to make your storage work better with virtual servers andmedia.techtarget.com/searchStorage/downloads/... · The buying company is just looking to kill off potential competition (or

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Managing the information that drives the enterprise

STORAGEVol. 9 No. 7 October 2010

to make your storagework better with virtual servers andvirtual desktops. P. 13

TopTips

ALSO INSIDE

5 Acquisitions alter storage landscape

8 Bridging the information gap

22 Use your backup app with cloud storage

28 Solid state, cloud top shopping lists

37 File vs. block for virtual storage

40 Capacity optimization is hot

43 Backup blues: Too much data

STORAGEoctober 2010

RREEGGIIOONNAALL SSOOLLUUTTIIOONN PPRROOVVIIDDEERR

Storage October 2010

STORAGEinside | october 2010

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Ex-StorageTek, Ex-Sun, Ex-Oracle Storage EngineerLooking for Work

5 EDITORIAL The flurry of storage vendor mergers and acquisitions is changing the landscape. Some of the deals make sense, someare hard to figure out and some will be outright disasters. What does all of this mean to you? by RICH CASTAGNA

Filling the Storage Information Gap8 STORWARS Making storage technology choices is hard, but

getting solid information about those technologies may be even tougher. It’s an information tug-of-war, and right now storage users are on the losing side. by TONY ASARO

10 Tips for Managing Storage for Virtual Servers andVirtual Desktops

13 Server virtualization and virtual desktops can make configuring and managing storage systems a lot tougher. These 10 tips can help ease some of the stress caused by managing storagein a virtual environment. by ERIC SIEBERT

Integrate the Cloud With Your Backup App22 Cloud backup services can complement traditional backup

systems, especially when those systems provide some level of integration. But while some backup vendors offer integration products, most are working out the kinks. by W. CURTIS PRESTON

Brighter Outlook for Storage Budgets28 Spending concerns have eased ever so slightly for storage

managers, and a lot of them are looking for solid-state storage products and cloud storage services. How does your shoppinglist compare to that of your peers? by RICH CASTAGNA

Block vs. File Storage to Support Virtual Server Environments37 HOT SPOTS What’s the best storage for virtual environments:

block or file? We offer the pros and cons of block-based andfile-based storage deployments to help you decide how to support your virtual environment. by TERRI MCCLURE

Capacity Optimization is Storage’s Newest Hot Topic40 READ/WRITE It’s been working great for backup and now

data reduction techniques are being aimed at primary storage. It’s a hot market, but there are issues that still need to be settled. by JEFF BYRNE

Space and Time Are Still Backup Bugaboos43 SNAPSHOT Our latest survey has Storage readers saying too

much capacity and too much stuff to back up is their biggest pain point when it comes to backup. Many of them are counting on data dedupe to ease their backup blues. by RICH CASTAGNA

Vendor Resources44 Useful links from our advertisers.

DCIG StorageBuyer’s Guide

Reviews & Rankings ofover 70 Products frommore than 20 Vendors

http://forms.nexsan.com/forms/DCIGBuyersGuide?campaign=DCIG_Buyers_Guide&source=TechTarget&source_type=StorageMagazine

Storage May 2010

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iN BASEBALL there are two ways to win: find the raw talent and build yourteam from the ground up, or shell out the big bucks and buy your way intothe World Series. These days is seems like a lot of storage companies aretaking the latter route, tearing a page out of the Yankees playbook and buying up emerging technology companies at a brisk pace.

And just like in baseball, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.Quantum bought ADIC. Sun bought StorageTek. Oracle bought Sun. HP boughtLeftHand, PolyServe, Ibrix and Opsware. Dell bought EqualLogic and PerotSystems. IBM bought XIV Systems, Diligent, FilesX and Arsenal Digital. NetAppbought Spinnaker and Onaro. F5 bought Acopia. Hitachi bought Archivas.Cisco bought NeoPath Networks and Nuova Systems. LSI bought ONStorand StoreAge. CA bought XOsoft. Seagate bought Maxtor.

Tandberg bought Exabyte. Symantec bought Revivio. Rackable boughtSGI. Brocade bought Foundry Networks, Silverback Systems and NuView.McData bought CNT, Nishan Systems and Sanera. Brocade bought McData.

And EMC bought all the rest.That list just scratches the surface, yet all of that activity keeps Wall

Street busy and gives venture capitalists (VCs) a reason to go to work eachday. But what does it mean to data storage managers, especially those whobought stuff from a “little guy,” when they see a company disappear into thecorporate portfolio of a major-league organization?

The short answer is: Who knows? The better answer is don’t let all thisbuying and selling deter you from your own acquisitions—that is, getting the best storage technology to fill your company’s needs. When you’re dealingwith newer (and smaller) firms some caution is advised, but that doesn’t meanyou should avoid them. A few years ago nobody knew what a Kia was, butnow it’s considered a pretty cool car with a solid service record. Same dealwith Data Domain, which created its own success with timely technology andgood products; the company didn’t need EMC, but I’m sure Data Domain’s VCsdon’t mind being $2.1 billion richer.

If you’re a customer of a company that was scooped up, there are severalpossible scenarios that can occur:

Copyright 2010, TechTarget. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher. For permissions or reprint information, please contact Mike Kelly, VP and Group Publisher ([email protected]).

editorial | rich castagna

Ex-StorageTek, ex-Sun, ex-Oracle storage engineer looking for work

Vendor acquisitions are changing the storage landscape.Some make sense, while others will be disasters.

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mailto:[email protected]


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You’re outta luck. The buying company is just looking to kill off potentialcompetition (or just came to its senses), and they deep-six the acquired company’sproducts and offer something completely different in its place. (Still trying to getsupport for that NeoPath File Director?)

