August 2011

‘Race to Recovery’ Taking VMworld 2011 by Storm

August 31, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

If you have been following this blog or Syncsort’s Twitter feed over the last week or so, you have no doubt heard of the ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge we’ve been running in our booth at VMworld 2011. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? All joking aside, the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution is so easy to use that show attendees that have never used it before are recovering virtual machines in record-setting times after sitting through only 3 or 4 minutes of “training.”

Through the first two days of the show, the current record stands at 1 minute and 8 seconds. Don’t take my word for it, check out the following video. For those of you attending VMworld 2011, don’t forget to swing by booth #527 for your chance to compete. While setting the new record and obtaining bragging rights is the ultimate goal, you can still walk away with an iPad 2 for scoring the best time of the day. Game on!

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Syncsort Announces Data Protection 4.0

August 30, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

As usual, VMworld started with a bang. The first night at the welcome reception is always the craziest. Nearly all the attendees wander the show floor simultaneously and there is a great buzz in the air (having a rock band playing not too far away only added to the noise and excitement!).  

The first three hours of VMworld 2011 were packed with non-stop action in the Syncsort booth.  We talked to literally hundreds of customers and propsects in that brief period of time, and ran at least five or six showings of our ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge (tell you the truth, it was so busy I can’t even remember the exact number of times we ran the Race – and I’m one of the presenters!).

Tuesday at the show, news takes the spotlight as Syncsort announces the upcoming release of Syncsort Data Protection 4.0, a key component of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution that we are demonstrating at booth #527. Here is a quick rundown of what’s new in the release:

  • Agentless VMware backup support. This provides management and ease-of-use benefits to users by letting them more easily protect virtual machines. (While Agentless backup has its place, we still think agents are important for some use cases – more on that in an upcoming blog post!)
  • Rapid VM recovery from Agentless backups. We are bringing our patented Instant Virtualization technology to the Agentless space, allowing you to restore entire VMs in less than two minutes.
  • Remote backup enhancements to better enable cloud deployments, for both private and public clouds.
  • Enhancements to storage efficiency (squeezing out even more disk savings) and backup management (major reductions in backup job overhead).
  • A new, improved user experience in terms of both user interface and documentation.

Version 4.0 is scheduled to ship within 90 days from today. Once we get past VMworld and all the non-stop activity, I’ll be blogging more about the details of these new features. We are also announcing today that EVO Merchant Services, the largest privately-held credit card processor, is using NSB to reduce backup and recovery complexity. EVO uses NSB to protect its mixed environment of 250+ physical and virtual servers.

Meanwhile, you can stop by our booth and see for yourself, and maybe even run a recovery as part of the ‘Race to Recovery.’  Last night, our iPad 2 winner was Sean Bettencourt, who recovered a VM in a blazing 1 minute and 12 seconds! Not bad for never having even touched the product before.

Yes, it’s really that simple to use, and that fast.  We’re giving away another iPad 2 today, so check the demo schedule at the booth and see if you can’t be today’s ‘Race to Recovery’ winner.

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VMworld 2011 Move-in Day: Chaos Reigns!

August 28, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

And so it begins. Having escaped Hurricane Irene by a few hours, I’ve spent most of today in the Sands Convention Center during move-in day for VMworld 2011. If you’ve never worked a tradeshow from the vendor side, you may have no idea of just how chaotic things are before the show opens. When you arrive as an attendee, everything is nice, neat and pinned up. Demos are humming along and vendors are in their polo shirts smiling and handing out squishy balls. But just a day or so earlier, it’s a mess.

Because words don’t do it justice, here is the view from the Syncsort booth (#527) during move-in day. I’ll make sure to post a picture of the finished product during the show!

As you can see, the show floor is littered with crates, pallets and boxes. Everyone is working furiously to build booths and connect up hardware and make sure a thousand little details are in perfect working order. In a way, it’s like what you do as an IT person each day: countless details to track, always the threat of something going wrong, and just when you think you’ve got it all down, you realize you missed something and you have to scramble to make it work properly.

I guess it’s endemic to life in IT, whether you’re on the vendor side or the user side. I’ve been at this for 18 years and like the French say, “same old same old.” Everything changes but it’s always the same. But it’s the changes that make it fun.

When I started in 1993 backup meant one thing: file backup to tape. It was slow and unreliable, but the best we had.  We tried just about everything to make it faster. How many of you remember Tape RAID? In a RAID 0 configuration, the idea was to stream a backup to multiple tape drives at the same time. Problem was, if you lost any of the tapes, you lost the whole backup because you couldn’t recreate it. It was as crazy as it sounds and practically nobody ever used it. To make up for that there was a tape RAID 5 setup, where you wrote data to two tapes, and a third tape was your parity tape (just like RAID 5 in the disk world).  If you lost Tape 1 you could re-create the data from Tape 2 and the Parity Tape. It was the same thing for Tape 2. And it made for nice, slow backups! Once again, nobody used it.  

Things have come a long way since then, but in some ways the chaos remains.

Here at VMworld 2011 though, we’ll be sure the chaos is over when the show floor opens on Monday night. We’ll see you there!

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Racing To Vegas for VMworld 2011

August 25, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

Almost time to start packing for VMworld 2011 in sunny Las Vegas.

Sunny? Projected high today is 111 degrees! Fortunately, when I head out on Saturday the high is projected to be a far more bearable 107.  Why that’s nothing. And speaking of weather, I’ll be getting out just ahead of Hurricane Irene, which is threatening to make things pretty interesting here on Long Island where I live.  First we got the earthquake and now the hurricane. Maybe I’ll stay in Vegas.

This year’s show looks to be another great week of fun, business and learning for the projected 20,000 attendees. It gets bigger every year, and in keeping with that trend, Syncsort has upsized its presence at the show. Drop by and see us at booth #527 for some fun presentations, educational demos, and to learn all about how the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution is the right data protection for the virtual world (and for spanning the physical and virtual worlds!).

And this year you can even use the product yourself, in our “Race to Recovery” challenge.  Here is how it works. My colleague, SE manager extraordinaire Pavan Jhamnani, and I will be providing some quick (and we hope entertaining!) demos of NSB in our booth theatre. After we’re done, we will select two audience members to come up to the podium. Each will get their hands on a mouse and keyboard that they will use to restore a virtual machine (with coaching as needed from Pavan and me).  The first person to get their VM online wins the race.  Estimated time: less than two minutes from start to finish!

We’ll keep track of the fastest times throughout the show, and the fastest recovery each day will win a shiny new iPad2! (Maybe I can disguise myself and enter the race, because I don’t have one!)  Everyone who participates will get a small gift as well. So drop by and maybe you can walk away with a new iPad. You’ll also gain valuable experience recovering a virtual machine in less than two minutes – with a solution so easy to use that you can do it the first time you ever touched it.  

The Race to Recovery is great fun, but we’ll also be showcasing exciting new product features and we’ll have a number of NSB customers speaking as well.  Stay tuned to our official social media channels on Twitter and YouTube for the latest information throughout the show.

So please ignore all earthquakes and hurricanes and blazing heat and come visit us at VMworld to learn about our powerful data protection solution. You just might walk away with the crown for the “Fastest Recovery in the West.”

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