
have sounded like a revolutionary idea, the rhetoric of the
open systems movement never really panned out. Those
who bought into the idealistic Rousseau-ian world view
(hierarchical order corrupts) forgot to read their French
history and Hugo and Dickens novels. Revolutions tend to
eat their own and generally produce a lot of unintended
consequences.
Following the open systems revolution, things quickly
got pretty oligarchic, or downright anarchical, as IBM ri-
vals swarmed into the void left by a retreating Big Blue.
Taking a page (and paraphrasing) from Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan, the self-interest of each storage array vendor
led it to seek a stick big enough to raise over the heads of
all the others, making life in the process nasty, brutish,
and short for many tech startups.
Of course, as my bureaucratic friends like to remind
me, there were a few alliances along the way, some of
which led to de jure standards such as SCSI, Fibre Chan-
nel (FC), iSCSI and the Storage Management Initiative
Specication (SMI-S).
But even those successes (when more closely exam-
ined) illustrate the foibles of standards-making by vendor
committees. Vendors did work together from time to time
7 STORAGE
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STORAGE TECH IS
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OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
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ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE REVOLUTION | JON TOIGO
But FC didnt provide a management layer, so storage
boxes were interconnected by both serial SCSI intercon-
nects (FC, iSCSI and SAS) and IP connections. The latter
were required to provide access to onboard monitoring
and conguration controls for delivery out of banden-
tirely separate from storage I/O trafcto storage admins.
This bifurcated design reected the willingness of the
industry to cooperate with SAN standards only up to the
point where it made nancial sense to do so. SANs pro-
vided more connection points for serial SCSI-compatible
storage rigs, which was good for vendors. Rudimentary
SANs also provided a way for former mainframe channel
extension vendors to sell a new family of products (SAN
switches) at enormous prot.
to set some ground rules, but usually only when consum-
ers expressed a preference for open standards that insu-
lated them from the quick entry and exit of vendors into
the market rather than proprietary cobbles that exposed
them to vendor lock-in.
Mostly, those standards had to do with signaling,
handshaking and plumbingnot any sort of agreed-upon
management paradigm for the ever-expanding storage in-
frastructure. Instead, each vendor sought a scheme of el-
ement management that, coincidentally, let the vendor
host other value-add services directly on its array and
charge signicantly more for what was increasingly be-
coming a collection of commodity components.
Storage management took the form of running reports
to discern trends, obtaining current status information,
and perhaps doing some conguration and maintenance.
The approach was acceptable at rst, especially to server
admins who only needed to deal with a single direct-
attached storage rig. It became a signicantly more chal-
lenging modus operandi when the number of storage de-
vices proliferated and were interconnected into FC or
iSCSI fabrics.
Note that I dont call these SANs because they
werent. A storage area network, by its earliest denition,
was supposed to have been a true network, described
like other networks using the OSI layer cake model in
which one functional layer provides common manage-
ment for all interconnected devices.
Each vendor sought a scheme
of element management
that, coincidentally, let the vendor
host other value-add services
directly on its array and charge
significantly more for what was
increasingly becoming a collection
of commodity components.
8 STORAGE
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STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
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ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE REVOLUTION | JON TOIGO
that the SAN management vision hadnt been fullled
and they set out to do something about it by creating a
software-based super controller that would sit over the
physical storage fabric and provide more efcient sharing
of services across all systems. By doing that, they revealed
the hardware guys secret: despite the logo on the bezel
plate, everybody was just selling a box of Seagate hard
drives. Moreover, storage virtualization advocates noted
that managing an infrastructure of heterogeneous boxes
on a one-off basis was a lot more difcult and expensive
than managing them as a centralized resource with on-
demand service provisioning. A lot of money was spent to
squelch the upstarts.
At the same time, companies like Tributary Systems
were creating interesting niche management products, le-
veraging existing infrastructure to non-disruptively insert
engines of service management into the data path. Trib-
utarys Storage Director is such an appliance, performing
the role of a virtual tape library, but also brokering other
data protection services to data that companies stand up
in a disk-to-disk-to-tape architecture.
Next month, well look at how these innovations in
storage management are becoming even more relevant in
contemporary storage infrastructure. n
JON WILLIAM TOIGO is a 30-year IT veteran, CEO and managing
principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data
Management Institute.
Vendor technology evangelists said SANs would
change everything by creating pools of storage that would
enable a more elegant and simplied management ap-
proach. But they stopped short of delivering on that
promise. Agreeing to a common interconnect was one
thing; enabling common management was quite another.
SNIAs SMI-S started out as an earnest effort to create
a grand management scheme, but it became much wa-
tered down, difcult for vendors to implement and sub-
ject to less-than-enthusiastic promotion.
Digital Equipment Corp., and later Compaq, articu-
lated a real SAN strategy in 1997 with common manage-
ment built in as a feature. It was called the Enterprise
Network Storage Architecture (ENSA), but it was never
implemented. Once Hewlett-Packard got hold of Com-
paq, ENSA disappeared. In the words of a former ENSA
developer:
If we had fullled the ENSA vision and placed all
value-add functionality on a switch or some other device
where the functions could be shared across all spindles in
a managed way, our bosses worried that the Asian devel-
opers would swoop into our market selling rigs with ele-
ment management and lots of value-add software on their
array controllers. They would eat our lunch.
That may also explain why the box-makers worked so
hard to scare customers away from the likes of DataCore
Software, FalconStor Software and other early pioneers
of storage virtualization. Those companies recognized
10 STORAGE
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APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
COVER STORY | STORAGE SYSTEMS
By Jacob Gsoedl
ARE STORAGE
ARRAYS
OBSOLETE?
Cloud storage, virtualization
and the relentless growth
of unstructured data have all
contributed to a rethinking
of the way storage is
packaged and presented.
A CHANGING COMPUTE WORLDwhere physical data cen-
ter infrastructure is yielding to virtualized systems and
clouds, and desktops and laptops are supplemented with
mobile devicesis challenging traditional computing
paradigms and reshaping everything computer related,
including storage architectures. While trying to t into a
virtual world, storage has also been tested by a relentless
deluge of unstructured data, with voracious contempo-
rary applications and services demanding more data stor-
age capacity.
