Innovation and what succeeds in the market is an endlessly interesting idea. I was reminded of this recently when I read a New Yorker magazine profile of Clayton Christensen, the business guru most famous for his work “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” The profile extends beyond his work: it covers his family background, his battle with cancer, his religious faith, and more. In all, it is a fascinating and inspiring profile that I highly recommend. At the moment, it’s behind a subscription wall, so if you have access you can get it here, or you can read it in the May 14, 2012, print edition.
Christensen’s notion of “disruptive innovation” applies across any industry. An interesting example is perhaps Christensen’s most famous “miss” about the iPhone, which he predicted would not succeed because it was just a fancy cell phone. What he realized later, after its phenomenal success, was that the iPhone was actually disruptive to laptops, not just to other cell phones. A great insight, albeit after the fact.
All of this got me thinking about changes in the backup world in the past few years, particularly two disruptive technologies, deduplication and snapshots.
Deduplication first made its mark in the form of deduplication appliances, single-purpose devices that were highly disruptive to tape as a backup target. Disk had long been used for backup, whether as plain disk or in the form of a VTL, but it remained a niche methodology because it was just too expensive. As a result, disk was limited to only a day or two of data retention, if used at all. Deduplication radically changed the economics by providing data reduction rates of 90% or more, which is another way of saying you could get potentially twenty times as much use out of the same amount of disk.
It changed the face of backup as far as tape was concerned, but interestingly, deduplication was not disruptive to the backup process. Users started replacing tape drives with disk, but everything else stayed the same. In the end, deduplication appliances were disruptive to only a portion of the backup process at the very end of the line. They were evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Snapshots have the potential to be truly revolutionary because they disrupt the entire traditional backup process, changing it from end-to-end, not just at the final step in the chain. But even though snapshots have been around for a long time, they are still not the leading way to protect data, despite all their advantages of speed and performance. A survey by UBM TechWeb (commissioned by Syncsort) showed only 25% of users made use of primary storage snapshots (you can get the full survey here).
Why the limited uptake? A few key reasons:
- Cost: snapshots are typically done on primary disk, which is expensive.
- Performance: many disk arrays suffer significant performance degradation as snapshots accumulate.
- Complexity of restore: snapshots are great at capturing data, but a lot of disk systems do not have convenient, easy-to-use workflows for recovering data, do not have a catalog, etc.
- Limited retention time: because they are expensive, you normally can’t keep weeks or months of data on snapshots.
Maybe this is why snapshots haven’t been as disruptive to traditional backup as might have been expected. So are snapshots destined to remain a limited use option, typically relegated to tier-1 applications and short retention times?
Not at all! There’s a disruptive technology in town now, and it’s called NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB). How does NSB change things? It is quite simple. NSB takes the snapshots off the primary storage and puts them onto secondary storage, and then overlays it with easy recovery work-flows and a catalog. This seemingly simply change in the design solves all of the key reasons listed above for limited uptake.
I’ve written about this before here if you’re interested in more specifics.
For now, I will conclude with a concept from Clayton Christensen, who refers to the process of consumer product selection as people looking towards a way for “jobs to be done.” Simply put, people don’t want products, they want to get something accomplished. The IT world is no different. None of us want backup software, really. What we want is for data to be protected and easily recoverable in a way that is cost-effective and reliable, and doesn’t demand too much of our attention. This is exactly what NSB delivers, as we heard recently from a user. It can do the same for you.
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