Wednesday, April 23, 2008
St. Patrick’s Day is no longer the only occasion for going green. When it comes to addressing your data storage requirements these days, you’ll want to go as green as possible. After all, everyone is thinking eco-friendly, from hybrid cars to canvas grocery bags while recycling wherever and whenever possible. This same kind of responsibility to our planet has more and more companies demanding sustainable data storage solutions from their vendors and partners.
The reasoning and results are undeniable; sustainable data storage helps companies’ better meet demands for business continuity and compliance. Further, relying on energy-efficient hardware is not only eco-friendly but budget friendly also. As the price of fuel soars, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that from 2000 to 2006, the compounded average growth rate of electricity use from electronic data storage increased 20 percent—outpacing site infrastructure and networking equipment. According to the Uptime Institute, the yearly cost to power one server will rise from $95 in 2006 to $1,445 by 2012.
With typical data storage increasing 60 percent a year, no company can afford to be without an energy-efficient data storage strategy. So where to begin? Here are a few tips:
• Look for vendors and partners that use only the latest in energy-efficient technologies, such as data deduplication and compression.
• Internally implement green strategies, which may include data consolidation or moving to networked or virtualized storage.
• When appropriate, purchase equipment containing energy-efficient components, such as high capacity disk drives (e.g., SATA) that will conserve data storage and electricity usage.
Products from Overland Storage, such as our REO 9500D deduplicating VTL appliance and REO models with hardware compression take full advantage of eco-friendly features that increase disk capacity while using less power and producing less heat. This will translate to noticeable energy savings. These appliances also are RoHS compliant and don’t contain heavy metals, which increases storage efficiency and optimizes power consumption.
In particular, Overland’s REO 9500D can help any data center go green with increased retention of backup data on disk. Utilizing highly-efficient data deduplication software, the REO 9500D can dramatically increase storage capacity while reducing data volumes. The REO 9500D also can be configured as multiple VTLs, allowing fast and efficient backup to disk.
Additionally, Overland’s non-deduplicating VTLs include Dynamic Virtual Tape, basically thin provisioning for virtual tape, to maximize the utilization of available disk space. Any unused VTL space can be used for nearline storage.
Besides ensuring your data center gets greener, REO VTLs arrive ready to integrate without hassle. There’s no software to install, they are simply configured with the preferred VTL set-up with the easy-to-use configuration wizard. These eco-friendly, energy-efficient appliances are compatible with all major backup software and require no modifications to hosts or backup servers. So there’s no need to waste any time—or precious energy. Go green today!
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Jeff Graham
Senior Product Manager
Friday, April 18, 2008
It’s pretty much a given that every organization must not only backup its data but do it with frequency—and let’s not forget—do it well. With that said, there is the much harder task of making that statement a confident reality. If impetus is needed, there’s a lot at stake: think about job security, your company’s viability and, of course, getting a good night’s sleep.
First off, brace yourself with the proper point of view. Because the act of backup should be looked at as much more than just having your vital data duplicated on disk and/or tape in case there’s an emergency. Start with the goal of doing all you can to ensure your backup data is called into duty as few times as possible.
Fortunately, this is now easier as more and more IT departments are embracing disk-based appliances that make possible storing weeks—if not months—of data. Disk also makes IT staffers look like superstars because most restores are instantaneous. But how do you know much backup disk is needed? Begin with a capacity planning exercise.
Determine exactly what data gets backed up. How much data are you backing up now? By what percentage do you expect the data to grow? If the rate of your growth is unclear, use IDC’s baseline that typical storage grows by 60 percent per year. What is your company’s retention policy? For instance, do you need to keep on hand one month of weekly fulls, one year of monthly fulls, three years of quarterly fulls, seven years of annual fulls? What does your data look like? While compression technology has been a good friend to the backup process, if you’re working with lots of video and audio, don’t count on a 2:1 ratio because those files already are compressed. Public companies must take into consideration all Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
The good news is embracing the proper amount of disk-based backup permits taking better advantage of incremental backups, which saves disk space over full backups. With today’s technology, you can schedule a full backup every Friday with daily incrementals and feel pretty good about getting that good night’s sleep. You can make better use of your storage space by performing more incrementals and fewer fulls, which results in taking up less storage space. But this isn’t always necessary as disk-based offerings, such as Overland’s REO SERIES of disk-based backup and recovery appliances scale extraordinarily and economically.