The traditional SAN and NAS shared storage systems
that have become so familiar typically consist of storage
processing hardware, attached disks (or solid-state de-
vices) and proprietary storage software that delivers a set
of storage features; theyre accessed via block- and le-
based storage protocols. These systems are relatively rigid
and complex (SANs more so than NAS) and limited in
their exibility and scalability.
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STYMIE STORAGE
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TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
COVER STORY | STORAGE SYSTEMS
has opened a window of opportunity for new storage
architectures and vendors to challenge the status quo.
These emerging storage architectures are likely to
shape the DNA of coming storage systems:
l Object storage
l Cloud storage
l Software-dened storage (SDS)
and virtualized storage
l All-ash arrays
OBJECT STORAGE
Unrestricted scalability, ubiquitous access, cost-ef-
ciency, the ability to support custom metadata, and a se-
curity framework that safely supports multiple tenants
and heterogeneous, dispersed clients are the key charac-
teristics of an object storage system. Instead of les and
blocks, the basic data elements of an object store are ob-
jects with unique identiers and custom metadata. Un-
like le-based storage with its hierarchical data structure,
objects are stored in an easy to manage, virtually innite
object namespace.
Autonomous storage nodes that provide both process-
ing and storage resources comprise an object store, and it
can scale proportionally as nodes are added. To keep costs
at bay, storage nodes are typically built with off-the-shelf
commodity components, such as x86-based systems with
THE SEARCH FOR STORAGE SIMPLICITY
The complexity of SANs, their inherent lack of simulta-
neous data access to multiple hosts (requiring clustered
le systems to orchestrate shared data access) and their
management overheadfrom conguring zoning, LUN
masking, virtual SANs and ISLs to provisioning LUNs to
hostsquickly became an impediment to virtualized in-
frastructures and an even bigger obstacle when used as
cloud storage. Block- and le-based protocols of tradi-
tional storage systems that have worked well with a lim-
ited number of hosts accessing data center storage across
private links have proven inapt for the boundless con-
nectivity requirements of mobile devices and a growing
number of cloud services. Traditional storage systems are
slowly adjusting to a changing computing and application
landscape by adopting scale-out architectures, supporting
HTML-based protocols and revamping storage back-ends
to more efciently support ash, but the pace of change
Traditional storage systems are
adopting scale-out architectures,
supporting HTML-based protocols
and revamping storage back-ends
to more efficiently support flash.
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STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
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ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
COVER STORY | STORAGE SYSTEMS
CLOUD STORAGE
For a storage platform to be considered cloud storage, it
needs to be:
l Network accessible. Similar to object stores, cloud stor-
age is typically accessed via Web protocols, such as REST.
l Shared. Shared, secure access across different clients
with multi-tenant capabilities that allow sandboxing dif-
ferent tenants is expected from contemporary cloud
storage.
l Service based. Cloud storage is consumed as a service
and paid for based on usage.
l Elastic. It needs to dynamically grow and shrink as
needed.
l Scalable. Cloud storage needs to dynamically scale up
and down based on demand, without an upper limit.
The majority of todays cloud storage offerings are
powered by an object store on the back end, so its no
surprise that object and cloud storage share many of the
same characteristics. While object storage is storage infra-
structure, cloud storage is a storage service. Cloud stor-
age is available as a public service from companies like
attached JBODs, that are glued together by the object
storage softwares secret sauce. Sophisticated data pro-
tection mechanisms of traditional shared storage systems
are replaced by a multi-instance object philosophy that
calls for storing copies of objects on multiple nodes, with
the number of copies depending on service levels and the
criticality of the data. Finally, object storage is accessed
via HTML-based protocols such as Representational State
Transfer (REST) that enable access to object storage from
any device anywhere.
Object storage is best suited to storing vast amounts of
unstructured data that needs to be readily available to a
wide range of clients. It has become the preferred storage
architecture of Web 2.0 applications and websites that
deal with a high volume of unstructured data, from im-
ages and videos to any other le types. Its also nding its
way into corporate data centers to help with the explosive
growth of unstructured data that has overwhelmed tradi-
tional storage systems.
Object storage is unsuitable for structured data and
transactional applications where traditional storage sys-
tems have excelled and will continue to dominate. While
early object stores were proprietary (built by the likes
of Yahoo and Google), established storage vendors have
been offering object stores such as Caringos Object Stor-
age Platform, Dells DX Object Storage Platform, EMCs
Atmos, Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Content Platform
and NetApps StorageGrid. (Continued on page 14)
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STORAGE TECH IS
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TAP INTO CLOUD
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FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
COVER STORY | STORAGE SYSTEMS
Emerging storage architectures
MERITS CHALLENGES USE CASES
OBJECT
STORAGE
lVery scalable
lVery flexible
lCost efficient
lDistributed architecture
lNew storage protocols
and APIs
lNot good for structured
data and transactional
applications
lStorage for Web 2.0 and
websites/services that
manage large amounts of
unstructured data
lCorporate storage for large
amounts of unstructured
data
CLOUD
STORAGE
lService based
(pay-as-you-go)
lVery scalable
lCost efficient
lSimplified storage
management
lSecurity concerns
lOnly accessible via storage
APIs
lNot appropriate for
structured data and
transactional applications
lStorage for Web 2.0
applications and websites/
services that manage large
amounts of unstructured
data
lCorporate storage for large
amounts of unstructured
data
SOFTWARE-
DEFINED
STORAGE
lAbstraction of software from
the underlying hardware
lImproved interoperability
lEnables more flexible
storage configurations
lNot necessarily in the
interest of storage vendors,
since it devalues their
lucrative storage hardware
business
lVirtual storage appliances
lMany object and cloud
storage systems are based
on software-defined design
principles
ALL-FLASH
ARRAYS
lAn order-of-magnitude
better performance than
disks
lSturdier than disk systems
lHigh price
lChallenges of traditional
storage arrays to support
the high performance of
NAND flash
lHigh-performance
applications
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STORAGE TECH IS
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OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
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ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
COVER STORY | STORAGE SYSTEMS
reshaping storage architectures. One of the main bene-
ts of decoupling the software stack from the underlying
hardware is the exibility of being able to mix disparate
platforms that may vary in size, capabilities, performance
and price, depending on requirements.