They didn’t screw it up. In this scenario, the purchaser remembers why theyshelled out billions to buy a pretty cool company that has had some success. Theback-office stuff, marketing and those kinds of things may get absorbed by thenew parent company, but it’s pretty much hands off when it comes to the newlyacquired technology and product lines. Dell’s handling of EqualLogic comes tomind, and I think most current and past EqualLogic customers would agree thatthe boost Dell has given the company has worked out well.

What happened to that cool technology? Sometimes, a company getsbought not for its products but for the ideas behind those products. The purchaseris looking for the intellectual property—engineering designs, patents, etc.—that it lacks to bootstrap a new effort or resuscitate one that’s on life support. Forusers of the acquired company’s products, it may seem a lot like the “You’re outta luck” scenario above, at least until the technology they liked is resurrectedin a new product.

They don’t know what to do with it. Mostacquisitions make sense to reasonably intelli-gent adults. But once in a while a real head-scratcher comes along that can induce somewarranted anxiety for users of the products inquestion. Oracle plus Sun? A puzzle alright, butOracle doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. And whatabout HP buying Palm? A hardware companythat failed in the smartphone market buys asoftware company that failed in the smartphonemarket and that should equal success, right? It’sway too soon to tell, but bewildering to say theleast. The bottom line is that if your array vendorgets bought by a company that sells ringtones on the web, you better find anew array vendor.

This kind of stuff happens in all industries for all kinds of products, so it’s notsurprising that storage should be going through such a shakeout. Still, when yousee that the maker of the storage gear you pleaded for is on the block and thevultures are circling, it can be a little nerve wracking. The truth is that a lot of thebig storage vendors don’t do much innovating these days so they go shopping fornew ideas, technologies and markets. Hopefully, the startup you took a chance on will wind up in a smart new owner’s shopping cart. 2

Rich Castagna ([email protected]) is editorial director of the StorageMedia Group.

* Click here for a sneak peek at what’s coming up in the November/December 2010 issue.

The bottom line isthat if your arrayvendor gets boughtby a company thatsells ringtones onthe web, you betterfind a new array vendor.


http://www.pillardata.com

http://www.pillardata.com

http://www.pillardata.com/ssd


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hAVING A CHOICE is important, but it’s also a double-edge sword. That’swhy on some level having a clear market leader makes life easier andsafer for IT professionals. For example, you’re probably using Cisco foryour networking infrastructure; have a ton of Microsoft servers; andyour server virtualization platform is more than likely VMware.

However, users evaluating storage systems don’t have a single clearleader to choose from. Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Hitachi, IBM, NetApp and Oracle all have multibillion dollar storage businesses. Thereare more than a dozen storage system vendors that can be considered“competitive,” and more startups are popping up all the time.

In my travels I always ask IT professionalswhere they get their information when theyhave to make a storage decision. The three answers I consistently hear are from theirpeers, storage vendors and channel partners.

The information you get from vendors is obviously biased toward their own products.Channel sources are a bit less biased, but theyalso hitch their wagons to specific vendors.Talking to peers is considered the most valuableof the three methods, but it has limitations asenvironments and requirements usually differ from company to company.And it’s not possible to be completely unbiased once you’ve taken theplunge and invested in a specific vendor’s solution. With your peers, youget real-world perspectives based on first-hand experiences. But thereare some important issues—like optimization, best practices and appli-cation integration—that are rarely discussed in detail even among peers.

If you’ve already decided to go down a specific path, you can get a tonof great insight from your IT vendors. However, depending on the size ofthe vendor and the number of products they have in their portfolio, ven-dors may not be able to answer your questions very effectively. I recentlysat down with a vice president of IT, along with a storage vendor and theirchannel partner, to look over proposed storage solutions. I happen to

StorWars | tony asaro

Filling the storage information gap

Making technology choices is hard, but getting solid information about those technologies

may be even tougher. And users are losing out.

If you’ve alreadydecided to go downa specific path, youcan get a ton ofgreat insight fromyour IT vendors.


know the product extremely well and it was alarming to me how little the sales people and systems engineers for both the vendor and channelpartner knew about it—and it was their flagship product.

There’s often a disconnect between many vendors’ corporate marketingand sales organizations, and information gets lost in translation. In somecases, the corporate folk think they have the answer and don’t understandwhy the field doesn’t get it. On the other hand, the field is frustrated be-cause corporate doesn’t listen to them and the solution that was rolledout wasn’t what they were asking for or needed. In the midst of this con-fusion, the customer and channel partner get squeezed.

The problem is that people will make decisions despite lacking infor-mation or having too much misinformation. I spoke with a user who wasimplementing an archive storage strategy using a tier 1 storage system.But the system couldn’t scale to the capacity levels the firm needed andit was way overpriced for this type of use case. That’s like buying a sportscar to haul dirt. That kind of decision doesn’t help anyone, as the user endsup disappointed and the vendor will be seen in a bad light that might costthem a long-term relationship.

There’s still a lot of confusion among users about technologies suchas thin provisioning, storage virtualization, intelligent storage tiering,primary storage deduplication, scale-out storage and cloud storage.Users may even get tripped up when it comes to some storage funda-mentals. I worked with one company with petabytes of storage thatwent from using RAID 10 to RAID 5 across all of its arrays and nettedmore than $100 million in savings. Why wasn’t this done sooner? Be-cause their vendor told them their performance would suffer. Guesswhat? Performance hasn’t been an issue.

How do we fill the information gap? Unfortunately, there’s no easyanswer. I believe the only way to truly solve the problem is through aconsortium or community of IT professionals who will share informa-tion, insights and best practices, as well as sponsor ongoing research to dig deeply into new technologies and products. Done right, this groupcould emerge as the single most powerful entity in the industry andcould have a legitimate influence on the future of IT.

