February 2011

Don’t Fence Me In

February 28, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

Cole Porter is one of my favorite song writers. I love his witty and debonair lyrics.

You’re the top!
You’re a dance in Bali.
You’re the top!
You’re a hot tamale.
You’re an angel, you
Simply too, too, too diveen,
You’re a Botticelli,
You’re Keats, you’re Shelley,
You’re Ovaltine!

Who else does that? Now, generally speaking I like my Cole Porter served up smooth by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and such.  But every now and then a more contemporary artist manages to transform Porter into something different. I was reminded of this when I stumbled across a song I hadn’t listened to in a few years, namely David Byrne’s rendition of Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.”  He turns an old Western ditty into a drum-centric beat-fest that still manages to stay true to the song’s origins. It’s got a fun video too.

By now you’re thinking that you somehow stumbled onto the wrong blog. Not so! Truth is, I happened to re-discover this version of the song at the same time that I was thinking about David Chapa’s recent blog post on Is DR the new Backup?  Yet another instance of the quality thinking that comes out of Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) all the time. 

David talks about the differences between DR and backup and what recovery really means, and there is a lively discussion in the comments about this topic, to which I added my two cents. And I was ready to jump in again. As a member of the professional chattering class, I’m more than happy to get into discussions about how many angels can dance on an LTO-5 tape drive, and those discussions are important. But then the song hit me.  

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don’t fence me in.

Hmmmm. Don’t fence me in.

When you get down to it, at the level that really counts – that of the IT user – what they really want is a product that gives them the freedom to do what they want to do – no, what they need to do – when they need to do it.  You can call it backup, you can call it DR. But does it meet my needs or not?

And that’s what we focus on with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB).  It’s all about getting things done, and in a way that’s easy, doesn’t burden the staff with arcane complexity, and is easy on always squeezed IT budgets.

Now, is NSB a perfect product that covers every possible fringe use case? Of course not. But we focus on the big things, the things that are really broken in the backup world.

Can I speed up my backups dramatically and get away from backup windows? Can I have one product that works great for my physical servers, and also resolves the unique needs of my virtual machines?  Does it work with SharePoint, a notoriously troublesome product to back up, so I can get rid of a point product?  Can I restore anything from a server to a database to a file quickly and reliably?

Yes, and yes again. More and more, our users are finding this out. In fact, we recently went through an incredibly rigorous proof of concept at a customer. They put NSB through over 180 test cases (180!), and we passed with flying colors. Our competitor – a vendor of Ever More Complex solutions that I won’t name, ahem – got tossed out when they couldn’t deliver, even after throwing three different products into the mash.  

Bottom line, they couldn’t do what the customer needed done. They couldn’t give the customer the freedom to protect some systems every hour, and others once a day. To restore an email in two minutes, without any production impact. To get access to a data set of any size in five minutes.  To use backups freely and easily for test and development. They didn’t want to get fenced in, so they made the choice that gave them the freedom that they needed.

I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in.
Don’t fence me in.
Don’t fence me in.

{ 0 comments }

Wikibon on New Models of Data Protection

February 23, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

David Floyer at Wikibon recently posted some very nice comments about NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup in an article entitled New Models of Data Protection from NetApp and Syncsort.  

Floyer makes the case for moving to a new data protection model based on snapshots for reasons of performance, speed, and flexibility of recovery. He refers to it as a “service model for backup” because you can easily treat different workloads with different levels of protection. Good stuff and I recommend reading it!

Floyer also considers four “Constraints to Adoption.”  I don’t disagree with him, but I’d like to add a bit of commentary from my perspective.  Floyer’s words are in italics, and my comments follow.

1. The availability of applications and operating system that support consistent snapshots. This is currently easiest in a Windows environment with VSS.

This is true enough. Windows is a great environment for snapshots because a lot of the tools are there. But it’s more than just snapshots: you need to understand the application and provide easy ways to restore at multiple levels. To take just one example, when NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) protects SharePoint, we understand the environment from the server farm right down to the item level. So you can recover a server, a database, a SharePoint site, or individual items. It’s this level of integration with the application that really lets you achieve the kinds of recovery SLAs that Floyer writes about in his article.

2. The understandable reluctance to make major changes to complex data protections processes and procedures that work. Movement is likely to take place on an application by application basis, as new versions of software are implemented.

Backup is certainly a “sticky” application. Even when people hate their backup product, it’s hard to move them off it because the prospect seems so daunting. That’s why NSB focuses so much on ease of use. If I provide you a backup “solution” that takes you three times as long to manage every day, well that’s not a solution at all!  