Even though software-dened everything has re-
cently caught the attention of the storage marketing ma-
chines, it has existed in various forms in the storage realm
for a while. A virtual storage appliance (VSA), where the
storage software runs on a virtual machine (VM) and is
distributed as a VM image, is one example of software-
dened storage. For instance, NetApps Data Ontap Edge
VSA no longer requires a NetApp ler, but its VM image
runs on any server with the appropriate hypervisor, and it
seamlessly integrates with other NetApp systems.
Today, VSAs are primarily deployed in remote of-
ces and for use cases that dont merit hardware appli-
ances, such as embedded applications and mobile military
systems. VSAs can be put directly into the cloud to en-
able elasticity at a low cost, said Val Bercovici, NetApps
cloud czar, citing another use case of VSAs. In general,
the majority of object stores and cloud storage systems
are following the SDS model, where the software stack
runs on low-cost commodity components. Without ques-
tion, the abstraction of storage software from the under-
lying hardware is a trend that will continue. Over time,
standards like the Storage Networking Industry Asso-
ciations Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI),
Amazon (S3) and Rackspace; it can also be deployed in-
ternally to service corporate departments and users, and
charged back by usage. It can be deployed as a hybrid
storage cloud that combines internal and external cloud
storage. Its benets are usage-based consumption, elimi-
nating the need for storage infrastructure, the ability to
dynamically adjust and scale to any storage demand, and
unfettered access via Web protocols.
The security concern of handing off condential and
private data to an external storage cloud is still the main
reason hindering cloud storage adoption. Akin to object
storage, cloud storage is best suited for unstructured data
and isnt appropriate for structured data or as a data store
for transactional applications.
SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE
AND VIRTUALIZED STORAGE
Storage systems have for the most part been a combi-
nation of proprietary storage software running on stor-
age vendors custom hardware, with the infrastructure
components optimized for their storage software stack.
Software reuse has been limited, often even within ven-
dors own storage systems, and rarely ever across vendor
boundaries. The move toward a virtualized infrastruc-
ture that started with server virtualization and has since
extended to other areas, such as networking, is actively
(Continued from page 12)
15 STORAGE
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APRIL 2013
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STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
COVER STORY | STORAGE SYSTEMS
formance, [and theyre] missing many enterprise features
and maturity, said Mohit Bhatnagar, NetApps senior
director of ash products. But within two to ve years,
reliability and capabilities such as QoS will be there.
DARWINISM IN THE STORAGE REALM
Traditional storage arrays are far from dead, but theyre
evolving to support the requirements of a changing
compute landscape thats fraught with cloud and mobile
computing. The move toward scale-out architectures, an
increased use of solid-state storage and adoption of new
storage protocols are evidence of this transformation.
File-based storage is trending toward becoming object
storage and is already competing with object-based stor-
age to power cloud services. Block-based storage will con-
tinue to be critical for structured data and transactional
applications, but vendors of those systems are adopting
scale-out back-ends and evolving their storage architec-
tures to better cope with the requirements of NAND ash
and other emerging semiconductor-based storage tech-
nologies. In the meantime, the storage world is full of
opportunities for new vendors to emerge that are able
to move more quickly and are willing to gamble on
innovative and unconventional technology. n
JACOB N. GSOEDL is a freelance writer and a corporate director
for business systems.
and frameworks provided by the likes of OpenStack and
CloudStack will eventually enable interoperability be-
tween storage components from different vendors.
ALL-FLASH ARRAYS
Solid-state storage has been a disruptive and game-
changing storage technology. An order-of-magnitude
faster than mechanical disks, NAND ash-enabled new
storage designs are displacing expensive techniques like
short-stroking to lower access times and improve I/O.
Semiconductor based and void of mechanical compo-
nents, NAND ash is positioned right between DRAM
and mechanical disks, both from a price and performance
perspective.
Many contemporary storage arrays now offer solid-
state storage, either as cache or as a substitute for me-
chanical disks. However, very few all-ash arrays are
available because of the relatively high cost of NAND
ash and performance limitations of traditional storage
arrays that are optimized for mechanical disks. Contrary
to hybrid disk/ash arrays, all-ash arrays can support
hundreds of thousands of IOPS and are used for very
high-end applications where minimal latency and maxi-
mum IOPS are needed. All-ash systems are available
from companies such as Nimbus Data, Pure Storage,
Violin Memory and Whiptail.
At present, all-ash arrays are mostly about high per-
Memorizing RAID level denitions
and knowing which level does what can be:
Confusing
Hard to Remember
Useful
All of the above
So how much do you think you know about RAID?
Find Out For Yourself and Test Your Knowledge with Our
Exclusive RAID Quiz! And dont forget to bookmark this page
for future RAID-level reference.
Test your knowledge at
SearchSMBStorage.com/RAID_Quiz
17 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
CLOUD BACKUP
CLOUD BACKUP SERVICES can truly change the way your IT
department protects company data, but theres more to
do than just sign up with cloud backup providers in the
market. You may have discovered that your end users
have grown frustrated because the company lacks an ef-
fective, easy-to-use backup system for their mobile de-
vices or desktops, and have taken the issue into their
own hands by installing cloud backup or le synchroni-
zation software themselves. You may have also run into
problems backing up remote sites or branch ofcesthe
process has become too difcult to manage or youre un-
able to meet what you consider to be a reasonable recov-
ery time objective. Finally, you might be interested in
cloud backup because youre considering outsourcing all
your companys backups to a cloud provider. For all these
cases, cloud backup might be an appropriate alternative,
but youll have to determine if its a feasible and afford-
able option for your particular environment.
