I am flying from the east coast to the west coast to close out the “Evolution of Disaster Recovery” seminar series, with show 7,8 and 9 in LA, Orange County and San Diego respectively. As part of the seminar I spent a significant amount of time discussing Backup, Recovery and Archiving (BURA). I thought it might be a worthwhile endeavor to document this a little further and seeing that I have 6 hours to kill there is no time like the present.

The following example assumes a 5 week backup rotation, which is fairly common. In the event that you have a backup rotation that archives monthly backups for one year and yearly backups for 7 years, etc… the model grows exponentially. Typically most backup policies consist of incremental backups which are taken Monday through Thursday with a weekly full backup on Fridays. Tape sets are vaulted for 4 weeks, on week six week fives tapes are recycled, this rotation maintains 4 offsite copies at any point in time. Assuming a typical weekly rate of change of 10% data duplication is massive which extends backup times and raises cost due to the amount of media required. The following is a graphical representation of a typical 5 week rotation:

By introducing an archiving strategy we can greatly reduce the amount of data that is duplicated in the offsite facility and remove stale or unwanted data from the production data set which greatly improves backup and recovery times. The archive is an active archive which means that archived data is replaced by a stub (not a shortcut, stubs are not traversed during backups) and moved to an archiving platform of choice such as ATA(Advanced Technology Attachment), NAS (Network Attach Storage), CAS (Content Addressable Storage) , tape, optical, etc… – The user experience is seamless. A sample of what an archiving strategy might look like is represented by the following graphic:

Some duplication will continue to exist due to the fact that we may have frequently accessed data that we choose not to archive. The archive is static, any data that is read or modified is pulled back into the production data set thus there is no need to backup the archive on a daily of weekly basis. We refresh the archive backup following an archiving process which in this example takes place monthly.

-RJB

EMC had a recent management re-org.? Steve Duplessie does a nice job on his blog laying out the new roles of top execs at EMC.

-RJB

Here is a podcast preview from our Dallas seminar. ?The fully combined and edited podcast should be released sometime in September. ?We are also discussing a video podcast of the Irvine, CA seminar but no promises. ?Enjoy.

-RJB

Well, we just wrapped up week 2 of "The Evolution of Disaster Recovery" seminar series, this week we visited Washington DC, NY and Boston.? The week was topped of by the what I would call the best seminar thus far in Boston with good attendee interaction and some of the best questions we have seen to date, west coast there is still time to nudge out Boston for best seminar.? I think we are putting together some great questions from all the seminars and I am really excited to publish the podcast sometime in September.? Next week we wrap-up on the west coast with a stop in LA, Orange County and San Diego, I am looking forward to a capacity crowd. The highlight of the show thus far for me was a comment we received on one of the comment cards which read "It was really nice to attend a seminar where the presenters knew the material so well".? Hopefully you have been happy with the content and walked away with some valuable insight.? We are reading every single comment card? and next quarter we will be looking to improve the material and format based on them.? Thanks again for attending!

-RJB

All, the much anticipated presentation is now avialable. I hope everyone enjoyed the seminars thus far.

Click here to download the presentation.

-RJB

I know that I owe many of you who attended the seminars in Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago a copy of the road show presentation, I am working on the size so that it is manageable for everyone.? Sorry for the delay but I should have it posted in the next few days.

-RJB

Last week I completed the first three cities (Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago) in a nine city road show event focused on "The Evolution of Disaster Recovery"? where we covered three core topics:

• Recovery Management – What is it and how do we facilitate it?? What is the? state of the marketplace?
• Remote Office Disaster Recovery – Leveraging edge-to-core data consolidation
• Virtual Infrastructure – Taking disaster recovery to the next level

Despite a high potential for mistakes and missteps (due to the fact this was the first round) we managed to present 3 very good seminars.? I believe that 99% of the attendees walked away with some piece of valuable information.? Being that I will be speaking for 3 weeks on the same topic I attempted to change it up a little in each city to avoid the "Groundhog Day" effect.? In Chicago I talked a little about the "Infrastructure Chasm"?and surprisingly there was some serious head nodding going happening.? I think as we make our way to the 6 other cities I may discuss this in further detail.