If it’s of any consolation, no tiered data protection strategy can unequivocally guarantee data will never be lost. But remember, even baseball’s best hitters are out more than six times out of 10. With a well-planned backup strategy, IT departments will far exceed this average and reach all-star status in the data protection league.
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Jeff Graham
Senior Product Manager
Friday, March 28, 2008
There has been a lot interest lately in data replication. Unfortunately, the flurry of words has caused quite a storm of confusion. And at the eye of the storm? Synchronous or asynchronous replication? That is the question.
For anyone considering synchronous data replication, the most important factor to understand is that this process can require a tremendous amount of bandwidth, depending on the amount of data involved. This is because every write to the disk subsystem is replicated immediately.
Aside from the beaucoup bandwidth needed, the process can be costly. Even if your synchronous replication is local, it still requires high-performance disks and fast local network connections because the process is only as fast as its slowest element. In addition, all hardware and networks needed in replication must be available always. Mirroring of data is the same in basic principle except it can be achieved within the same device or with two devices.
Given the extraordinary bandwidth and cost involved, why would anyone want synchronous replication? In one word: redundancy. In case you were to lose one system, business can keep on going uninterrupted. It’s the same reason businesses favor the security of clustered servers. If you have mission-critical databases and you can afford it, synchronous replication delivers reassuring peace of mind.
In contrast, asynchronous replication is much more common and affordable. Async basically makes the most sense for backing up data as part of a disaster recovery application. It provides outstanding fault tolerance for network storage by capturing changes to data at the byte level. The largest benefit of asynchronous data replication is if there’s an outage, replication can continue and all data in the replication system is secure.
What factors are driving the requirements for asynchronous replication? A primary reason is the growing number of organizations with multiple sites that want to consolidate their backups and/or achieve heightened disaster recovery capabilities.
Asynchronous replication has evolved as DR planning has become a front-and-center issue. Thanks to some more recent technologies, such as bandwidth optimization and data deduplication, async replication now is more affordable and accessible than ever. In particular, bandwidth optimization can ensure you have high-capacity connections to transmit replicated data while data deduplication can lower the time and cost of backing up data to disk.
So if you’re looking for ways to bolster your current disaster recovery plan, consider asynchronous replication as a way to ensure that all your sites—not just your data center—have the highest levels of protection possible.
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Jeff Graham
Senior Product Manager
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Early in the days of my career as an IT administrator and later as an IT engineer, careful consideration was always taken when considering the power consumption requirements of servers, storage arrays, uninterruptable power supplies, etc – anything and everything that went into a lab – and yes, even the stereo that helped the late nights and longer weekends seem not so bad.
Careful consideration was taken, at least in my case, to make sure that I had the correct electrical outlets available and so to avoid the cursing building maintenance supervisor when I blew a fuse.
Over the past few years, the motivation for such careful consideration has shifted quite a bit. Not only is there concern for the correct electrical outlets and minimizing the risk of unruly encounters with the building supervisor, the cliché requirement to “do more with less” has now stretched to the data center energy bill.
Available today, there is a great deal of technologies and best practices that can help us “propeller heads” address these new power utilization limitations. Such technologies include server consolidation, server virtualization and idle disk-drive spin-down.
A very common practice in terms of tiered storage, but lesser known best practice to reduce power consumption, is to balance disk-based power efficiency with capacity and performance.
Without doubt, SAS drives are quickly consuming the market for high performance disk drives over traditional fibre channel disk drives and legacy SCSI disk drives.