But as long as users are guarded about their IT “secrets” and are reluctant to share their best practices and hard-earned insights, creatingsuch an organization may be an impossible task. It would have to bewell organized, planned and funded to make a radical change, not just act as a message board where a handful of people play question/answerping-pong with one another. If something isn’t done, the information gap will persist and IT professionals will continue to do the same heavylifting year after year with the same mixed results. 2

Tony Asaro is senior analyst and founder of Voices of IT (www.VoicesofIT.com).

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http://www.VoicesofIT.com

NEXT GENERATION

BACKUPSTARTS NOW

It’s about disk. It’s about networks. It’s about time. EMC is the leader in disk-based backup and recovery.

Learn more now. www.EMC.com/products/category/backup-recovery.htm

EMC2, EMC, and where information lives are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. © Copyright 2010 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.


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STORAGECOMING IN NOV./DEC.

And don’t miss our monthly columns and commentary, or the results of our Snapshot reader survey.

Hot Technologies for 2011Each year the editors ofStorage magazine and theSearchStorage.com familyof sites confer with indus-try experts—analysts, con-sultants, service providersand users—to determinewhich newer technologiesare likely to end up in storage shops in the coming year. We describethe technologies and howthey’ll improve storageshop efficiencies. We’ll also list the techs that aren’t quite ready andgrade ourselves on lastyear’s predictions.

Storage Salaries 2010Now in its ninth year, the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com annualStorage Salary Survey asksstorage professionalsacross the country abouttheir compensation, bene-fits and perks. As the onlysalary survey that focusesexclusively on storage-related professions, thisanalysis will provide insightinto the state of storageprofessions, consideringsuch factors as years ofexperience, education,industry and geographiclocation.

Quality Awards V: Tape LibrariesThis is the fifth time we’vefocused our Quality Awardsprogram on tape libraries.Although disk-based storagetechnologies may have less-ened the role of tape hard-ware in most firms’ backupoperations, our purchasingresearch data finds that 76%of firms still spin some orall of their backup data offto tape. Our survey collectsproduct service and reliabilityfeedback from tape libraryusers. Previous winnersinclude Spectra Logic,Sun/StorageTek and IBM.

TechTarget Storage Media Group

Vice President of EditorialMark Schlack

Editorial DirectorRich Castagna

Senior Managing EditorKim Hefner

Senior EditorEllen O’Brien

Creative DirectorMaureen Joyce

Contributing EditorsTony AsaroJames Damoulakis Steve Duplessie Jacob Gsoedl

Storage magazineSubscriptions:www.SearchStorage.com

Site EditorEllen O’Brien

Senior News DirectorDave Raffo

Senior News WriterSonia Lelii

Features WriterCarol Sliwa

Senior Managing EditorKim Hefner

Associate Site EditorMegan Kellett

Editorial AssistantDavid Schneider

Site Editor Andrew Burton

Managing EditorHeather Darcy

Features WriterTodd Erickson

Executive Editor andIndependent Backup ExpertW. Curtis Preston

Site EditorSusan Troy

Site Editor Sue Troy

UK Bureau ChiefAntony Adshead

TechTarget Conferences

Director of Editorial EventsLindsay Jeanloz

Editorial Events AssociateJacquelyn Hinds

Storage magazine275 Grove Street Newton, MA [email protected]

STORAGE


http://www.SearchStorage.com

© 2010 Iron Mountain Incorporated. All rights reserved. Iron Mountain, the design of the mountain and the Iron Mountain logo are registered trademarks of Iron Mountain Incorporated in the U.S. and other countries.

Having trouble deciding whether to migrate to the cloud?

Iron Mountain can help. We offer a rich set of on-premises, hybrid and cloud information management solutions for archiving, eDiscovery, data protection and compliance. We can help you select the right solutions to meet your specific needs so you can migrate to the cloud when and if you're ready.

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SERVER AND DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION have provided relatively easy ways to consoli-date and conserve, allowing a reduction in physical systems. But these tech-nologies have also introduced problems for data storage managers who needto effectively configure their storage resources to meet the needs of a con-solidated infrastructure.

Server virtualization typically concentrates the workloads of many servers

Tips for Managing Storagefor Virtual Servers and

Virtual DesktopsServer virtualization and virtual desktops can make

configuring and managing storage systems a lot tougher. These 10 tips can help ease some of the stress caused bymanaging storage in a virtual environment. By Eric Siebert


onto a few shared storage devices, often creating bottlenecks as manyvirtual machines (VMs) compete for storage resources. With desktopvirtualization this concentration becomes even denser as many moredesktops are typically running on a single host. As a result, managingstorage in a virtual environment is an ongoing challenge that usuallyrequires the combined efforts of desktop, server, virtualization andstorage administrators to ensure that virtualized servers and desktopsperform well. Here are 10 tips to help you better manage your storagein virtual environments.

#1KNOW YOUR STORAGE WORKLOADS. Virtual desktopworkloads are very different from virtual server workloads,and the workloads imposed by individual desktops and serverscan also vary dramatically. Blindly placing VMs on hosts without

regard for their disk I/O usage can create instant resource bottlenecks.You should have a general idea of how much disk I/O a VM will gen-

erate based on the applications and workloads it will host. Therefore,you should try to balance high disk I/O VMs among both physical hostsand data resources. If you have too many VMs with high disk I/O on a single host it can overwhelm the host’s storage controller; likewise,having too many high disk I/O VMs accessing a single storage systemor LUN may also create a performance bottleneck. Even if you have agood idea of your virtual machine’s disk I/O workloads, it’s still a goodidea to use performance monitoring tools to get detailed statistics suchas average and peak usage.

