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.

NSB as Disruptive Technology is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

When it comes to evaluating technology, nothing speaks louder than the voice of the customer. Vendors can say what they want about a product, but what matters is how it works in the day-to-day world of IT, where everything that can go wrong sooner or later does.

Recently, Syncsort and NetApp jointly sponsored a webinar that featured a user of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution.  Fernando Mejia is the Senior Manager of IT Infrastructure for IPC, which is a Franchisee Purchasing Cooperative for the SUBWAY restaurant stores. IPC helps the 28,000 SUBWAY restaurants in the U.S. and Canada reduce costs by leveraging their collective purchasing power. IPC supplies everything from food to paper goods to IT processes.

Mr. Mejia was kind enough to join us on a webinar that you can view here. A brief registration is required, but it’s well worth it.  And here’s a tip: the first part of the webinar is me talking. If you’re familiar with the NSB story then you can jump to the 25 minute mark where Mejia begins speaking.  It takes a minute or two for the webinar to load up.

I want to give you a sense of what IPC gained by moving to NSB.  Their environment is about 350 servers and 70 TBs of primary storage, most on NetApp FAS 6280 systems. They use NSB to back up that data to a clustered FAS 3160, which is dedicated to backup.  Prior to NSB they were using Symantec NetBackup and having major headaches. Nightly incrementals started at 6:00 p.m. and finished up around 6:00 a.m. Weekend fulls started Friday night at 6:00 p.m. and lasted until Monday morning.

This led to problems, as Mejia said:

“It was always a challenge hoping and praying there weren’t any kind of gotchas, like there always are with backups, that would cause that window to extend. And often it did extend beyond the window and ran into standard business hours. And often times depending on which systems were affected we did have an impact on the performance of our systems, and users had a problem with productivity.”

Not only that, but management was a burden.

“We did have one full-time resource dedicated to just managing backups. That person’s sole purpose was to, in essence, babysit the backup process and make sure we were getting successful backups. It was a very labor intensive process.”

Some new applications that were coming on-line and would significantly extend production hours pushed IPC to look for a solution “to meet our needs, particularly the one need of being able to potentially completely eliminate a backup window.”

They got it with NSB.  The average backup time for their servers is now between 1 and 15 minutes! The backup window is a non-issue. In addition, they gained a significant benefit from the NSB Instant Virtualization capability.  It’s not only useful for recovering systems, but it has dramatically enhanced IPC’s application development efforts.

“We have an in-house development staff and we do develop a good majority of the applications we use…  We’re able to leverage Instant Virtualization to bring entire applications, that are composed of multiple servers, from production into our development and staging environment. This minimizes the drift between development staging and production, in turn resulting in much quicker time to develop applications, much more streamlined testing and QA processes, and in the end a lot less issues and problems that make it out into production.”

That’s how NSB leverages the power of snapshots – launch entire applications in minutes using your most recent backup data. And because it’s using NetApp FlexClone to do it, there’s no additional storage required other than new writes to the system.  

Maybe the best part of the new solution, however, was the management relief. Rather than the full-time IT resource required before, with NSB:

“It takes barely an hour a day to go over, manage and maintain the entire solution…  That was a great win, because I can re-assign those resources that were basically just doing maintenance and operational type work and put them into more important tasks and projects that are more crucial to the organization.”

How is this achieved?  Partly it’s how easy the solution is to use.

“NSB’s capabilities of leveraging NetApp technologies as well as being entirely integrated into virtualization technologies allowed us to collapse the amount of administration interfaces into one. That’s one great benefit of the solution. The second great benefit is that it’s extremely intuitive. It’s very easy to get in front of the interface and through a very short learning curve understand how the backup jobs are configured, understand how to perform recovery operations, understand how to generate reports. In the end that resulted in really lowering our operations overhead.”

The other key is reliability. A great deal of backup management ends up being trouble-shooting and scrambling to recover from failed backup jobs. Not with NSB.