For low cost, high capacity disk, SATA drives have already become the staple in almost every IT environment ranging from the Fortune 100 data center in NYC to the 10-person plumbing business in rural Iowa.
SATA cannot obtain the same random I/O performance requirements that SAS drives can address. However, when taking into consideration the wattage per terabyte of capacity, there is no question that SATA reigns supreme.
The table below shows the facts from www.seagate.com regarding their SAS and SATA drive power utilization per drive:
| Model # |
Drive Type |
Drive Capacity |
Typical Power Utilization (W) |
Average (W) per Terabyte |
| ST3750330NS |
SATA-II |
750 GB |
11.6 |
0.015 |
| ST3146855SS |
SAS |
146 GB |
14.9 |
0.102 |
Although the difference may seem small when comparing one drive to another, picture the wattage required for 100 terabytes of each:
· 100 TB SATA requires 1.5W
· 100 TB SAS requires 10W
Taking this a step further, “best of breed” storage arrays are now being architected to support both SAS and SATA drives intermixed within a single enclosure! This awards storage administrators the ability to provide both SAS and SATA to address performance and capacity requirements without having to purchase additional arrays, which ultimately have additional power requirements of their own.
Overland Storage has already taken this advantage into account and launched ULTAMUS RAID 1200 in February of 2007.
Now in its second generation, ULTAMUS RAID 1200 provides users with the ability to intermix both high performance SAS with high capacity SATA to address a broad range of application requirements within a single chassis and while also addressing the ongoing need to be conscious of the energy bill.
If only I had this capability available to me years ago… I could have avoided the explicit language of Don, the maintenance man, and could have (quite possibly) justified squeezing a more quality stereo system into my capital budget.
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Kevin C. Wise | Senior Product Manager
Friday, February 22, 2008
The rate at which data is growing today is causing heads to spin faster than a whirring disk drive. It can be overwhelming and part of the feeling is brought on by the fact many backup administrators have been caught by surprise at what’s happening.
While tape has long been known tape as the capacity leader—with the best price per TB—it no longer can solve a panacea of problems caused by escalating data growth and ever-increasing backup and recovery requirements.
In the early 1990s, mid-range tape storage was revolutionized when it became possible to put 5 GBs on one tape. At the time, conventional thinking was that it would take three years to fill this expanded capacity. Fast forward to the New Millennium. Now your storage level has reached 5 TBs, and while tape technology has continued to do its part in capacity growth, the speed needed for the lightning-fast way we do business today obviously is missing, causing backup windows to look like a picture window with a very bad view.
There are steps for changing the size and view of your backup window. Start by figuring out exactly how much data truly needs protection. Then evaluate the criticality to establish the value of this data. Calculate the SLAs and data retention requirements that must be achieved and then start benchmarking them vs. the current configuration. Determine these factors against your desired Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Granularity Objectives (RGOs).
Introducing a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) strategy will enable a faster backup method that will make it possible to meet SLAs. Overland’s REO SERIES disk-based appliances are designed purposefully to solve backup window woes. Once the suitable backup times are achieved, advancements such as data deduplication helps reduce storage of repetitious data while improving the amount of data that can be kept on disk for rapid restores.
With SLAs under control, it’s much easier to determine data protection growth levels for the next three years. If this seems daunting, apply IDC’s standard that data is growing at 60 percent a year. So if there’s 20 TBs of production data today, plan for at least 50 TBs in three years. A good rule of thumb in backups is to keep 10 times your primary disk capacity on-hand for growth, but by using compression and data deduplication the tables tip in your favor. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, a 20-to-1 data reduction ratio is achievable.
Today, one technology is not enough to ensure effective data protection. But have no fears, tape is not going away, it’s just transforming from a first line of storage to a second or third. A summer 2007 study by Aberdeen Group revealed 75 percent of respondents said they will continue to use tape for some form of backup. So matching NEO SERIES or ARCvault tape automation with Overland’s ULTAMUS RAID nearline storage and REO disk-based backup and recovery provides the building blocks necessary for a solid tiered data protection solution that provides years in peace of mind.