And don’t forget that VMs are usually mobile and may not always beon the same host; they may be moved to another physical host usingtechnologies like VMware VMotion. Having a group of busy Exchangeservers ending up on the same host could bring the disk subsystem to its knees. If you’re using VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler(DRS) to balance workloads among hosts, keep in mind that it doesn’ttake VM disk I/O usage into account, it only balances based on CPUand memory usage. To compensate for that, use DRS rules that will always keep specific virtual machines on different hosts.

#2AVOID INTENSE DISK I/O. Certain scenarios with yourVMs may create periods of very intense disk I/O, which can create such high resource contention that all of yourVMs will slow to a crawl. For virtual desktops this can be

caused by time-specific events, like all of your users turning on theirdesktops at approximately the same time each morning—often referredto as a boot storm. While that kind of situation may be unavoidable,there are ways to deal with it, such as by adding large cache controllerslike NetApp’s Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) to your storagedevice, or by using automated storage tiering technologies that can

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leverage faster storage devices like solid-state drives during periods ofhigh disk I/O.

Other scenarios—like virtual machine backup windows and scheduledVM activities such as antivirus scans or patching—are controllable. Havingconcurrent backups running on multiple VMs on a host or data store cancause high disk I/O that will impact the performance of other VMs runningon the host or data store. Try to schedule your backups evenly so youdon’t have too many occurring simultaneously on the same host or storageresource. You should also consider backup applications that avoid usinghost resources by accessing the VM data stores directly to back up VMdisks. And some specific virtualization disk-to-disk backup products canshorten backup windows and allow tape backups of the disk repositoriesto occur afterwards without impacting hosts and virtual machines. Forscheduled operations like patching and antivirus scanning, enable ran-domization or create staggered schedules to spread the operations overa period of time so they don’t run simultaneously. You should also becareful when running disk defragmentation operations; defrag generateshigh disk I/O and can cause thin disks to rapidly increase in size.

#3USE SPACE EFFICIENTLY. It’s easy to use up disk spacewith virtual machines, but there are ways to control and limitthe amount of space they take up on your storage devices.For virtual desktops or lab-type server environments, using

linked clones can save a great deal of disk space. Linked clones aresimilar to VM snapshots where a virtualmachine’s virtual disk file is maderead-only and a smaller delta disk iscreated for any disk writes that mayoccur. Linked clones work by creating amaster virtual disk image that’s read bymany VMs but all writes occur on eachvirtual machine’s own delta disk. For ex-ample, if you create 100 VMs with 40 GBvirtual disks, they would consume 4 TB of disk space without linkedclones. If you used linked clones, however, you would have a single 40 GBvirtual disk for all VMs to read from and smaller 1 GB to 2 GB virtual disksfor writes—a huge space savings.

Thin provisioning can also help save space. It can be implementedat the virtualization layer or the storage layer. Almost all VMs are givenmore disk space than they usually need; thin provisioning allows youto overprovision storage by allowing virtual disk files to only take upthe space they’re actually using and not the full disk space they wereallocated. The use of thin provisioning can greatly reduce the amountof disk space your virtual machines consume and will give you morecontrol over costly storage capacity upgrades.

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For virtual desktops orlab-type server environ-ments, using linkedclones can save a greatdeal of disk space.

Slow Backup? Big Solution.Announcing Deduplication for the Rest of Us.

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The Quantum DXi6500. Simple, Affordable Deduplication.Contact us to learn more at (800) 677-6268 or visit www.quantum.com/dxi6500


#4AVOID UNNECESSARY I/O OPERATIONS. Why generateexcessive disk I/O if you don’t have to? You should always try to limit the amount of disk I/O that virtual servers and virtual desktops create. This includes disabling any Windows

services that aren’t needed, uninstalling unnecessary applications, disabling file indexing, and limiting the amount of logging that both the operating system and applications generate. There are many other smallerthings that can be tweaked and they can add up to greatly reduced diskI/O across your VMs. You can use end-point management tools or ActiveDirectory group policy to help manage and control the configurations.You’ll not only reduce virtual machine disk I/O, you’ll reduce consumptionof other host resources. Reducing the amount of unnecessary disk I/Othat VMs generate is always a smart move as it allows your storage subsystem to operate at maximum efficiency.

#5USE THE RIGHT STORAGE FOR YOUR WORKLOADS.Most hosts have local storage available in addition to beingconnected to shared storage for virtual machines. The typesof storage available to your hosts will often have different

performance characteristics, such as an 8 GB Fibre Channel SAN and a 1 GB iSCSI or NFS storage device. Besides different storage protocols,you may have hard drives with different speeds (e.g., 10K rpm, 15K rpm)and interfaces (e.g., SAS, SATA, solid state). With so many differentstorage options to choose from, it makes sense to fit the VM to theright type of storage. Place less-critical VMs on the slower storagetiers and your more critical VMs with higher I/O requirements on thefaster tiers. You can also use an automated storage tiering system likeCompellent Technologies Inc.’s Fluid Data architecture or EMC Corp.’sFast technology that moves data between storage tiers based on demand.

You can go a step further by splitting a VM into multiple disk parti-tions whose virtual disk files reside on multiple storage tiers accordingto their performance needs. One common way to do this is to createseparate disk partitions for the operating system, Windows pagefile,applications and data. The faster storage tiers can be used for thedata’s higher I/O requirements, while slower tiers can be used foreverything else. Even if you don’t do that, you can still specify sloweror local storage for the large virtual machine virtual swap file createdfor each VM and used when a host exhausts its physical memory. Thisalso helps ensure that your VM uses less disk space on the more expen-sive storage tiers.

#6DON’T FORGET TO MONITOR. People usually pay atten-tion to storage statistics when problems occur, but datastorage requires attention on a continuous basis. If youdon’t monitor your storage performance on an ongoing

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basis you might not know of potential problems or bottlenecks, or beable to spot trends or patterns that may allow you to act proactively. It’sparticularly important when using network-based iSCSI and NFS storagebecause network health can impact storage performance. Storage per-formance should therefore be monitored at both the virtualization layerand storage layer, as a problem may be visible from one viewpoint butnot the other. Monitoring a virtual environment is not as simple as moni-toring a physical environment. Products designed for virtual environmentsthat monitor end-user or application experiences can help pinpoint exactly which resource or component may be causing a bottleneck.