By W. Curtis Preston
A PRACTICAL
GUIDE TO CLOUD
BACKUP
Cloud backup providers have
grown up from their consumer
product roots and now offer
services that can meet the
needs of enterprises. Heres
what you need to know.
18 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
CLOUD BACKUP
Combine the low bandwidth requirements of to-
days cloud backup software and huge amounts of avail-
able bandwidth with aggressive pricing, and you begin to
CLOUD BACKUP HAS MATURED
Cloud backup isnt all that new; such services were
around long before the term cloud was even con-
sidered. A few changes in technology, however, have
brought cloud backup to the forefront.
The rst change is in the backup software itself, in-
cluding technologies such as continuous data protection
(CDP) and source data deduplication. They reduce by one
or two orders of magnitude the amount of data that must
be sent from the backup client to the backup server to en-
able the backup process. (Both CDP and source dedupe
technologies are block-level incremental forever and
never need to do a full backup.)
The next change falls into the area of the consumer-
ization of IT, because technology advances in the con-
sumer space are once again driving technology in the
enterprise arena. Consumer products have helped make
broadband Internet access ubiquitous; many people have
better bandwidth at home than they do at their ofce.
Widely available broadband communications make cloud
backup far more accessible compared to when previous it-
erations of cloud backup services were available.
Another consumerization-induced change is the im-
pact of the way cloud backup providers have aggressively
marketed their services to consumers, luring them with
pricing thats almost impossible to turn down. Many con-
sumers spend less for a year of secure, off-site backups
than they do for a single month of basic cable.
Are file sync-and-share
services good enough
for backup?
SMALLER COMPANIES sometimes use file-
synchronization services in lieu of traditional
backup or cloud backup. Its possible to do this
responsibly, but it can also create a disaster.
The difference between the two is the exis-
tence, or lack thereof, of file history. If you dont
have file history, you are one CTRL-ALT-DEL
away from disaster. That command would se-
lect and then delete all your companys data.
The file-synchronization service will then repli-
cate that deletion to every device youve set up
to replicate to as well as the cloud copy.
With three keystrokes, all your company
data is gone. However, if you went with the op-
tional history feature, a few more keystrokes
could regain all your data. Word to the wise:
Dont use file-synch services that lack a history
option or some other backup mechanism. n
19 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
CLOUD BACKUP
cloud backup service may use its software to store your
backup data on Amazon S3 or Glacier. Depending on the
cloud backup provider, all services including storage may
be included in a single bill, or you may be billed for their
software and required to set up your own account with a
compatible cloud storage provider.
l Cloud gateway appliances. Cloud gateway appliances
are available as physical or virtual devices and act as a
go-between between your data center and a cloud stor-
age provider. Theyre not backup systems any more than
le-synchronization services are, but theyre marketed
as a storage and backup offering because they offer syn-
chronization and history (see Are le sync-and-share
services good enough for backup?). Think of this as a
cloud version of the model that NetApp made so popular:
snapshots and replication as both a storage and backup
solution. Some of these vendors describe what they do by
calling themselves the NetApp of the cloud.
understand why the leading consumer backup services
boast of tens of millions of subscribers. These customers
then go to their workplace and say, If this works for my
home data, why cant it work for my work data? The an-
swer is that it probably can, so lets take a look at whats
available.
AVAILABLE SERVICES FROM
CLOUD BACKUP PROVIDERS
All cloud backup options offer the ability to get data off-
site in a secure fashion. The only questions are what
you use to get the data off-site, and what off-site storage
youre going to use.
l Their software, their storage. The most common option
is a full-service cloud backup service provider that pro-
vides both the software you install on the computers you
wish to back up, as well as the storage that will be used to
store your backups. Most people choose this option be-
cause its the simplest. You simply download and install
some software, set up automated billing and start your
rst backup. Backups couldnt be any easier.
l Their software, cloud storage. This option is functionally
very similar to the previous option, except that your back-
ups arent stored on the cloud backup providers storage
but on another cloud providers storage. For example, the
The very first thing you need to
examine when considering cloud
backup services is the financial and
technical viability of the company.
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
20 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
CLOUD BACKUP
particular, look for any news stories that describe past in-
cidents where the service might have lost any customer
data. Your organizations legal department should be able
to help investigate the nancial viability of candidate
Any data you store on an appliance is cached locally
and replicated to the cloud, along with snapshots for his-
tory purposes. If you delete all your data or lose the ap-
pliance itself, a copy of your data is in the cloud. If you
delete or corrupt one or more les, previous versions of
those les are stored in snapshots, which may be in the
cache or in the cloud.
WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER
Like any other area of IT, there are options to consider
when youre thinking about adopting cloud backups in
one form or another. Consider the following:
l Viability. Theres an old adage that says on the Inter-
net no one knows youre a dog. Similarly, anyone with
an Internet connection and a little bit of know-how can
become a cloud backup provider. On the Internet no one
knows the service might just be one person in a garage
with a computer and some USB storage hanging off it. So
the very rst thing you need to examine when consider-
ing cloud backup services is the nancial and technical
viability of the company.
If a cloud backup provider has a signicant list of
current customers and is nancially viable, you should
be able to nd a lot of published material about the ser-
vice. The articles you nd can offer some insight into
the size of the company and the direction its taking. In
Cloud backup
of cloud-based data
WITH ALL THIS talk of backing up to the cloud,
you may be wondering about backups of the
cloud. That is, backups of data already stored in
a cloud service.
For example, your company may use Sales-
force.com, Google apps or similar Web-based
services where the only copy of your compa-
nys intellectual property is stored on someone
elses servers. You can trust that the online app
provider is protecting your data adequately or
you can take action to protect it yourself. Hav-
ing data restored by one of these services can
be expensive; for example, the cost of having
Salesforce.com restore data due to your compa-
nys error starts at $10,000 per account.