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Peri Grover
Director, Product Development
Saturday, February 16, 2008
You can pound a nail into a wall with just about anything (last time I resorted to using the handle of a screwdriver), but for the best results I suggest using a hammer. This rule also can be applied to your corporate data protection strategy.
No organization should safeguard all its data with just one tool. While perhaps it can be done (refer to screwdriver-and-nail example), it just isn’t efficient or sufficient for achieving the best results. That’s why it’s good to have a “hammer” and “screwdriver” in your corporate tool kit; in this case, I’m talking about disk and tape technology. Using the proper tools for the job, disk is the answer for business-critical data while the needs of less critical data are perfect for tape.
Relying on one tool to meet all tiers of your data protection needs exposes you to the unnecessary risk of data or revenue loss as well as potential regulatory incompliance. While choosing the most appropriate tool ensures the most satisfactory user experience, using your tools in unison creates a tiered data protection strategy that will deliver the most appropriate levels of data protection according to its value to the organization.
Following along on this theme, it’s important to realize that a one-size tool doesn’t fit all applications. That’s why Overland’s NEO SERIES and ARCvault tape automation products as well as REO SERIES disk-based backup and recovery appliances are offered in a variety of sizes and capabilities—so they can be mixed and matched to best suit specific applications along the data protection continuum.
Beware of any vendor that would tell you otherwise. The truth will come out by looking into their toolbox; (1) it probably contains a limited product line and (2) whatever their tool is, they’ll be sure to tell you it’s the exact one you need to solve your problem (regardless of whether you’re trying to shrink your backup window or improve long-term data retention).
Any experienced IT person knows that isn’t true. Disk isn’t the answer to everything anymore than tape is. At Overland, we know this very well because we have lived it. While the company earned its spurs as a pioneer in tape technology, we added complementary disk-based offerings to meet a wide range of requirements, including disaster recovery, business continuity, regulatory compliance and e-discovery liabilities.
Our complete product portfolio enables us to solve your problem whatever it is, and accomplish it optimally. We do not try to force-fit problems into our solution; we do not hammer with a screwdriver, so to speak. We look at your environment, understand your challenges and then reach into our toolbox to provide a solution optimized specifically for your business and budget.
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Peri Grover
Director, Product Management
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Tape has its own take on that much-used quote from Mark Twain about reports of his death being greatly exaggerated. In fact, there have been seemingly hundreds of reported “deaths” since I first got tangled in tape during the Reagan Administration.
Here’s the truth: Tape is very much alive, and in certain applications, it’s as viable as ever. For the pessimistic in the crowd, look no further than a recent IDC report on mid-range tape automation. It states that tape is a $1.2 billion market. How can that be, you ask? Well, many leading manufacturers have huge investments in tape technology. That’s why tape is still here today and isn’t going away any time soon. Simply put, the ranks of the LTO Consortium, which include the likes of HP, IBM, Imation, Maxell, Quantum and Sony, all have big strategic initiatives in tape and see sustaining value in the technology.
So even if SLDT may be at the end of its life, a quick look around the corporate landscape would prove LTO tape technology is doing quite well. You would be hard-pressed to go into any enterprise today and not find tape playing an integral role in any overarching data protection strategy. So don’t go writing tape’s obituary just yet because HP and Quantum are working feverishly on polishing up the next generation of technology, LTO-5.
LTO-5 will deliver 1.6 TBs of native capacity—twice that of the previous tape generation. And with compression playing an ever increasing role in any tape library, it’s not unlikely 3 TBs is possible. While speed should also increase, it may not necessarily double. On the drawing board, LTO-6, which should appear in 2010 or 2011, should double capacity, if not speed, once again. In addition, many industry watchers are predicting LTO-6 will bring the first appearance of a 3 TB cartridge. So there’s a lot to be excited about.
