backup software

Making Data Protection Work for the Smaller Enterprise

April 25, 2013

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

Data protection vendors love to tout their large enterprise customers. And, why not? If you can support a massive organization it speaks to the robustness of your solution. But what’s often left unsaid are the complexities of such products.

Older, legacy backup tools – you know the ones! – can usually scale pretty well, but they often take a team of data scientists to keep them running. In a very large organization it’s not a big deal to dedicate a team of backup experts to keeping your data protection running smoothly, or getting it over the bumps. But what about a smaller organization?

Smaller IT shops may only have half a dozen people and they can’t afford to dedicate one or two of them to backups. This is the problem we recently ran into at Bryn Athyn College, a small private college in Pennsylvania. They were facing a real data protection dilemma.

They had three different products in their environment, and all were problematic. Their main tool may have had a name that sounds a bit like “simple,” but it was anything but!

It would take an operator about six months to really become versed in the software. It had its own terminology, many confusing relationships between entities, and if something went wrong it took days to fix. Sometimes the staff at Bryn Athyn couldn’t figure it out and had to call in a consultant. That meant precious dollars spent out of an always tight IT budget.

They knew they needed a solution, so they turned to Syncsort and NetApp and the NSB solution. What a change! First, it only took a week to become familiar with how to use NSB. This means more staff members can be versed on the solution and it’s not limited to one staff “expert” any longer (very useful in the event the expert wasn’t available when something went wrong).

The person dedicated to backups used to spend about 80% of her time baby-sitting the backup environment, and now she spends only 20% of her time on it.  As the Director of Technology at Bryn Athyn put it, “Her whole life isn’t backups.”

But what about the real test, having to restore data? Turns out that not long after NSB was installed, there was a problem with an anti-virus product update, which ended up destroying the data on several servers! Repairing this mess would have taken days with their previous “simple” product. But with NSB, the college got the servers back online in half an hour each.  Pretty sweet results, I’d say!

So, yes, it takes certain skills to support very large customers. But it also takes certain skills to truly help users that have limited staff, less money and no ability to hire teams with targeted expertise. That skill is knowing how to truly integrate software and hardware like NSB, and how to make operations easy and intuitive. We hear from our customers all the time that NSB is reliable and easy to use. If you’re having your own problems with backup complexity, why not drop us a line? We’d love to talk to you about how we can help.

You can read more details about Bryn Athyn’s experience here.

 

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Data protection services — Make sure you get what you pay for

February 7, 2013

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

For those readers growing up in the 1970s, you are probably familiar with the commercials for Fram oil filters. For those who don’t know, they featured a grease covered mechanic talking about how changing your oil filter for a few dollars would prevent far more costly car repairs later on. The tag line was a very convincing: “You can pay me now, or pay me later.”

I was reminded of this recently when hearing about how a particular data protection vendor did something like this to a customer. Basically they put the customer into a “pay me later” situation by offering a highly discounted product upfront, and now that “later” had arrived the customer was faced with a huge bill for expansion. They are not happy about it. This is a far too common practice and something you need to watch out for carefully.

To read my full blog on this topic, please go to Computerworld at http://bit.ly/XqoTAe

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Walter Curti Joins Syncsort

August 23, 2012

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

I’m delighted to report that Walter Curti has joined Syncsort as Vice President of Data Protection Engineering.  Walter is a long-time player in the data protection space and a true visionary.

I first met Walter back at Cheyenne Software where I worked in the mid 90s.  He was in charge of the Windows division at Cheyenne where we worked on ground-breaking products like ARCserve data backup software and InocuLAN anti-virus software. Those were the early days of what we used to call client-server computing, and the innovations were coming fast and furious. Cheyenne was breaking new ground in protecting open files, in integrating backup and anti-virus with applications, and with unique ways to make tape backup faster (including “Tape RAID” – whatever happened to that?). This was back in the day when a backup that measured in Gigabytes was a lot! These innovations seem routine today, but back then integrating backup with a database was cutting edge.