#7WATCH OUT FOR STORAGE THREATS THAT CAN GROW.Virtual machine snapshots and thin provisioned virtualdisks represent a double threat as they have the potentialto consume all of the disk space on your VM data stores,

which can potentially crash or shut down your running VMs. If you planto overcommit your storage using thindisks, you need to closely monitor their growth. Don’t rely completely on thin disks to address disk spacewoes; try rightsizing VM disks whenyou create them and don’t give them a lot more disk than they need.

Snapshots are an even bigger threat,as VMs can have multiple snapshotswith their combined space much largerthan the original virtual disk file size.While VM snapshots can be a handytool, you should never use them in lieu of traditional backups. Not onlydo snapshots take up additional space, they can reduce data storageperformance. That’s especially true when you delete a snapshot andthe delta disks are written back to the original disks causing intensedisk I/O while the operation is occurring. For very large snapshots, tryscheduling their deletion during off hours when the extra I/O will haveless of an impact.

Don’t rely on manual methods to monitor thin provisioning andsnapshots. For thin disks, set alarms for specific overcommitment percentages so you’ll know when your data stores are becoming over-committed. For snapshots, use alarms to look for snapshots that growbeyond a certain size. You should also use alarms to monitor datastore free space to alert you when space is low. Be sure to set youralarms high enough, as thin disks and snapshots can sometimes growvery quickly and there might not be much time to respond. Don’t relycompletely on alarms for snapshots; use regular reporting tools toidentify snapshots so they don’t run longer than needed.

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Don’t rely completely on thin disks to addressdisk space woes; tryrightsizing VM diskswhen you create themand don’t give them a lotmore disk than they need.


#8INTEGRATE SERVER VIRTUALIZATION WITH STORAGEMANAGEMENT. More and more storage vendors are inte-grating server virtualization and storage so they can bemanaged and monitored using a single console. Examples

include plug-ins developed for VMware vCenter Server from NetApp (Virtual Storage Console) and EMC (Virtual Storage Integrator) that allowstorage arrays to be managed fromvCenter Server. This type of integrationallows for much simpler management of the storage devices used by virtualhosts because monitoring, provisioning,replication and other storage operationscan be done directly from vCenter Server.

Storage vendors are also leveragingvirtualization APIs to provide very tightintegration between the storage layerand the virtualization layer. Using the VMware vStorage APIs, storagetasks traditionally handled by the virtual host (e.g., block zeroing, StorageVMotion) can be offloaded to the storage array, thereby freeing up hostserver resources. The APIs also provide more intelligent multipathing toachieve better I/O throughput and failover, and offer replication integra-tion for products like VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

#9TRADITIONAL METHODS MIGHT NOT CUT IT. Movingfrom a physical to a virtual environment also requires achange in thinking. Things like backups, server provisioning,monitoring and management are all very different once

servers are virtualized. Applications written specifically to monitorand manage physical environments typically aren’t effective in virtualenvironments because they’re not aware of the virtualization layer between the server hardware and the guest operating system.

With backups, for example, it’s not efficient to back up serversthrough the OS layer on virtual hosts. Instead, most virtualization-awarebackup apps go directly to the virtualization layer, which is quicker andmore efficient. Performance monitoring is another example: If you moni-tor using OS tools that aren’t aware of the virtualization layer, the resultswill often be inaccurate as the OS tools don’t have direct access to theunderlying host hardware.

#10PRIORITIZE STORAGE TRAFFIC. Hosts with manyvirtual machines running on them can be like the WildWest with all of the VMs fighting for the host’s limitedresources. You can end up with less-critical VMs

impacting the resources of critical virtual machines and the resourcesavailable for host operations. To prevent this kind of contention, consider

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More and more storagevendors are integratingserver virtualization andstorage so they can bemanaged and monitoredusing a single console.


using storage I/O controls that can provide a Quality of Service (QoS)level for certain critical host functions and VMs. VMware’s vSphere 4.1introduced a new feature called Storage I/O Control (SIOC) that worksby measuring storage latency; when a set congestion threshold isreached for at least four seconds, it enforces configurable I/O shareson VMs to ensure the highest-priority virtual machines get the I/O resources they need. SIOC should help restore some order on busyhosts and allow VMs to coexist peacefully by making it less likely thata few rogue VMs will drag down your critical virtual machines. 2

Eric Siebert is an IT industry veteran with more than 25 years of experiencewho now focuses on server administration and virtualization. He’s the author of VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration (Prentice Hall,2009) and Maximum vSphere (Prentice Hall, 2010).

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Building the engines of a Smarter Planet:

Robust backup. Rapid recovery. Reliable return on your investment.As the engines of a smarter planet, midsize businesses are busy fueling innovation and a global economy. And with so much information flowing across their organizations, the implications of lost data can be tremendous. They need a dynamic infrastructure that provides smarter ways to help protect and quickly recover data when anything goes wrong, no matter the cause. And they need a reliable, cost-effective solution. The IBM® Comprehensive Data Protection Solution Express™ can help protect your company from loss of data by providing automated backup and near-instant recovery. In other words, every time you make a change, it makes a backup—which helps to shorten backup gaps from days to minutes. Here’s how to get started:

1 Actual savings and costs will vary depending on individual customer confi gurations and environment. IBM Global Financing offerings are provided through IBM Credit LLC in the United States and other IBM subsidiaries and divisions worldwide to qualifi ed commercial and government customers. Rates are based on a customer’s credit rating, fi nancing terms, offering type, equipment type and options, and may vary by country. Other restrictions may apply. Rates and offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Smarter Planet and the planet icon are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. © International Business Machines Corporation 2010.