Tape’s long life can be traced to several, sustaining virtues: high capacity, low cost, excellent portability. What has changed, however, is how tape is best utilized in the corporate scheme of things. Sure, tape has long exceeded its best usefulness as a first line of backup. Disk has ascended the throne of near-line backup and retention, and rightfully so. We work in a world demanding immediate responsiveness, and disk delivers that kind of instant access to data and lightning-fast restores.
But the importance of long-term archiving, especially for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery, is growing every year in the corporate world. So for applications where performance is less of an issue yet capacity can double at least every 18 months and the data needs to be available for years, I say stick to tape.
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Peri Grover
Director, Product Management
Friday, December 21, 2007
Part II of a Two-Part Series
In part I, I covered the basics on why Snapshot technology is the most frequently employed technology to backup data at a specific point-in-time. In this second submission, I’d like to focus on how Overland has incorporated snapshots into its ULTAMUS® RAID to support data protection best practices.
Snapshot functionality is a very integral component of Overland’s ULTAMUS RAID firmware, which runs in the RAID controller rather than on a host—maximizing performance while ensuring full availability to data as applications continue to process.
As shown in the diagram below, ULTAMUS RAID snapshots employ a Copy-On-Write (COW) process, meaning the snapshot copy and primary data share the same data source, except when new data is created. The snapshot keeps the unchanged file and primary data keeps the updated file.
A COW snapshot produces a result similar to full volume copy, but a snapshot is captured in far less time—and requires far less disk space—than required for a full volume copy. Once a snapshot is taken, a server writing to the source logical volume transparently causes pre-defined segments of the source logical volume to be copied to the snapshot before allowing the write to continue, thus preserving the original data on the snapshot.
When in operation, servers continue to read from the source volume and write to a special reserved area with the user unaware that the snapshot has occurred. Once the snapshot is released and the source volume is "unfrozen," data that was written to the source volume while the snapshot was active is re-integrated into the source volume. This activity is completely transparent to the user making snapshot clean and non-intrusive, which, according to my research, is required in most cases.
Clear as mud? If you are like me, visual representation works best…
It is important to note that a COW snapshot is not what the acronym implies. In fact, it is the exact opposite as a COW snapshot is not a complete physical replication of the original disk requiring the same amount of space as the original volume. A COW snapshot is only a virtual copy, as all data written to the source volume will still reside on the source disk.
This implementation requires a minimal amount of storage capacity, typically between 10-to-20 percent of the source logical volume (dependent on data change rates, of course), enabling it to quickly generate and efficiently store several snapshots within roughly the same space required for a single mirror or copy of the volume.
Real-world access and use of snapshot varies. For example, using products from Overland, a backup server can mount the snapshot volume from ULTAMUS® RAID and backup the frozen data to a REO®, NEOTM or ARCvaultTM while the application server continues in production. This same snapshot volume can also be used to roll-back the volume to a previous state or be used for a test environment when validating a process within a Business Continuity (BC) plan.
With all that said, snapshots, undeniably, are vital in any BC plan as they provide the most efficient, flexible (as stated above by the numerous key benefits) and reliable method of data protection and restoration by providing administrators with a copy representing an entire volume at a given point in time.
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Kevin Wise
Product Manager
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Part I of a Two-Part Series
As I continue to research data protection “best practices” and speak to multiple storage analysts and industry experts, it has become more and more apparent that, beyond RAID, the most fundamental and widely used method of data protection is snapshot.
Yes, another word for your growing Business Continuity (BC) plan’s glossary. Surprisingly (and mercifully), there is no industry-wide acronym for snapshot (yet).
Snapshot, an “image” or pointer-based copy of a volume, is the most fundamental and widely used tool in the data protection toolbox. When developing a Business Continuity plan or evaluating a current plan, IT managers must clearly understand how vital snapshot technology is for BC, regardless of the size of the implementation.