“I must say that our job failure rate is extremely low. If I get maybe one or two a week that’s a lot. And usually when we get a job failure it’s a problem with a particular server that was getting backed up. So over time we ended up not having a lot of focus on the backup solution because it just works so well… I remember in our NetBackup days I was hyper-focused on all kinds of detailed information on the backup because it was critical that you were on top of it all the time to make sure it was functioning correctly. With the Syncsort solution that really has changed.”

There’s more I could write, but I’ll leave you to listen to the webinar where you can hear it for yourself. If you have follow-up questions, the webinar will explain how you can get them to me, or just post a comment here.

The Voice of the Customer Speaks Loudest is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

At the end of March, Syncsort hosted a tweetchat to celebrate World Backup Day.  We were joined very actively by Jon Toigo who made a lot of thought-provoking comments. I blogged a bit on this earlier, here, but wanted to get back to some of Jon’s comments.

During the #backupjam, ESG analyst Jason Buffington launched various questions to solicit comments. For the sake of readability, I’m going to run together some of Jon’s tweets, but otherwise these are his verbatim responses. And then I’ll follow with some short comments of my own. This list is not comprehensive, and if you want to review the original tweets, you can reference Jon’s tweets on March 29, 2012.

Q: What are the top backup challenges facing customers?

@JonToigo: Identifying appropriate bu techniques based on poorly or un-defined restore targets.

My comment:  Jon makes a great point that you have to start with restore in mind. What are you really trying to achieve? From there, you can begin architecting a solution.   

Q:  How has virtualization impacted data protection strategies?

@JonToigo: My bigger concern, server virt vendors claim bu unneccesary. Just HA failover. Not true!  I have been told this over and over and so have my customers. It is wrong-headed.

My comment:  Completely agree! It seems this “all you need is failover” idea springs up every now and again, and it’s never the solution. Failover and HA schemes are there to keep applications running when hardware dies (or somebody pulls a plug). They do nothing to save you when you lose data at the logical level. 

Q: What’s the answer to the broken state of backup?

@JonToigo:  Depends entirely on what’s breaking it.  First, you need to get past the politics. Lose the Tape Sucks Move On bumper stickers for a start.

My comment: Love this response. It’s so Toigo!  First, the obvious fact: you can’t find the answer unless you know what the problem is.  Then the shift into a related issue, what you might call “sloganeering.”  While “tape sucks” might work as pay-attention-to-me style marketing, if you use it as a starting point in your solution design, you may very well be writing off a critical component.  Tape may not be the latest thing, but it remains a key part of many data protection strategies and dismissing it up front is foolish.  

Q: What are some of the main causes for lost data?

@JonToigo: User error. Malware. App error. HW error and Facility faults. In roughly that order.  And blowing through the question “Are you sure?”

My comment: A good list, and important to note that there is very little that hardware redundancy can do to help you with user error, malware or application error. You’ve got to have backup in place to deal with these issues. The final comment speaks to the issue of testing. “Are you sure?” is a simple question, but not at all easy to answer when you’re talking about your backup environment.  

Thanks again to Jon, Jason and everyone else for participating in the #backupjam. We really enjoyed it and look forward to organizing and participating in others like it in the future.

More from World Backup Day and Jon Toigo is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

I want to point readers to a good blog post from one of Syncsort’s most successful partners, SwishData.

The Swish team focuses on the U.S. Federal government market, including the Department of Defense, and they have enormous expertise in multiple technology areas. Plus they really understand the unique needs that you find only in certain kinds of military and government scenarios.  Simply put, Swish really gets it.

One of the things they understand really well is backup and recovery. SwishData CTO Jean-Paul Bergeaux has a good blog up about it: “Walk Before You Can Run: Ensure Backup and Recovery Aren’t Afterthoughts.”   

Ok, so he mentions my name in it! That doesn’t take away from the useful information provided, as well as links to other helpful blog posts.

It’s worth a look. And if you’re in the Federal Government space and looking for help with any current or upcoming projects, you should consider contacting the certified smart guys over at SwishData.