The good news is that companies like Back-
upify can back that data up for you, ensuring
you have an additional copy thats not stored
with the original. n
21 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
CLOUD BACKUP
while the cloud copy ensures your data will survive a
major disaster. The other option is for the cloud backup
service to perform a reverse seed by restoring your
high-volume data to disks or tapes that they then ship
to you. Make sure youre aware of what options cloud
backup providers under consideration have for large re-
stores and how quickly they can respond when a restore
is required.
l Insourcing. Larger companies may be interested in the
possibility of insourcing their backups after theyve out-
sourced them. Cloud backups can be a wonderful thing,
but the bill can sometimes get quite large. Companies
that nd themselves in this position may be able to in-
source their backups by reverse seeding the entire backup
set back to their infrastructure and licensing the software
cloud backup providers.
You should learn as much as you can about how the
service will protect your data. Most services offer en-
cryption, but youll want to know if data is encrypted be-
fore its sent, and if the encryption key is known only to
you. Youll also need to ascertain whether backup data is
stored in one or multiple locations, especially if regula-
tory compliance is an issue for your company.
l Tape or disk seeding. The most difcult hurdle your
company will have to overcome is the rst backup. It
could take months if you have a lot of data and are using
a typical Internet connection. To get started in a reason-
able fashion, nd out if the cloud backup provider offers a
seeding option. This allows you to make your rst backup
on your premises to a set of tapes or disks that you then
ship to the cloud vendor for them to load onto their stor-
age system.
l Large restores. Another situation you must consider
is what will happen when you need to restore a large
amount of data in a timely manner. Its one thing to re-
store a few gigabytes; its an entirely different matter to
restore a few terabytes. There are two ways of handling
this particular challenge. The rst is to have an on-site
cache of your backups. You back up to a local appliance,
and that appliance replicates your backups to the cloud.
Large restores come directly from the local appliance,
Just because youre using a cloud
backup provider doesnt mean
theyre managing your backups
for you. If youre looking for a fully
managed provider, make sure your
expectations are clear when youre
in discussions with providers.
22 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
CLOUD BACKUP
nish. They may, of course, ask you to do the initial in-
stallation of their backup software, but they take it from
there.
TREAD LIGHTLY
Outsourcing your companys backups to a cloud backup
provider may indeed bring you the peace of mind that
comes with knowing your companys data is adequately
protected and that the costs for those backups are predict-
able and reasonable. Choosing the wrong provider can
also get you red. Do your research. n
W. CURTIS PRESTON (aka Mr. Backup) has been singularly
focused on data backup and recovery for more than 15 years. He is
the webmaster of BackupCentral.com, and the author of hundreds
of articles and the books Backup and Recovery and Using SANs
and NAS.
for internal use. If repatriating your backup operations
to in-house systems might be a possibility for your or-
ganization, make sure to address your alternatives dur-
ing sales negotiations with any cloud backup service
providers.
l Fully managed or self-managed. Just because youre
using a cloud backup provider doesnt mean theyre man-
aging your backups for you. If youre looking for a fully
managed provider, make sure your expectations are clear
when youre in discussions with providers. Some of them
merely provide the infrastructure for you to perform and
manage your own backupsthey dont even tell you if
backups worked properly or not. They might provide
email notication, but its up to you to read those emails
and act accordingly. No one is going to do anything if
you dont. Fully managed cloud backup providers, on
the other hand, manage the entire process from start to
23 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
By Phil Goodwin
EFFECTIVE
STORAGE
CAPACITY
MANAGEMENT
Poor allocation and provisioning,
and a lack of effective capacity
management tools, can lead
to underused storage systems.
But new tools and improved
processes can make storage
efficiency a reality.
STORAGE MANAGERS RARELY admit they have a capacity
management problem. Instead, theyre more likely to talk
about how big a slice of their IT budget storage eats up or
the unpleasantness of unplanned purchase requests. In
some cases, the conversation focuses on the high cost per
gigabyte of storage.
Other managers may be preoccupied with seeking a
solution to seemingly unattainable backup windows or
impossible disaster recovery scenarios.
Some are looking for capacity management tools or
processes that can identify and prune obsolete data, while
others are buying storage in large chunks annually to get
quantity discounts.
What do all of these scenarios have in common? In
each case, storage managers are trying to address a symp-
tom without taking a holistic view of a fundamental prob-
lem: the lack of an effective storage capacity management
regimine.
24 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
provisioning. Its a legitimate perspective, but it can cover
an insidious incentive to overprovision because it allows
that portion of storage to be ignored for a long period of
time. Some administrators will tout an 85% utilization
rate, even though perhaps only 20% of the array has actu-
ally been consumed. Such poor utilization, however, ul-
timately drives up the average cost per GB consumed by
2x or more with management none the wiser. Moreover,
most capacity purchases are triggered when allocated ca-
pacity hits 85% regardless of how much is really being
consumed. Responsible teams husband an organizations
resources more diligently.
WHY IS DATA GETTING SO BIG?
The biggest driver of storage growth is secondary data,
copies of original data or primary storage. Secondary
data includes snapshots, mirrors, replication and even
data warehouses. The secondary data multiplier can be
as high as 15:1. It would seem the obvious solution is to
reduce the number of data copies, which may indeed be
the case. However, the secondary copies were likely cre-
ated for a reason, such as for data protection or to reduce
contention for specic sets of data. The unintended con-
sequence of optimizing storage capacity management
may be reduced data recovery capabilities or worse per-
formance. Thus, storage managers must be aware that
theres an inverse relationship between data recovery,
DONT LOOK TO THE CLOUD FOR ANSWERS
Lets state up front that cloud storage is not the solution
to a capacity management problem. Increasingly, cloud
is portrayed as the cure-all for what storage ailments are
aficting companies. Cloud may mask the pain with a
somewhat lower cost per GB, but it does nothing to fun-
damentally address uncontrolled capacity expansion.
Cloud has a role in storage service delivery, but solving
capacity problems isnt one of them.
It would be charitable to say that some organizations
storage utilization is less than stellar. Many companies
have as little as 20% to 30% average utilization as mea-
sured by storage actually consumed. Those organizations
whose consumed utilization is more than 50% are the ex-
ception. This metric is one of the fundamental obstacles
to better utilization.