The IBM Express Advantage™ Concierge can connect you to the right IBM Business Partner. Call 877-IBM-ACCESS or visit ibm.com/engines/data2

Midsize businesses are the engines of a Smarter Planet.

1Understand where you are. Know your business risks and what’s most important to you now. Evaluating your current recovery processes and prioritizing critical data help you see risk exposure and develop a backup schedule.

2 Recover data quickly. IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager FastBack automatically looks for data as it’s created and recovers it when needed. Worry less with a backup schedule that you define. IBM technologies can recover data in just minutes.

3 Protect your assets. IBM System x® Express servers pull data and send it to the IBM System Storage® DS3200, which houses data in a reliable location.

The IBM Comprehensive Data Protection Solution Express includes IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack, the IBM System x3250 M3 Server and the IBM System Storage DS3200 array, priced together starting at

$364

4 See the savings. The data protection solution can pay for itself in less than a year by helping reduce the risk of revenue loss and the costs of manual data backup and recovery. Savings are estimated at $15,000 annually.

per month

for 48 months1

www.ibm.com/engines/data2

aStorage October 201022

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RE YOU STILL backing up to boring old tape, disk or even deduped disk? Whatabout using a backup device that has unlimited capacity and doesn’t needto be managed? That’s what cloud backup promises—but can it possibly bethat easy?

There are a lot of products and services being bandied about with theterm cloud attached to them. Everybody wants to be on the cloud band-wagon, and it seems like everybody has an opinion about what the cloud is or isn’t. In the absence of any clearly defined standards, we’ll provide adefinition for the purposes of our discussion.

Integratethe cloud with

your backup appGetting the sophistication of a backup app and

the simplicity and scalability of cloud storage is possible today. But there are still some kinks to work out.

By W. Curtis Preston


The cloud, specifically the public cloud, is storage (or backup) thatyou don’t have to manage. It has unlimited on-demand capacity and infi-nite burst capabilities, all for a price at or below what it would cost todo it yourself. If you want to pay for 100 TB this month and then pay foronly 5 TB for the next year, you can do that with the cloud. You can’t approach that kind of flexibility if you buy a storage system becauseyou’ve paid for it whether you use it or not.

There’s also the private cloud, where most of the marketing hyper-bole is happening. For our purposes, we’ll focus on the public cloud.

CLOUD STORAGE vs. CLOUD BACKUPAlthough the terms are often used interchangeably, there’s a differencebetween cloud storage and cloud backup. Cloud storage is storage as a service. To tap into cloud storage, you get an account with a serviceprovider; they provide you with their API and you use some type of soft-ware that enables you to store data via that API. Voila! You have storagewith unlimited capacity. You don’t manage the storage where your dataresides, and you don’t even have to ask for additional capacity. All youhave to do is pay the bill. All cloud storage providers charge a “storagefee,” a monthly rate based on how many gigabytes of data are stored in your account. In addition, some cloud storage providers may chargea fee for each gigabyte that’s downloaded or uploaded—essentially a“bandwidth fee.” With cloud storage, you still have to manage the appli-cation that’s sending the data into the cloud.

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BACKUP APPS PLUS THE CLOUD: A PRODUCT SAMPLER

Some backup applications and other products have developed ways to integrate with cloud backup services.Here’s a sampler of some currently available products.

WHAT IT DOES

Can use any cloud storage service that supports RESTas the target for backups and archiving

Can send backup data to any cloud storage service builton the EMC Atmos platform

On-site storage appliance that stores data before sending it to the cloud; can be used as a backup target

Can send backup data to the Symantec ProtectionNetwork

Can use Amazon’s S3 service as the target for backups

VENDOR

CommVault Systems Inc.

EMC Corp.

Nasuni Corp.

Symantec Corp.

Zmanda Inc.

PRODUCT

Simpana

NetWorker

Nasuni Filer

Backup Exec

Amanda


To be considered a cloud backup service, a cloud service must pro-vide all of the above plus the software to make the backups happen. Acloud backup service typically provides some type of client softwarethat must be installed on all the systems to be backed up. Backups are then automatically scheduled tooccur on a regular basis. The backupsoftware generally uses techniquessuch as delta-level backups or fulldeduplication to minimize networktraffic.

The provider’s service-level agree-ment (and the price they charge) will determine what happens when things don’t go as planned. At a minimum, the service may provide an on-screen pop-up notification or an email message to tell you thatthings are going well (or not). The service may also have the ability to automatically escalate the problem when failed backups aren’taddressed.

TRADITIONAL BACKUP SOFTWARE MEETS THE CLOUDSome companies may use a cloud backup service for all of their backups,while others may opt for a combination of traditional backup methodsand cloud services. There are two very different ways to go about inte-grating traditional backup software and the cloud. You can use a tradi-tional backup system in parallel with a cloud backup system, or you canuse backup software that has the ability to use a cloud storage systemas its target.

If the main reason you’re considering using cloud backup is the“hands-off” aspect, then this is the route to take. You can continue using traditional backup software to perform the bulk of your backups,then use cloud backup software to handle those parts where it wouldbe most beneficial. The most common practice is to start by performingremote site and laptop backups using the cloud backup service. Manycompanies aren’t yet performing backups of their laptops, and backingthem up with traditional backup software is problematic, to say theleast. Most companies back up their remote sites, but they often useless than desirable methods because their remote offices don’t havededicated IT staff. A cloud backup service can solve both the laptop and remote-office problems; all you have to do is write a check.