Backup Thoughts from SwishData is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

ESG’s Steve Duplessie has a great new blog post this week titled IT Chasms, Gaps and A New World Order.  Featuring Steve’s classic, straight shooting style, it is well worth your while to give it a read. It focuses mostly on networking (the kind with routers, not meeting people for a drink), but he makes a very interesting point about storage that I think are important and want to explore further.

After discussing how important it is for vendors to help customers develop applications faster, Duplessie says this:

The bigger truth is telling a storage buyer that your stuff is awesome because he can go faster running VMware is cool, but telling the App owner that your storage features will enable them to cut test and Q/A time by 30% is where the money is.

Hats off to that!  Steve is dead-on here. And one of the ways to do this – I would argue the best way – is by using your backup storage.

Let’s step back a bit.  Normally, when you hear vendors talking about using storage for test/dev tasks they start talking about snapshots and clones, and that usually means doing this with your primary storage.  Does it work? It does, but there’s a price to pay. 

First, primary storage is expensive, and using up high-speed disk resources for tasks that do not require high-performance is spending money you’d rather not spend. Second, it impacts performance.  Many disk array snapshots create quite a bit of impact on performance because the copy-on-write model means two writes and one read every time a block is written. To provide a hypothetical example, if “Barry the Unruly Developer” wants to do a lot of test/dev work off your primary disk, you risk serious impact to production performance.  

If you happen to use NetApp for your primary storage, you happily avoid this performance penalty because not all snapshots are created equal. But what if you don’t have NetApp primary storage?

That’s where NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) can help.  NSB lets you back up from any primary storage environment to a NetApp FAS device.  When NSB captures data, it stores it using NetApp Snapshots. And guess what? You have full access to cloning capabilities. The benefits of this are many.

1.  Everything is running on secondary storage. That means low-cost SATA drives with loads of capacity.

2. Everything is running on secondary storage. That means that no matter how many clones you spin up, no matter how hard “Barry the Unruly Developer” bashes away at the system, the impact to your production environment is zero, as in none whatsoever!

3. Everything is running on secondary storage.  That means it’s all consolidated onto a single hardware platform, no matter what mix of primary disk you have. It even protects boot drive data that’s not on a SAN, so Barry has access to all the application information, not just the data volumes.

4. Everything can also run on tertiary storage. Just use SnapMirror replication to send your backups to a DR site, and you can do all your test/dev over there.

5. It’s all super easy. NSB overlays the NetApp Snapshot and FlexClone features with super-simple workflows.  That means the person dishing out the storage to the test/dev folks doesn’t have to know how a NetApp FAS works.  How many steps does it take to provision a 2 TB SQL database volume clone to a dev?  A couple of mouse clicks. You can see how it’s done here. 

6. It’s physical. It’s virtual. It’s virtu-physical!  NSB can take any backup from any server and boot it from a FlexClone into a new VM in about ten minutes start to finish. That’s right.  When “Barry the Unruly Developer” demands a SQL Server instance to work on, you can say “Ten minutes Barry!”  And ten minutes later Barry has a brand new VM running he can play with all he likes. All running off a FlexClone, using zero extra storage footprint. And running – did I mention this? – from secondary storage or even tertiary, if you’d rather have Barry as far away as possible! To see how this works, click here. 

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. We have users doing this every day, leveraging their backup data for tasks beyond recovery: development, testing, data mining, reporting, even virus scanning. Anything you want to do that requires copies of your data and you would prefer to off-load from production hardware.

Saves time. Saves money. So easy that your most inexperienced IT person can be designated as “the guy that Barry gets his data from.”  (And not to worry inexperienced IT person – you can schedule NSB to deliver Barry his data every day, automatically).

It makes you smile. It makes Barry smile. What’s not to love?

Making “Barry the Unruly Developer” Happy is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

As we get closer to Tax Day on April 17^th (two extra days this year!), a bit of shocking news has come out about the computers at the IRS.  Brought to my attention by the TaxProf Blog, a new audit shows that fully 34% of the computers at the IRS are not properly running their intrusion detection software. See the story here.