There are three basic ways to measure storage
capacity:
l Formatted (sometimes referred to as raw,
though there is a technical difference)
l Allocated (sometime expressed as provisioned)
l Consumed (or written)
When asked what their utilization rate is, most stor-
age administrators will quote the allocated gure. From
their perspective, if its allocated to an application, its
as good as consumed because its unavailable for new
25 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
performance and capacity management; if you improve
one, youre likely to impede the other. Consequently, its
important to start with service-level requirements for re-
covery and performance. Capacity management can be
optimized only to the point that other service levels arent
jeopardized.
CAPACITY MANAGEMENT TOOLKITS
Fortunately, storage managers have numerous tools to as-
sist them in tackling capacity management. These include
two general categories: utilities and reporting tools. Ar-
ray vendors have a number of useful utilities that are now
available with most systems.
Perhaps the most common of these is thin provision-
ing capability, which is supported by nearly every vendor.
Thin provisioning allows administrators to logically allo-
cate storage, but automatically keeps the physical alloca-
tion only slightly above the actual capacity used. Storage
is automatically allocated from a common pool as a vol-
ume demands more space. Because the array itself may
be logically overallocated, its possible to have an out-
of-space train wreck if administrators dont ensure that
enough physical capacity is available as data grows. This
is uncommon, however, as automated alerts should keep
administrators on top of the situation. Thin provision-
ing alone can largely alleviate the problem of high allo-
cation/low utilization. In most cases its complemented
Tools to take control
of capacity management
THIN PROVISIONING
+ Eliminates overallocation and increases
utilized capacity from 30% to 60%
+ Cuts the cost per gigabyte (GB) stored
by 50%
COMPRESSION
+ A 2:1 compression allows twice as much data
in the same array, for another 50% reduction in
cost per GB stored
DEDUPLICATION
+ A 2:1 deduplication rate further halves the
cost per GB of storage and the deduplication
rate could be higher for some data types
STORAGE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS
+ Manages storage as an enterprise, not
as individual arrays
+ Measures storage metrics to drive best
practices
+ Spots trends that could become serious
problems without proper attention n
26 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
compression where vendors make efciency guarantees,
there are no such guarantees with deduplication because
its highly dependent upon data type. Media les gener-
ally dedupe poorly, whereas text les may dedupe quite
well.
CAPACITY MANAGEMENT REPORTING TOOLS
The other category of tools is reporting tools, or more
accurately, storage resource management (SRM) prod-
ucts. Both array vendors and independent vendors offer
SRM products, examples of which include EMC Control-
Center, Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co.s HP Storage Essen-
tials, NetApp OnCommand Insight (formerly SANscreen)
and Symantecs Veritas CommandCentral Storage. All
of them offer the ability to comprehensively manage and
monitor an enterprise storage environment. Yet few orga-
nizations leverage them, largely because SRM has gained
a reputation as being unwieldy and resource-intensive.
These limitations can be overcome by focusing on only
those aspects of an SRM application that are truly bene-
cial, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. In the context
of storage capacity management, you should focus on the
following:
Thresholds. Individual arrays provide threshold alerts,
but SRM applications can consolidate them and give an
enterprise-wide picture to administrators. This allows far
by a space reclamation feature that returns unused space
to the common pool. While array vendors may offer this
feature, reclamation can also be performed by Symantec
Corp.s Veritas Foundation Suite for those who use that
product.
Another useful and near-universal utility is compres-
sion. Most vendors are willing to guarantee a 2:1 com-
pression on primary storage, or a 50% space savings.
Compression is normally applied at the LUN or volume
level, depending upon the vendors specic implementa-
tion. Compression does incur some performance penalty,
though it can be as little as 5%. Of course, your mileage
may vary, so a proof of concept is worth the effort. From
a management standpoint, the benet of compression is
cutting the cost per GB stored by 50%.
Compression is complemented by data deduplication,
though deduplication is not yet supported on primary
storage by every vendor; EMC Corp. and NetApp Inc. are
examples of vendors that do. Here again, deduplication
differs in its implementation on primary storage versus
backup appliances. On primary storage, data deduplica-
tion is an idle-time process and isnt nearly as aggressive
in eliminating duplicate blocks as deduping backup ap-
pliances. Because its a background process, the compres-
sion itself doesnt impact operations. Decompression,
known as rehydration, may have minimal or signicant
effect on performance, so a proof of concept is advised.
Rehydration is more like reassembly of parts. Unlike
27 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
l Growth rates. Knowing growth rates fosters accurate
forecasting, thereby avoiding unnecessary safety fac-
tor purchases. Storage prices decline approximately
10% per quarter on a per-GB basis, so delaying an orga-
nizations purchases can yield substantial savings over
time.
l Days storage in inventory. Using growth rates, calcu-
late how many days of storage growth capacity is on the
oor. Target 90 to 180 days. Less than 90 days doesnt
give purchasing enough time to do their job most ef-
fectively. More than 180 days and you could have pur-
chased the storage later at a cheaper price.
Organizations can dramatically cut the cost per giga-
byte stored by using the array utilities that in many cases
are already paid for. Implementing thin provisioning,
compression and deduplication (where applicable) can
reduce this cost by 50% to 75%, which isnt bad by any
measure. However, best-practice organizations will im-
plement SRM products to take their storage management
to the next level. With it, storage managers can balance
and optimize performance, data protection and capacity
utilization simultaneously. n
PHIL GOODWIN is a storage consultant and freelance writer.
more comprehensive planning and provisioning to pre-
vent one array from being oversubscribed while another
is undersubscribed, for example.