Another event I remember very well was when Cheyenne developed the first Bare Metal Restore application for Windows NT. That project was driven by Walter and I recall him telling me how Microsoft said it was an impossible task. There was no way to restore a server without going through the full Windows NT install and then copying back the data. You couldn’t restore the previous system state. Well Walter didn’t let Microsoft put him off, and sure enough he figured out how to do it and Cheyenne was the first vendor with a BMR product for NT.  

This refusal to accept defeat is characteristic of Walter’s approach to technology and innovation. He is also a terrific team leader and motivator who knows how to listen to his people. You can’t say that of everyone in this business!

Walter and I took different roads after CA acquired Cheyenne and I didn’t work with him again until our paths cross briefly several years ago. I’m very excited to be working with him again now at Syncsort, and I’m confident that our users and partners will soon see the benefits his vision, enthusiasm and insight will bring to our data protection offerings.

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Disaster Recovery is Top of Mind

July 26, 2012

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

Disaster Recovery has been on many people’s minds of late, and the trade press is full of stories. American Express OpenForum has a piece rating the most dangerous cities in America in which to start a new business, based on the risk of a disaster.  I found the rankings surprising (New York City is 5th?), but worth a read.

Network World delivers on story on how DR plans are getting more urgent based on an increase in the rate of disasters. They provide this alarming quote:

“Last year was the worst year we’ve had in the history of disasters,” said Al Berman, executive director of the Disaster Recovery Institute, an industry group.

They also note how the widely reported shutdown of the Amazon cloud service put paid to the idea that cloud services were invulnerable (if anybody had that idea in the first place).

Computerworld gets more into the IT side of things with “4 tech trends in IT disaster recovery,” which discusses cloud, virtualization, mobile networking and social networks.  I didn’t see that last one coming either, but they make a good case for why social networking is something you need to consider in the context of your DR planning.

Disaster Recovery is a huge subject, especially if you broaden it by adding “Business Continuity” into the mix. Then you’re getting into just about everything: personnel, legal, facilities planning, and transportation, on and on, to say nothing of IT and effective product mixes.

My concern is the IT side of things, and even that is a huge subject for discussion and I wouldn’t attempt to scope it all out in one blog post.  Rather I’ll focus on one aspect today and then continue to delve into disaster recovery issues in the weeks ahead.

One area where there exists a significant disconnect is between backup and disaster recovery. Since those terms are flexible, let’s define backup as “making copies of data locally” and disaster recovery as “creating copies of data at an alternate location.”  Very often these two processes are separate, using different technologies and products. The most classic formulation is making tapes locally and then trucking them off to an off-site location. The down-sides of this are well understood, and the only real upside is that you are using the same backup software product at all steps of the way.

Because tape is cumbersome, more and more users have moved to some form of electronic data transport, a.k.a. data replication over IP networks. It’s safer (no lost tapes), it’s efficient (no manual shipping), it’s faster. But it’s also often handled separately from your backup process. I could write a half-dozen blog posts on the different replication models, but the point is that if you have one process for backup and something completely different for DR, then you’re not maximizing efficiency in terms of time or money. And if you’re doing array-based replication in a multi-vendor disk environment, you’ll find yourself managing multiple separate replication processes and completely different recovery workflows. It’s a mess!

That’s why with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) we’ve done some very effective things to make sure DR is a seamless part of the backup environment. 

First, we consolidate backups from any primary storage environment onto NetApp disk. Replication is handled by NetApp SnapMirror.   This centralizes all your replication onto a single platform no matter what mix of primary storage you have (it even includes data from internal boot disks).  Management is simplified and you can reduce costs by eliminating primary storage replication licenses.

Second, there is no additional impact from replication. NSB uses standard backup data on secondary disk as the source data for replication. No additional backup passes, no impact on your applications or primary storage at all. This is far more efficient than doing replication off your primary arrays, for example, or from your ESX servers. Why would you want to impact your production workloads with replication overhead when you don’t have to?  

Finally, all DR recovery processes are run from the same NSB console as your regular backups, and the recovery workflows are the same. If you know how to restore locally, you know how to restore at the DR site.  This reduces learning curves and management overhead.

Of course there are a lot more details I could get into but this gives you the idea of how NSB can really drive down the cost and complexity of disaster recovery. And it is easier than you’d ever think to test your disaster recovery. I wrote about DR testing here and will be talking more about this in the future.

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