This is more of a security issue than a backup issue, but of course if intruders can get into those computers they are free to delete files, reformat drives, etc.  Would the IRS be able to effectively recover that information if lost?

The report itself doesn’t address backup issues, but it does say the following: “Incident response policies, plans, and procedures are either nonexistent or are inaccurate and incomplete.”

That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence!  And this isn’t the first time security problems have been reported at Internal Revenue. 

I’d imagine that the IRS is taking data protection seriously, and hopefully they are confident in their ability to protect and recover the extremely critical information they maintain. If not and they need some advice…they certainly know where to find me!

Keeping IRS Data Safe: A Taxing Matter is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

Syncsort kicked off our celebration of World Backup Day yesterday by hosting a Tweetchat with Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Jason Buffington. If you missed it, you can easily go back and check out the conversation by searching #backupjam.

One of the main participants that joined in was industry watcher and self-described “vendor watchdog” Jon Toigo. Jonmade a number of interesting points during the discussion, and I want to touch on some of them. I’ll pick a few at a time over the next week or so and share some additional thoughts.

Jon’s opening remark was almost philosophical:

Backup defined: A humble acknowledgement of the fallibility of all technology, and of our increasing dependency upon it

That is certainly an interesting way to define “backup,” and there is nothing there I would argue with.  If you live and breathe in the backup space like I do, sometimes it all starts to seem very normal. But think about it: literally billions of dollars are spent every year to protect information, to protect intangible, digital assets that exist ultimately as zeros and ones. And why do we spend that money? We do it because every digital tool fails eventually. Every single one!

Whether it’s your iPhone, a laptop or a multi-billion dollar data center project like the one Jon referenced during the Tweetchat, sooner or later something goes wrong.  The result is that something very valuable to somebody vanishes, whether that’s your only copy of beloved vacation photos, your collection of five thousand songs, or a customer database that a business cannot function without. And if you’ve ever suffered through this – and who hasn’t at least once? – you know the panic it causes, the desperate too-late feeling of “I knew I should have backed that up.”

If you lose data and do have a backup of it, the sense of relief when those files start coming back is incredible. If you’re an IT person responsible for backup, it’s more than relief. It is not an exaggeration to say it can mean saving your job, or even saving your company and the jobs of many other people. It’s that important.

That’s why World Backup Day was started, so that we can all think about what we’d be losing if the inevitable decided to pick us as its next victim.  And that’s the thing about something that happens to everyone: it happens to you, too.

Reflections on the World Backup Day #Backupjam is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

Get your questions and comments ready, because it’s #backupjam time!

Syncsort is hosting a Tweetchat today in advance of World Backup Day.  We’ll be joined by Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst from ESG, and from 1:30 to 2:30 EDT we’ll be taking any and all questions and comments around data protection.  Wondering about the best new technologies to protect your data? Need to know how you can recover critical applications faster?  Have questions about the impacts of Big Data, Cloud and virtualization?  It’s all open for discussion.

To join us today:

• Follow the handle of the moderator @JBuff
• Follow the handles of @FrankJablonski and @Peter_Eicher  from @Syncsort
• Engage using the hashtag #backupjam

Looking forward to “seeing” as many of you as possible there!

Join us at the #Backupjam is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

There’s a rather shocking story from Computerworld today, about email outages and other IT failures at the White House.  It seems that shortly after the new CIO came on board in 2009, they suffered a 21 hour email outage. Yikes!  Several more outages followed.  Eventually they got their systems under control, but it should make you ask yourself: how resilient are my systems? How long would it take my organization to recover from a major application outage?

The article provides no specifics on what went wrong or what was done to restore services. I’d rather not speculate since it could be a hundred different reasons.  The larger point is that they clearly didn’t have a mechanism in place to get things back fast.  So let’s try a little thought experiment: What if the White House had been using NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup?

Let’s use an imaginary but plausible timeline and scenario to see how things might have gone…

1:00 p.m.   Email goes down hard, a sudden catastrophic failure of the application. Email admins are looking at the problem.