Utilization. Again, SRM consolidates information that oth-
erwise must be manually aggregated (and who has the
time to do that?). Utilization gures to monitor include:
l Consumed as a percent of raw. Know how much the ar-
ray is truly utilized. Target 55% or higher as a best prac-
tice, though this will vary with the age of the array and
growth rates.
l Consumed as a percent of allocated. Know whether or
not the array is overallocated. Target greater than 70%
(85% if thin provisioning is used) as a best practice. Al-
locations lower than 70% may be acceptable for newly
provisioned LUNs or those with high, unpredictable
growth.
l Secondary data. Know how much data is consumed by
snapshots, mirrors and the like. Target no more than
3x the primary storage. More than 3x may be justiable
for various reasons, but this ensures that space isnt
consumed unnecessarily. This feeds into data/informa-
tion lifecycle management.
Trends. Thresholds and utilization are points-in-time.
Identifying trends is the key to optimizing capacity.
28 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
Theres still a place for tape,
even in the cloud
Although the role of tape in traditional backup operations might be diminishing,
it still has a place in long-term data retention and even cloud storage services.
HOT SPOTS | JASON BUFFINGTON
A
CCORDING TO THE Enterprise Strategy
Groups Trends in Data Protection Mod-
ernization, tape is in use in 56% of
data protection strategies today. That
represents a lot of tape users, suggest-
ing tape is far from dead as some have declared. If you
look at archiving solutions (not to be confused with long-
term retention during backup), the use of tape would be
even higher. But since our focus is on data protection in-
stead of data management, consider the following stats
derived from surveying 330 users, with a 60/40 mix of
enterprise and midmarket respondents.
Data backup methods currently used:
l To disk; copy sent off-site on removable media: 31%
l To disk; no off-site copy: 15%
l To tape; copy sent off-site on removable media: 15%
l To disk; copy sent to off-site disk via WAN: 15%
l To tape; no off-site copy: 10%
l Over WAN directly to second corporate site; no
on-site copy: 7%
l To disk; copy sent to cloud storage provider: 5%
l To third-party cloud storage provider; no on-site
copy: 2%
Today, 25% of companies use tape as their only me-
dium for recovery, which includes 10% backing up di-
rectly to tape, and another 15% having tapes both on- and
off-site. Even compared to a collective 73% of folks who
use disk as their rst tier of recovery, the tape number
seems high. As a rst tier of recovery, I expect the tape
numbers will continue to gradually shrink, with even
29 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
HOT SPOTS | JASON BUFFINGTON
tape look like disk, effectively creating virtual disk devices
as the antithesis of VTLs.
THE ROLE OF TAPE IN A CLOUDY WORLD
If the number of users who employ tape as their primary
backup target dwindles and cloud use grows, what will
be the role of tape? One of tapes roles will be economi-
cal data retention. Even with deduplication, compres-
sion, disks that spin down and other very compelling
disk-based retention and archival technologies, its hard
to economically compete with the two-or-three-cents-per-
gigabyte economies that tape offers.
There are, however, two trends that could contribute
to a renewed interest in tape:
l More people understand theres a difference between
archiving and long-term backups. As e-discovery sce-
narios and regulatory requirements continue to evolve,
content-savvy archival apps are becoming more main-
stream to meet those needs. Archive vendors (and their
customers) seem to be of the mindset that the colder
the data needs to be, the more applicable tape might
be as part of the solution, often with high-performance
disk or ash in front of it.
l As cloud-based storage and backup providers con-
tinue to mature, tape tiers within their infrastructures
more companies moving to disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T)
and using disk as their primary recovery medium, before
storing data on tape for longer-term retention.
In contrast, with all the cloud storage hype we hear,
only 7% of respondents use cloud in their data protection
strategy, including 2% going directly to backup-as-a-ser-
vice (BaaS) offerings. Another 5% back up to local disk
(presumably for faster recovery scenarios, deduplication
and buffering) before shipping backup data to a cloud
provider through an enhanced BaaS scenario or by lever-
aging cloud-based storage attached to their on-premises
backup application.
NOT YOUR FATHERS TAPE
To be fair, with newer tape formats, tapes speed and
unreliability issues have been resolved, but the bad rap
against tape persists. And in some cases, the old rules
have actually reversed themselves.
Twenty years ago, people wanted faster/better back-
ups than what tape could provide at the time. But backup
software didnt know how to use disk effectively, so disk
vendors created virtual tape libraries (VTLs), disk systems
that presented as tape.
Fast forward to today, and those who want cheaper/
cooler/greener storage than their existing disk solutions
may be surprised to discover that tape cartridges (LTO-6
with LTFS) can be mounted as le systems. LTFS makes
30 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
HOT SPOTS | JASON BUFFINGTON
preferred deduplicating rst tier as a recovery solution,
while tape has a role as economical, long-term retention.
Sure, there are disk-based products that can dwarf the ap-
plicability of some tape implementations, just as there are
some snapshot technologies that can appear to diminish
the need for traditional backups.
Whatever the case, understand how you need to pro-
tect, retain and recover your data, and then keep an open
mind while considering the myriad technologies that
might meet those challenge while keeping an eye on
costs. n
JASON BUFFINGTON is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy
Group. He focuses primarily on data protection, as well as Windows
Server infrastructure, management and virtualization. He blogs at
CentralizedBackup.com and tweets as @Jbuff.
may become more compelling. The main attraction
of cloud storage services is that they can scale, and
providers can offer capabilities less expensively than
what subscribers could do on their own. And since
the usual bottleneck between a subscriber and a pro-
vider is the Internet pipe (not the storage media), ser-
vice providers may embrace tape tiers within their
storage services to deliver scale while lowering their
own cost models.
Tape versus disk is as tired an argument as snap-
shots versus backups. In both cases, it shouldnt have
to result in an either/or decision; rather, they should be
viewed as being better when used together. The same way
that you might use snapshots for faster recoveries and tra-
ditional backup for restoring previous versions, disk is the
31 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
The evolution of data
deduplication continues
Data deduplication for backup has evolved enormously in
the last decade, and its poised to go beyond just backup.