Let’s face it, data protection is a mundane part of IT. Absolutely critical, but hardly exciting! You’d rather have your IT folks doing other things while your data protection hums along largely on its own, with a high level of reliability. That’s just what NSB delivers. One of our customers, Robert Scott, the IT Manager at the Community Health Center of Snohomish County, put it this way: “In my experience, NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup is one of the most logical and intuitive products.  My staff does not need extensive training or resources to administer it, allowing us to gain efficiencies and spend time on more proactive and strategic initiatives.”

3. Support for this model from the major backup software providers. Wikibon believes that changes are happening, but at a glacial place. Solutions such as those from NetApp and Syncsort are filling the vacuum.

Well, I don’t really have to add to this! Other than to say: we got it now, so come and get some!

4. Reluctance for change within the organization: Wikibon observed that organizations that have adopted the new model did so because of severe pain in one area. CIOs need to provide the capability of selective higher and lower functionality for lines of business, or see them look for cloud alternatives that either provide better service levels or provide lower cost alternatives.

As noted in point #2, backup is sticky and organizations often need a “tipping point” moment to change (too often that tipping point is a major data loss that harms the business).  We are confident that with NSB we’ve provided a solution that’s easy to use, turnkey and field-tested. What we like to refer to as Simple, Integrated and Proven. You don’t have to wait for a crisis to re-think your data protection when the transition to NSB will actually make your life easier while providing much higher levels of protection and recovery.

Thanks again to David Floyer and the team at Wikibon for their interesting and insightful view of the data protection landscape.

{ 1 comment }

February 17 Webcast: Beyond Deduplication – Rethinking Data Protection

February 9, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

As you may have noticed, we’ve been spending a lot of time recently at Syncsort talking about the need to move beyond deduplication to technology that solves backup problems at the source. On February 17 at 1 p.m. EST/ 10 a.m. PST, I will be participating in an InformationWeek webcast that explores this topic further including:

  • Where deduplication helps and where it doesn’t
  • How data growth impacts the entire backup process, not just storage footprint
  • Why deduplication isn’t enough

Registration is now open for the webcast. Please also feel free to use the comments section on this post if you have suggestions for other topics or questions you’d like me to address as part of it.

{ 0 comments }

Kicking Off the Year of NSB

February 4, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

I’ve just come back from Syncsort’s 2011 sales kickoff, and what an event it was! 

Syncsort sales reps and systems engineers flew in from around the globe to be joined  by many strategic partners and resellers as we gathered in Santa Clara, CA, for a week of intense learning and quite a bit of good fun.

The event was largely divided between Syncsort’s data protection and data integration lines of business.  I’m on the data protection side, and I was tasked with quite a bit of the presentations in our track, along with SE par excellence Pavan Jhamnani and sales manager John Albanese. We didn’t want to bury the folks in thousands of PowerPoint slides (only hundreds!) so we mixed in a lot of audience participation, roll playing scenes, videos and cartoons (thank you, Xtranormal) to keep things lively.  It was a lot of hard work by a lot of people (kudos to our sterling marketing team that made it all happen), and well worth it.

On the third day, the entire Syncsort team gathered together for a Paint Fest event run by the good folks at The Foundation for Hospital Art. They join with organizations like mine and yours to create colorful artwork for hospitals, to make them friendlier and less frightening places. If you’re looking for a corporate team event that’s both fun and worthwhile, you might want to check them out.

A really special part of kickoff was the participation of our partners.  We started the data protection track with NetApp’s Director of Data Protection Solutions, Mark Welke, joining us. He set the tone for the entire event: excited, eager and ready to roll with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB)! NetApp is really moving big time into the data protection space, and Syncsort is proud to be a key partner in this initiative. It’s only been six months since we jointly launched NSB, and we’ve already seen an extremely positive response from channel partners and customers. They love NSB’s ease of use, it’s highly efficient backup (especially in the virtual world) and its rapid restore features.  Who doesn’t like recovering any size data set in less than five minutes!

We were also joined by two of our premier channel partners, Swish Data and Insight Investments. They both talked about the success they’ve had with NSB, including some huge competitive wins, and helped our sales reps learn to be more effective in their channel interactions.

I learned a lot about the channel this week. As a product guy, I tend to be more of an inside person. I don’t always get enough exposure to how the feet meet the street, so it was great to see how deeply committed Syncsort is to working with the channel and activating our partners to be successful ambassadors of our “beyond dedupe” message.  If you’re not signed up as a Syncsort partner yet, you might want to get on the bandwagon now, because 2011 is lining up to be a big year.

More than anything, the kickoff event convinced me (not that I needed convincing!) that NSB is truly a transformational technology. We’re breaking down all the all walls that have made data protection a painful, expensive IT headache for far too long. 

With kickoff coming to a close, it is back to New York for me (thankfully there’s a brief snow-free window to travel). I’m taking a long weekend to recharge my batteries, and then it’s back to making 2011 the year of NSB!

{ 0 comments }