1:05 p.m.  It’s been determined that there was a massive failure on the storage hardware that will take many hours to resolve. Critical communications are down and will be for a long time according to the storage admin. The IT manager asks for ideas.

1:06 p.m.  The backup admin notes that the physical email server is being backed up hourly by NSB and the last backup ran 22 minutes earlier.  He tells the team they can restart the server as a virtual machine.

1:08 p.m.  The backup admin opens the NSB console. He already has a recovery job created that will always use the most recent backup image. With one click he starts the Instant Virtualization recovery job which boots a new VM from a NetApp FlexClone snapshot. This is running from backup storage, not the primary storage which will take many hours to repair.

1:18 p.m.  Within ten minutes, the virtualized email server is up and running. Email flow restarts. The crisis over, the IT team begins the lengthy process of fixing the primary storage problem.

Sound impossible?  NSB customers do this every day.  Any application that goes down, whether from a physical or virtual source, can be restarted in minutes as a virtual machine. When the most important thing is recovery time, then recovery time is the most important thing. How fast can you recover an application today? How fast could you do it if you had NSB?

From the White House to Your House? is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

(Blogger Note: If you are a regular reader of the Syncsort blog, you know that we try and mix in a little bit of fun every now and then. This is consistent with our company culture. While at our headquarters in New Jersey this week for meetings, I was joking around with several colleagues about creating a Hemingway-style post. Little did they know I was crazy enough to follow through! I’d love to get comments from readers on how I did as well as suggestions for other “themed” posts in the future. Enjoy! – Peter)

My email had disappeared, vanished into a whiteness like milk. I had to have it back. It would not best me, this email.

I knew where it hid, lurking within acres of spinning disks. Over the river then, and through the woods to the data center.

I sauntered in, a bright sneer in my cold eyes. There he sat, the backup administrator.

“Moretti,” I said. “My email.”

He was a good man, Moretti. Good and true.

“Umm, my name is Larry,” he jested in reply. Always the joker, that Moretti.

“My email is gone Moretti, vanished. Five hundred emails, lost like a flight of sparrows into a rain cloud.”

“Are you saying you deleted your emails by mistake?”

Yes, I thought. My emails. My mistake. It was like death. You tried not to think about it, but it was always there, waiting for you.  Or at least that’s what we told ourselves.

“Yes, Moretti. All vanquished by merciless time.”

“Yeah, that’s not a problem. I can have that back for you in about five minutes.”

Five minutes! Another jest. Maybe that’s what a data center did to you, taught you to laugh in the face of disaster.

“Moretti, my stalwart old friend. Restore my emails in five minutes? It’s pretty to think so, but we both know the truth. I was here a year past when your predecessor Montaigne ruled the roost.”

“Montaigne? You mean Hank?”

“What do names matter? It took him many days to return my lost emails to me. Many days, Moretti! Cold, hard days full of truth.”

“Yeah well that was before we had NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup, or NSB as it is known. Actually, if you just stopped talking funny I could have had those emails restored already. It’s really easy using NSB.”

Surely, something had gone soft inside Moretti. He had lost connection to the deep truth of email recovery.

“Well my friend, I see you cannot help me.”

“Yes I can. Just go back to your desk, your emails will be back in five minutes, like I told you.”

I turned then and left. It was maybe the toughest thing I ever did. At least that day.

My faith in Moretti shattered, I wandered aimlessly through the cubicles as I returned to my desk. I could only shake my head with a sadness born of the bitterest fruits. But then I looked to my laptop screen.

My emails. Restored. In five minutes.

Grabbing my head in astonishment, I staggered from my cubicle and out of the office door and through the hall and down the stairs and into the parking lot and down the street to the deli to grab a sandwich and a coke, knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.

Ernest Hemingway Visits the Data Center is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been spending the week at the NetApp Insight event  in Macau, China, talking to a host of NetApp partners and sales engineers from all over the Asia-Pacific region about the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution.