READ/WRITE | ARUN TANEJA
N
EW TECHNOLOGIES OFTEN come to mar-
ket as value-add features for existing
mainstream products that are then
later merged into these products. Its
often the only way a new vendor can
bring a product to market, like what happened with data
deduplication technology. In the early 2000s, data dedu-
plication came in the form of appliances from companies
like Data Domain, Diligent Technologies, ExaGrid Sys-
tems, Quantum and Sepaton. The appliances worked in
conjunction with existing backup software and the value
proposition was simple: install the appliance, point the
backup software to it and instead of backing up to tape
the backup app would stream the data to the appliance.
Backups and restores got faster and more reliable, and
with deduplication, disk costs were close to that of tape.
The market for the appliances soared in terms of rev-
enue and acceptance. But why not merge dedupe func-
tionality into the backup software itself instead of using a
separate appliance? Today, most backup software vendors
offer deduplication as a standard feature in their products.
But the technology continued to advance and source-
based data deduplication technology emerged. Rather
than dedupe data in the backup software, it could be done
at the application server under the control of the backup
app. Then only deduplicated data would traverse the net-
work, reducing congestion and improving performance.
This concept was introduced by Avamara startup at the
timeand because its method meant using a brand new
backup app, few enterprises wanted to risk their valuable
corporate data with a product from a relative unknown.
But then Avamar was acquired by EMC, and in the hands
32 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
READ/WRITE | ARUN TANEJA
and needs to be tamed. Whether you choose to tame it via
a data deduplication appliance or with new backup soft-
ware depends on factors that are unique to your environ-
ment. Most backup vendors can now offer source-based,
target-based and appliance-based products as options.
And some startups offer unique solutions that make up
for the lack of breadth in offerings.
Eventually, we wont need to talk about data dedu-
plication technology as it will simply happen when the
data is created by the application and stay deduplicated
through its lifespan. But, despite some promising starts,
this primary storage data deduplication approach hasnt
happened at a pace I expected. NetApp has had this capa-
bility for a long time but its not inline and requires post
processing. IBMs Storwize technology is compression
based and solves an important but adjacent problem, but
its still not available across the entire product line. Dell
bought Ocarina, but little has been done with that tech-
nology in almost two years. Still, without question this
concept will come to pass and we will quietly put data de-
duplication to sleep. Until then, work needs to be done
and IT life must go on. When you have to make a data de-
duplication decision, make that decision as strategic as
possible given the state of technology and its evolution. n
ARUN TANEJA is founder and president at Taneja Group, an analyst
and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server
technologies.
of a big, well-known company, product sales took off.
And now conceptually similar source-based deduplication
backup software is available from most major players.
The fundamental evolution of value-add feature
to mainstream is now complete. What can you expect
next? While it seems as if there are a lot of data dedupli-
cation technology choices to make, for new IT initiatives,
it makes little sense to go back to 20th century data pro-
tection methods. I believe data should be reduced at the
point closest to where its created and kept in its reduced
form through its entire lifecycle, except when its needed
in its full format to be viewed for audits, compliance, ana-
lytics and so forth. That logic dictates that all new IT ini-
tiatives should use source-based backup software to seal
in maximum efciency from the outset. This approach
also works very well for virtualized server environments,
given the level of duplication found in virtual machines.
For existing environments, its trickier. The particu-
lar situation will determine whether a dedupe appliance,
new backup software with target-based data deduplica-
tion or source-based backup software is most appropriate.
The main point, however, is that data deduplication
is now mainstream and should be treated that way. Make
decisions around data deduplication at a strategic level
and not as a patch to an existing problem. Were in a dif-
ferent phase of technology, but it doesnt mean the era of
data deduplication appliances is over. The amount of data
under the purview of legacy backup software is immense
33 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
4
1 1 4 4 1
SNAPSHOT
Backup isnt as hard as it used to be
Backup and recovery is, by its very nature, a pain point, noted one of our less
optimistic but maybe more realistic survey respondents. Backup is an uphill
battle, but it looks like storage pros are getting the upper hand. A year ago, 61%
said their biggest backup problem was how long it took to complete a backup;
this year, only 46% are eyeing the clock. Another of our users biggest backup is-
sues is the amount of data to back up; on average, our respondents will add 44
TB of disk capacity for backup, which is way up from last years 35 TB and 2010s
piddling 13 TB. Backing up the same stuff repeatedly is another backup buga-
boo, with 41% saying theyre backing up redundant data. But thats a drop from
last years 56% as more shops use dedupe: 48% use it now and 40% will evaluate.
Three-quarters of our group back up virtual servers or virtual desktops. Asked to
rate their virtual machine backup experience on a 1-to-5 scale, our gang gave it a
3theyre not crazy about it, but its also not driving them crazy. Rich Castagna
WHAT BACKUP AND RECOVERY PROBLEMS DO YOU MOST OFTEN EXPERIENCE?*
66
%
PLAN TO PURCHASE
ADDITIONAL DISK
CAPACITY THIS YEAR TO
COPE WITH BACKUPS
APPROXIMATELY HOW MUCH TOTAL DATA
VOLUME DO YOU BACK UP IN A WEEK?
15%
51 TB to
100 TB
19%
More than
200 TB
43%
Less than
10 TB
4%
151 TB to
200 TB
15%
11 TB to
50 TB
4%
101 TB to
150 TB
Backup
takes
too long
Backing up
redundant
data
Too long to
recover data
Inadequate
reporting/
monitoring
Too many
backup
failures
* UP TO THREE SELECTIONS PERMITTED.
51
%
46
%
44
%
33
%
29
%
61
%
56
%
50
%
41
%
33
%
46
%
41
%
35
%
29
%
24
%
n 2010 n 2012 n 2013
34 STORAGE
n
APRIL 2013
HOME
STORAGE TECH IS
CHANGING (FINALLY!)
OPEN SYSTEMS
STYMIE STORAGE
MANAGEMENT
IS YOUR STORAGE
ARRAY OBSOLETE?
TAP INTO CLOUD
BACKUP WITHOUT
FEAR
KEEP TABS ON
DISK USAGE
TAPE MEETS THE CLOUD
DATA DEDUPES
EVOLUTION
BACKUP ISNT AS HARD
AS IT USED TO BE
TechTarget Storage Media Group
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