Using cloud storage as a target for a traditional backup softwarepackage is a bit more problematic, but it’s not without its advantages.The same things that are true of cloud storage for traditional data aretrue of cloud storage for backups: no management, endless capacity,

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The provider’s service-level agreement (and theprice they charge) willdetermine what happenswhen things don’t go asplanned.


etc. As a “bonus” you automatically get off-site backups, which is still ahassle for many companies.

There may be more challenges than advantages, however, when itcomes to using cloud storage as the destination for traditional backups.

TOO MUCH DATA FOR THE CLOUD?The first challenge is that traditional backup sends and stores a lot ofdata. Traditional backup systems typically perform full backups once a week, and even backup apps that don’t perform repeated fulls on filesystems (e.g., IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager) perform full backups on applications. (Many companies even perform daily full backups of somekey applications.) In addition, all traditional backup applications performfull-file incremental backups. That means if just a single byte haschanged in a file, the modification time is changed or the archive bit is set so the entire file is included in that night’s backups.

Both of these typical practices create a lot of data that’s sent acrossthe network and stored on the target device. If the target device was a cloud backup service, it would require significantly increased band-width and higher charges to store the data in the cloud. Remember thattraditional backup systems are why data deduplication was developed.The backup applications create 20 GB on “tape” for every 1 GB on primarydisk. So a 10 TB data center would need to pay for approximately 200 TBof cloud storage every month.

In addition to the cloud storage vendor’s fees for disk capacity usedand the amount of data transferred, there are the costs associated withhaving sufficient bandwidth to get the data to the cloud storage vendor.If you consistently and regularly create a 10 TB full backup and want tosend it to the service over the wire, using a cloud storage vendor isn’tlikely to be practical. But even if your backup needs aren’t that extreme,the behavior of traditional backup will make the cloud part of yourbackup system cost quite a bit.

OFF-SITE DATA: THE GOOD AND THE BADThe second challenge ironically involves one of the key advantages of using a cloud backup service: having backup data stored off-site. Assuming you solve the problem of getting the data off-site in the firstplace, you then have the problem of all of your data being in a differentlocation than your servers. Obviously, this can significantly hamperyour ability to meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs). This meansthat any copy of your data that’s stored in the cloud should be just that,a copy. More specifically, it shouldn’t be the copy you rely on for routinedata recoveries. Using cloud storage as the only copy of large amountsof data that need to be transferred across the Internet is simply a disasterwaiting to happen.

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This sounds like a problem for data deduplication to solve, right? Sortof. A lot of backup software packages can deduplicate the data beforesending it over the Internet. That can certainly address the challenge ofgetting the backups onto cloud storage, but it doesn’t address the chal-lenge of getting the data back. So the rule about not relying on a singlecopy of your backups stored in the cloud still applies whether you’reable to use deduplication or not.

BACKUP APPS CAN LINK TO THE CLOUDThere are now a number of companies with software and hardwareproducts that support backing up to the cloud. The first backup applica-tion vendor to announce support was Zmanda Inc., a commercial firmthat offers its version of Amanda, an open source backup program.Amanda Enterprise 3.1 is capable of backing up directly to Amazon’sSimple Storage Service (S3) cloud storage service.

CommVault Systems Inc.’s Simpana supports backing up to anycloud vendor that supports the Representational State Transfer (REST)protocol. So you can use cloud storage services such as Amazon, Iron Mountain, Microsoft Azure, Nirvanix or Rackspace as a target forCommVault Simpana backups or archives. Archiving may actually be amore appropriate data protection application for cloud storage becausearchivers don’t perform repeated fulls and they have object-leveldedupe built in.

EMC Corp. and Symantec Corp. did something similar when they eachadded the capability to back up to their own networks. EMC NetWorkerbacks up to any cloud vendor using EMC Atmos-based storage, whileSymantec Backup Exec backs up to the Symantec Protection Network.

If your company uses a backupapplication that doesn’t yet supportbacking up to the cloud, you mightwant to consider Nasuni Corp.’s Filer,which provides an NFS/CIFS NASgateway to cloud storage. Any de-cent backup software package can back up to an NFS or CIFS mount.

Although it has limitations, one must still consider the availability of data deduplication when exploring backup applications that inte-grate with the cloud. Neither EMC NetWorker nor Amanda has anydeduplication built into its products. CommVault Simpana and SymantecBackup Exec can deduplicate data before it’s sent to the backup target.Simpana offers target deduplication that does the deduping once thedata is sent to the media agent, while Backup Exec uses source dedu-plication with deduplication occurring at the client before the data issent across the network. This makes them much more attractive com-panions to cloud storage. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) customers

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There are now a number of products that supportbacking up to the cloud.


also have an interesting option with Nasuni because TSM has dedupli-cation built in.

TRY IT, BUT TEST ITCloud backup services can be great complements to traditional backupsystems, especially when those systems provide some level of integra-tion. Because a cloud backup service will require little if any hardware to be installed on your site, it’s relatively easy to perform a full proof of concept using real data. This is especially important because imple-mentation may require substantial investments for licenses and have aprofound effect on your backup environment. As with any backup prod-uct or service, you should test everything and believe nothing. 2

W. Curtis Preston is an executive editor in TechTarget’s Storage Media Groupand an independent backup expert. Curtis has worked extensively with datadeduplication and other data-reduction systems.

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THE LAST TIME we reported the results of our biannual Storage magazine/SearchStorage.comPurchasing Intentions survey we suggested that storage managers could finally exhale after a year of nail-biting suspense over whether storage budgets would continue to fall.Last year’s results were slightly encouraging, and the latest survey indicates the budgetsituation has improved once again. We’re not saying storage managers are flush withfunds, but the days of beating about the sofa cushions for loose change seem to be over.