-RJB

So I am sitting on the plane on my way from east coast to the west coast listening to a speech by Dave DeWalt that he gave in April 2006 at the Software 2006 Conference in Santa Clara, California. Dave DeWalt is discussing decisions to embrace or disrupt the stack (software stack). He referenced a statistic that I found very interesting; 75% of the profit in the software marketplace comes from three companies and 50% of that number is generated by Microsoft, sounds crazy but I have no doubt that it is true. Some organization have embraced the Microsoft model and identified areas they can play or specific market segments where they can specialize. For instance Google has decided to leverage their lead over Microsoft’s MSN division to disrupt and hopefully capture the desktop space. Google is attacking the desktop market with applications like gmail, google spreadsheets, and the most recent application Writely (online word processor). There is also talk that Google will release a Linux distribution based on the Debian distro Ubuntu, the rumor is that this distro will be called Gubuntu.

I found Dave’s talk interesting because he referenced a couple of my favorite books “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman and “The Only Sustainable Edge” by John Hagell III and John Seely Brown. Dave also hits on many of the topics that Clayton M. Christensen discusses in another one of my favorite books “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.

-RJB

For years customer have been facing problems with backup windows, Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). The falling cost cost of storage has fueled the use of disk to increase the speed of backups and provide a potential solution to backup window, RPO and RTO issues. Customer today are leveraging the disk based backup solutions to augment their existing tape solutions in an effort to decrease backup time and recovery time as well as prolong investments in aging tape technology. Disk based backup solutions have taken numerous forms, leveraging ATA or LC-FC (low cost fibre channel) is a popular low cost solution that can normally be implemented in conjunction with an enterprise storage consolidation or integrated into an existing storage strategy.

The use of ATA or LC-FC can be a very economical introduction into the world of B2D. Often larger organizations shy away from traditional backup to disk because of the associated process change required and the potential increase in operational complexity. Organizations looking to benefit from the speed of disk without the need for process change may consider a VTL (virtual tape library) strategy. Virtual Tape also offers operational simplicity, in many cased native IP based replication, compression and/or data de-duplication. VTL devices are purpose built and optimized for backup this makes VTL a compelling choice. The caveat with VTL devices is that the simplicity of an emulated tape device also offers the many of the limitations and licensing costs associated with physical tape.

Organizations should also consider SLA requirements that typically encompass backup windows, RPO and RTO. What will the backup data flow be once a B2D solution is implemented? Will the architected B2D solution meet all the requirements of the SLA? In most cases the current state may look like D2T (production disk to tape), D2T2T (production disk to onsite tape copy to offsite tape copy) or D2Clone/Snap2Tape (disk 2 array based clone/snap 2 tape). Once a B2D strategy is employed the flow may look like any one of the following D2D2T, D2VT2T, or D2Clone/Snap2D2T, etc… The point here is that there are more ways than ever to implement backup solutions today, the pros and cons of each solution should be considered relative to the desired and/or required SLA, RPO and RTO.

-RJB

The storage or should I say security market is really interesting right now. It appears that storage and security are converging as fast if not faster than IP and storage. The trend was initiated by Symantec’s acquisition of Veritas for 13 billion and now EMC’s acquisition of RSA Security for 2.1 billion. It’s not just the big boys making the crossing over security company SonicWall is dabbling in the storage space. SonicWall is breaking into the storage market with a solution focused on backup and recovery. The SonicWall appliance is targeted at the SMB space and provides features like CDP, file versioning, SQL support, exchange support and bare metal recovery at an extremely affordable price.

It remains to be seen what EMC will do with RSA Security but I can see key management and products like Reporting and Compliance Manager being leveraged very quickly. With all eyes on data security and compliance the acquisition of RSA puts EMC in the role of innovator in a sector that is very hot.

The the RSA technology should provide EMC a huge advantage to begin to architect end-to-end solutions where data security and chain of custody can be guaranteed. Combining key authentication with logging tools like Network Intelligence or SenSage for security event management could provide a level of data security that the data security market desperately needs.

Finally one has to wonder what this will mean for data security appliance makers who rely on EMC as a significant source of revenue. How long will it be before EMC leverages the RSA technology to embedded data encryption.

-RJB