While NSB was launched in 2010, Syncsort has only recently begun to deliver the solution in the region via our distribution partner, Distribution Central.  Based on the conversations I’ve been having, it’s not a moment too soon!

I spoke to dozens of folks yesterday, and over and over it’s the same theme. Users need better data protection solutions  and the partner community here is excited about how NSB can take NetApp’s world-class data protection features (Snapshots, FlexClone, SnapMirror) and extend them into non-NetApp storage environments.

At one point during last night’s cocktail reception, I spoke to four Australian NetApp sales engineers in a row and they all confirmed that they are currently working on opportunities to solve customer problems with NSB. They were all eager to learn more about the solution’s unique value proposition and how it works!

When I share information about how NSB has helped take an 18-hour backup window and reduce it to 45 minutes or less, people’s eyes really light up. The problem is real, and folks here are ready to take NSB out to their users in a big way.

Good thing too, because it was not easy to get here.  Just for fun, here’s the journey I took to get to the event:

* Two hour flight from New York to Detroit
* Four hour layover in Detroit
* 16 hour flight to Hong Kong (I watched three movies and we weren’t even close to arriving!)
* 30 minute cab ride from Hong Kong airport to the Macau ferry terminal
* One hour ferry ride, Hong Kong to Macau
* 20 minute shuttle bus from ferry terminal to hotel

On Friday, I get to do it all over again only this time in reverse. While the travel is not easy, the trip and the great conversations here at Insight have been well worth it!

A Week at Insight in Macau, China is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

We recently held our annual sales kickoff and it was quite an event. Three days of meetings, trainings sessions, hundreds of conversations, and lots of fun mixed in.

A favorite moment for me was having one of our customers speak to the assembled group about their experience with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB).

This particular customer (who I don’t have permission to identify publicly) is an organization of more than 20,000 employees spread across 1,500+ locations. The company’s IT environment is pushing 200 servers (physical and virtual), 50 terabytes of data and a Microsoft Exchange system of more than 10,000 mailboxes. Their backup environment was giving them a serious headache – long backup windows, slow restores, lots of tape to handle. Backup was also a full time job. They literally had a contractor on staff five days a week just to handle it! They were using a conventional backup product (you’d know the name if I said it).

Enter NSB.  Let’s get right to what changed.

• Backup windows went from 18 hours to 30-45 minutes! Yes, you read that correctly. A 96% decrease in time!
• Restore times changed from 2-4 hours to restore a system to being back on line in 5 to 10 minutes.
• Messy tape shipments are gone, replaced by data replication (using SnapMirror). While the customer thankfully has not had to do a major restore, testing shows they could get all their tier 1 applications up and running in 1 to 2 hours should they lose their main data center.
• They no longer have a full-time contractor to run backups. Instead, data protection takes about 30 minutes of attention every few days, a huge boon to a busy IT organization.

I’d call that a major success at modernizing a conventional backup architecture!

My favorite part of the story though is how this customer came up with a new word for recovery. When the IT team restores information using NSB, they say we’re “Syncsorting” the data!

You can be “Syncsorting” your data too, assuming you like the idea of a 96% reduction in backup time and recovery in ten minutes or less.  If you want to find out just how NSB can help you, please drop us a line.

Are You “Syncsorting” Your Data? is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

This week, the Syncsort team from around the world has gathered in Newport Beach, CA for our 2012 Global Sales Kickoff. It has been a great event to say the least with presentations from NSB customers, channel partners, NetApp executives, and our own solution experts. In conjunction with the event, we were also able to recognize great NSB partners like SwishData, Zumasys and Voyant Strategies as part of our Partner of the Year Awards program.

One of the presentations that delivered a lot of value to the Syncsort data protection team was from Evaluator Group’s Randy Kerns. Randy has had relationships with members of the Syncsort executive team for many years, and it was great to have him on hand to share his views on the data protection market and the benefits that NSB can deliver to customers. We had the chance to catch up with Randy following his presentation and wanted to share an excerpt from that. Enjoy!