Before I go into the “how,” let’s cover the “why.”
Snapshot is the most frequently employed technology to backup data at a specific point-in-time, letting IT managers reliably protect data with minimal to no impact on production environments.
As I continue to investigate data protection “best practices,” it’s becoming more and more obvious that the primary use for snapshot is to optimize backup and protect data stored on a disk array without impacting production applications. Beyond this fundamental use, there exists six other key benefits to using snapshots for data management and data protection:
1. Eliminate backup windows with point-in-time backups
Snapshots provide instantaneous point-in-time copies of a logical volume in a storage array. The snapshot preserves the logical volume's image as it appeared at the instant the snapshot was taken.
2. Fast recovery and rollback
Backup exists to enable restore. Since snapshots are slices of the current disk data, storage managers can recover instantly to specific points in time. This is an ideal process for dealing with new regularity requirements, recovering from human error, application development and other IT functions.
3. Improve operations with low impact backup
Snapshots enable backups to occur without taking production servers and applications offline. Once the snapshot is taken, it can be used for a variety of uses (e.g., staging other backups, application testing and other data management applications).
4. Regulatory compliance
Across the globe, government regulatory requirements are changing and these changes lead generally to greater demand for data to be online and rapidly accessible. The data specified in a wide range of U.S. and international regulations must be tracked, protected and secured with accessibility requirements defined as well.
5. Business Continuance
Many events are simply beyond our control. Ensuring that business continues without interruption is a leading priority for IT organizations worldwide. The requirements of Business Continuity have led to an increased use of disk-based and remote data replication as well as a groundswell in the use of disk instead of tape for backup and instantaneous recovery.
6. Accelerate new application development and deployment
One of the significant risks in developing, testing and deploying new IT solutions is the risk to production data. Snapshots are an ideal way to protect against mishaps. IT managers can now take a snapshot that can be mounted as a new volume to support these tasks. If something goes wrong, the snapshot can be discarded and no harm is done. Snapshots gained great popularity when Y2K testing was a top priority.
Now that you know the “why,” next week, in part II, I’ll share with you the “how”—at least how Overland Storage has implemented a fast and efficient snapshot functionality into ULTAMUS RAIDTM.
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Kevin Wise
Product Manager
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
In an industry littered with initials and acronyms, every week some technology is announced as the latest candidate for the “NBT” (Next Big Thing) award. Unfortunately, many an innovation has failed to live up to the hype, so it’s refreshing to note that one of the recent NBT candidates is proving worthy of the lofty designation.
Data Deduplication deserves NBT status. “Data Dedupe” has become a well recognized moniker in the storage lexicon. As with most great ideas, the reasoning is simple: Data dedupe provides easier access, faster restores and longer-term, near-line retention of backup data.
Need more proof, like the “real world” kind? The Girls Scouts of the USA experienced a storage surge of more than 50 percent over the past year. While this overtaxed the existing tape-based data protection system, it was noted that a lot of the information—including similar system information for 100 Microsoft Windows 2003 file servers, a mission-critical SQL database containing four years of historical and one year of current membership data, as well as an ever-increasing data warehouse—was redundant. This is a perfect application for data dedupe. Now, GSUSA is using the REO 9500D to lower the cost of backing up redundant data with a drop-in appliance that saves their sole backup administrator substantial time and effort.
Vistage International, the world’s leading chief executive organization, is poised to retain months of data on disk to optimize storage capacity while also lowering the costs of protecting streaming media content. An early adopter of the REO 9500D, the company is achieving data deduplication ratios of 10:1 and better, and they expect the ratio to increase as they perform more backups. The end result is they’ll be able to meet tough retention objectives while reducing reliance on offsite tapes and improving customer service levels. And I shouldn’t forget to mention: the deployment took under an hour and the benefits were immediate.
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Jeff Graham
Senior Product Manager