August 2010

VMworld 2010, Day 1

August 31, 2010

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

The long day finally wanes here at VMworld 2010, and quite a long day it’s been. I started today with a jarring alarm wakeup at 4 a.m. New York  time to catch my early flight to San Francisco. As I write this post, it’s coming up on 11 p.m. – or 2:00 a.m. New York time – so I’m pushing 24 hours awake. Reminds me of college.

But what a great start to the show! I was very excited to see the new Syncsort booth, a striking white design that struck both retro and contemporary notes. If you didn’t catch it at the show, here it is:

Monday night was the opening session at the Expo running from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.  It was a whirl of activity from start to finish. Our engineers were running product demos non-stop, showing the world the first glimpse of the newly released NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup, which we officially announced Tuesday morning. You can read about it here: http://bit.ly/cVvH20

We’ve joined with NetApp to release a data protection solution that I think is destined to shake up the market.  Based on the conversations we had today, people are really looking for better ways to protect virtual machines. But based on our totally unscientific count, as many as 20% of the people we spoke to today AREN’T PROTECTING THEIR VMs AT ALL!

Pardon my caps, but that’s just a disaster waiting to happen. Yet we heard it over and over.  Many others are at least trying to backup their VMs, but they are struggling. I’m not really surprised. Virtualization has changed the playing field. Shared compute resources on hypervisors just don’t leave room for traditional, high-impact backup. That’s where NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup comes in, providing high-speed, low-impact data protection.

I’ll be blogging more about our solution and how it works in the days and weeks to come. For now, if you’re struggling with VM backup and you’re attending VMworld, please drop by the Syncsort booth (#213), pick up a t-shirt, and talk to one of our certified smart guys about how to fix the problems that are keeping you up at night.

And speaking of keeping up at night, time for me to get to sleep. Another jam-packed day tomorrow. We’re just getting started.

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Heading to VMworld 2010!

August 26, 2010

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

An entire caravan of folks from Syncsort, yours truly included, are heading off to VMworld 2010 next week in San Francisco. VMworld really has become a premier event in the IT world. I’ve been there several times and it’s always full of fabulous information, great sessions and plenty of face time with IT users.  Plus, I get to add another few shirts to my collection of vendor-ware (which is just what I need after 17 years in this business).  Most people really like the show, despite the griping about lunch lines (as if feeding 10,000+ of your closest friends was easy!).

It’s extra exciting for me this year because Syncsort will be unveiling a completely new and super cool show booth, plus we’ve got some big news coming out. Wish I could spill the beans on it, but you’ll just have to wait to hear it.

If you’re attending, please drop on by and visit us at  booth number #213. We’ve got some good giveaways (c’mon, we all know that’s important!), and we’ll have a lot of certified smart people on hand that you can talk to about your VM data protection headaches.

I’ll be reporting more from the show.  Hope to see you there!

P.S. – For our European friends, we’ll be at VMworld Copenhagen as well in October!

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Welcome to the Syncsort Blog!

August 25, 2010

Kevin Ruane

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Senior Manager, Corporate Communications

At Syncsort, we understand that exploding data volumes and shrinking IT budgets are forcing organizations to get more out of their data – and even more from their data integration and data protection investments.  That is why we are focused on helping many of the world’s largest organizations to rethink the economics of their data to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities to unlock revenue and competitive advantage for their companies. 

There are many exciting developments in the data integration and data protection markets, and we look forward to using this platform to host conversations with customers, partners, industry experts and the larger data integration and data protection ecosystems. We’ll be sharing our perspectives on industry trends, the latest developments with our extreme data performance solutions, and much, much more.

I’m pleased to welcome you again to the official Syncsort blog! We look forward to hearing from you and encourage your thoughts and feedback.

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It’s a Virtual World After All

August 25, 2010

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably involved in some way with server virtualization. It is without question the biggest IT trend and adoption numbers are pushing 100%. And with good reason: virtualization works. It saves money, and plenty of it (virtualizing a few hundred servers can actually save millions over time). It gives you much greater IT agility (need a new server? click, click, done!).  And it makes data protection so much easier.

Hah, fooled you on that last one.  

Many users are finding that the fly in the ointment of virtualization is data protection. Most people simply take their current backup solution and drop it onto virtual machines. Then they watch it collapse under its own weight.

The fact is that traditional, file-based backups don’t work well in the virtual world.  They have always relied on dedicated hardware and  unused system resources (the typical physical server runs at about 15% of capacity most of the time). But in virtualization, everything is shared: CPU, memory, network bandwidth, disk I/O.  Every virtual machine competes for resources, and very little is left for backup processing. If your backup agent assumes it can grab all the compute cycles it needs, things can get ugly.  

Fortunately, the situation isn’t  hopeless – provided you re-think how you do your backups in the new, virtual world.  We’ve published some of our thoughts on this subject in Business Computing World. You can read them here:  “The Five Imperatives for Extreme Data Protection in Virtualized Environments.”

What do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts, plus any interesting stories about life in the trenches with VM data protection.

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