Q. What demands do you see server virtualization placing on data protection today?

RK: Virtualization creates both a storage bottleneck and a great deal more systems to be backed up.  A new approach is needed.  New approaches may need a better backup software solution that can handle the virtualized environment.

Q. What do you hear from organizations in terms of the impact of Big Data on data protection?

RK: Right now, it is mostly a case of fear of dealing with the projected amount of machine to machine data they are going to have to deal with.  They are looking for approaches and tools to deal with this now.

Q. What are you observing from companies regarding business continuity and disaster recovery planning, as well as hearing about the priorities in those areas?

RK: Many companies have put BC/DR plans on hold the last few years and are now starting to catch up with what is needed.  BC/DR has many facets but the basis for all of it is data availability.  These companies are starting to execute on their delayed plans.

Q. Having spent time with the Syncsort team this week, are there any key takeaways on the NSB solution and its value to customers?

RK: I think one thing that struck me is the wealth of capabilities there are in the virtualization area.  There are some great opportunities there for improving the administration and operations.

Data Protection Q&A with Evaluator Group’s Randy Kerns is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

Today, we announced some very exciting news recognizing our partners for their commitment to Syncsort’s solutions. The program is a testament to the important role partners play in Syncsort’s go-to-market strategy. Across both our data integration and data protection businesses, we continue to expand our partner ecosystem and forge deep relationships as we navigate the increasingly diverse and competitive industry landscape.

The past year has brought a lot of attention to the industries we serve. The data integration business saw discussions around the opportunities Big Data represents for companies and how Hadoop and the evolution of ETL tools, or ETL 2.0 as we call it, make capitalizing on these opportunities a reality. In the data protection world, snapshot technology came to the forefront and organizations of all sizes faced increased pressure from the C-suite to modernize backup and implement more robust disaster recovery plans. This has certainly been a positive for solutions like NSB, our integrated data protection offering with our partners at NetApp.

Across the board, our partners demonstrated a tremendous commitment to serving customers and using Syncsort technology to create cost-effective solutions that address some of the most complex IT challenges that exist today. Our partners also showed great enthusiasm for the new Syncsort certification and training programs that we rolled out throughout the year. While we appreciate the many contributions made by all of our partners, the award winners really stood out across multiple dimensions. They include:

Data Integration

• Global Systems Integrator Partner of the Year: Cognizant
• ISV Partner of the Year: Clerity Solutions
• Reseller Partner of the Year: Amdocs

 Data Protection

• Channel Partner of the Year: SwishData
• Channel Partner Rookie of the Year: Zumasys
• NSB Technical Innovator Award: Voyant Strategies

We’ve had a tremendous response from all of the award winners and couldn’t be more enthusiastic about working closely with each of them in the year ahead.  We appreciate their hard work and it’s been fantastic for partners to make statements like:

“Our strategic relationship with Syncsort enables us both to offer clients unique solutions that address the most complex data integration challenges at a fraction of the time and cost. We appreciate the recognition as Syncsort’s GSI Partner of the Year, and look forward to building on our work and success together in the marketplace in the year ahead.” – Hal Lavender, Chief Architect and AVP, Cognizant

“Our partnership with Syncsort provides significant benefits to organizations, such as Singapore Exchange, looking for effective ways to reduce IT operating expenses and enhance flexibility through mainframe migration to better prepare for future growth. By collaborating with Syncsort and utilizing their powerful data integration and sorting technology, we can bring greater value to enterprises with large datasets and batch requirements.” – Cameron Jenkins, COO, Clerity

“Syncsort data protection solutions and their partnership have been a key piece of SwishData’s success since our founding in 2006.  As virtualization continues to disrupt various data center strategies, Syncsort products not only provide our customers and partners with an integrated, simple way to protect data, but also enable them to return to production operation time by recovering applications in minutes instead of the hours commonly required with other products. Fundamentally, SwishData adds value to our customers and Syncsort solutions enhance our ability to do just that.” - Bob Kerr, Vice President, SwishData Corporation

Congratulations again to this year’s winners!

Congratulations to the Syncsort Partner of the Year Award Winners is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.

It’s been a while since Part 2 of our “Data Protection Survey Series.”  I’ve been very busy preparing for Syncsort’s sales kickoff coming up in a couple of weeks and also doing some early prep for NetApp Insight in Macau, China in February (hope to see lots of NetApp partners there!).  Kickoff should be a great affair with lots of interesting guest speakers, and I’ll be sure to provide some reports from the event. Meanwhile, back to our survey!

Our final topic is recovery, and the short version of our survey results is that data recovery is truly at risk for many organizations. Systems are not being protected as they should be, and confidence levels are not high.

We started by asking what percent of servers were being backed up each night (broken out into physical and virtual). For physical servers, only 29 percent of respondents were backing up 100 percent of their servers. This means that 71 percent had some amount of exposure to unprotected data. 

On the virtual side, results were both better and worse.

A slightly higher percentage of users (31 percent) were backing up 100 percent of their virtual machines (VMs), but there were more users protecting less than 50 percent of their VMs. 

The first problem around recovery is that a lot of data (roughly 30 percent) is not even being backed up on any given night. However, the question specifically asked respondents to only consider their backup schedules. In other words, what percentage of your servers are you even trying to back up?  It didn’t take into account backup success rates, so that was our next question.  What percentage of your backups complete successfully each night?

Only 18 percent of users are seeing 100 percent nightly success rates. The bulk of respondents (57 percent) were getting what is typically considered a reasonable success rate of between 91 and 99 percent. However, a full 25 percent of respondents were at 90 percent or less success, adding a significant amount of data exposure to their organizations each night.

With all these issues around backup, we wanted to see how confident users were about data protection. The answer: not very.  We wanted to know how people would view a major disaster where an entire data center was lost, so we asked:  “In the event that you lost an entire data center, how confident are you that you could restore application services in a timely manner?”  Here are the responses.

Only 14 percent considered themselves “totally confident” with another 33 percent “very confident” (defined as: “I expect most recoveries will succeed but I am not convinced I can achieve 100 percent recovery of all systems”).

More than 50 percent of users had a significant degree of uncertainty.  In fact, the results are worse than shown here because 14 percent of total respondents said they didn’t have disaster recovery in place at all!  They responses were excluded from the chart. So, well over half of our survey participants are effectively risking their businesses in the event of a major disaster.

Our final question was around disaster recovery (DR) testing.  DR testing is usually a rather difficult affair, often involving long hours on weekends spent trying to bring up systems.  But testing is critical: it’s the only way to know you can actually restore your data  when you need to.

Again, we see a lot of potential exposure. A little over half of respondents test DR at least once a year. The rest range from less than once a year to never, or they have no DR to test. When we correlated “confidence” with “testing,” it was not a big surprise to find that among the group that were “totally confident” they could restore data, 60 percent of them said they test more than once a year and 29 percent tested once a year.  That’s a huge correlation of 89 percent of the “totally confident” users testing their DR once a year or more.

On the flip side, of those that were “reasonably confident” they could restore data, only 9 percent tested more than once a year and 32 percent tested once a year.   You couldn’t ask for a clearer indication that “testing equals confidence,” and that’s why one of the things I like to emphasize about NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup is that it makes DR and testing your DR so easy.  It’s no wonder that more than 90 percent of NSB customers deploy at least two NetApp FAS units, one for local backup and recovery and the other for remote-site disaster recovery.

Data protection and recovery are serious concerns and can’t be taken lightly. I certainly don’t think that all the risk exposure our survey uncovered is because users are indifferent to the problem.  What they are is overwhelmed. Too much data plus disruptive new technologies like virtualization have made conventional backup models obsolete. 

As our survey showed, this has led to a mix of problems:  too many products being used, backups taking too long, and recovery at risk.  Backup needs to be modernized and it can’t happen too soon!

Data Protection Survey Series (Part 3): Recovery is at Risk is a post from the Syncsort blog. Copyright © 2012 Syncsort, All Rights Reserved.