The average storage budget clocked in at a healthy $3.1 million; when compared to2009, our average respondent storage budget grew by a modest 0.6%. Enterprise-sizedcompanies are seeing the largest boost with an average 2.5% increase, followed by mid-


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outlook forstoragebudgets

Spending is slowly picking upagain, but storage managersare cautious and looking for

technologies that can helpthem use their systems more

efficiently. By Rich Castagna


sized companies with 1.6%. But times are still pretty tough for smallercompanies as they reported a -0.6% change in their budgets. These numbers hardly compare with those from four years ago when overallbudgets grew by 5.2%, but they’re still promising considering recentdreary results.

Twenty percent of those surveyed said price is the main factorwhen selecting a primary disk vendor. Although not the top criteria(features was No. 1 at 30%), that’s the highest ranking we’ve ever seenfor price. For smaller companies, price was the No. 1 factor for the firsttime. All in all, it looks like 2010 has been a year of struggle for smallerbusinesses, while much of the storage action seems to be happeningmidmarket, with midsized companies looking to add even more newdisk capacity than anticipated last spring.

DISK SYSTEMS STILL CENTER STAGEBudgets may be inching upward, but storage demands and disk capacitygrowth continue to grow by leaps and bounds. Once again, disk capacityjumped by double digits and respondents said managing disk capacitymade storage configuration and data protection more challenging.

Respondents will add an average of 40 TB of disk capacity this year.That’s the same figure reported last spring but 17% higher than notedon last fall’s survey. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen an up-and-down pattern where new disk capacity numbers are high in thespring survey and then drop off in the fall. This time, 2010’s spring andfall numbers are the same, so it’s safe to assume there were no cornersto cut this year.

As expected, larger companies plan to add the most capacity: an average of 81 TB, down slightly from the spring. Midsized companies

have been busy, adding an averageof 53 TB, which is a big jump fromthe 35 TB anticipated just six monthsago. Likely feeling their budgetssqueezed, small companies plan to add 19 TB of additional disk ca-pacity, well off the 25 TB expectedlast spring, but in line with last year’s number.

FC vs. iSCSI vs. SSDFibre Channel (FC) arrays still represent the biggest chunk of already installed storage systemswith 52% of the pie. But the slicehas been shrinking from a high of

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ABOUT THE SURVEYThe Storage magazine/SearchStorage.comPurchasing Intentions survey is fieldedtwice a year; this is the eighth year the survey has been conducted. Storage maga-zine subscribers and SearchStorage.commembers are invited to participate in thesurvey, which gathers information relatedto storage managers’ purchasing plans for avariety of data storage product categories.This edition had 609 qualified respondentsacross a broad spectrum of industries, withthe average company size measured ashaving revenue of $1.3 billion.


70% in the spring of 2008. During that sameperiod, iSCSI systems increased from 27%to 38%, while NAS and multiprotocol eachpicked up a couple of points. With the addi-tion of higher performing SAS disks, iSCSIsystems have reduced the performance gapcompared to FC and continue to provideeconomical high-density storage.

It’s hard to consider iSCSI an upstart oran SMB-only product anymore. Forty-fourpercent of respondents either deployed or plan to deploy an iSCSI system this year—the highest number we’ve seen. iSCSIgrowth has been steady if not spectacular,and now there’s growing interest in using

iSCSI storage in conjunction with virtualized server environments.Much of iSCSI’s growth appears to be coming from midsized firms;

52% of those surveyed are installing iSCSI this year, a six point jumpfrom a year ago. But larger organizations are also increasingly optingfor iSCSI; 39% have deployed iSCSI or plan to—a four-point increase vs.last fall. While attracting larger outfits, iSCSI has maintained its solidpresence in small companies, with 42% taking the iSCSI route this year.

iSCSI is still most popular for end-user storage, but it’s almost aswidely used for backup and email. And if there were confidence issueswith early iSCSI systems, users seem quite comfortable with the matureproducts available today as 44% run their companies’ mission-critical applications on iSCSI.

WHERE THOSE DISK DOLLARS GOWhether they’re Fibre Channel or iSCSI, midrange systems account forthe biggest chunk of storage system spending. Overall, storage managerssay 45% of their systems dollars are designated for midrange arrays,pretty much the same figure we’ve seen for the past three years.

But complete systems don’t account for the biggest portion of alldisk-related spending. In a trend we saw developing all the way back inthe spring of 2007, storage managers continue to earmark the largestpercentage of their disk budget (36%) to buying disks to add to alreadyinstalled systems. Four years ago, FC arrays won this race hands downwith a 59% share, but today that number has dwindled to 17%, just acouple of points higher than new NAS systems (15%) and new multipro-tocol arrays (13%).

As for who storage managers are buying their arrays from, EMC Corp.is still king of the hill with 31% of respondents noting they’ve bought anarray from EMC or intend to buy one before the year is out. Second-

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Purchased/plan to purchase a disk system from:

EMC 31%

HP 29%

IBM 26%

Dell 25%

NetApp 19%

TOP

5


place Hewlett-Packard Co., with 29%,has certainly narrowed the gap (whichhas been as high as 11 points on pastsurveys). IBM, Dell Inc., NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems round out therest of the top six choices.

SOLID INTEREST IN SOLID STATEIt’s expensive, its reliability might be suspect and it’s too soon to tell if solid-state storage can make it in enterprise environments, but the technology is really, really hot.

Fifteen percent of respondents areusing solid-state storage—almost doublethe number reported one year ago. Add to that another 9% who are implementing solid state this year (triple the fall 2009 number) and the 32% who are evaluating it, and you have some pretty impressivenumbers for a fledgling technology. Last year, 54% had no plans relatedto solid-state storage, but that figure dipped to 45% this time.

So far, the most popular place to put solid-state drives (SSDs) is intraditional arrays (61%); that’s not much of a surprise as practicallyevery disk system vendor currently offers an SSD option, and a growingnumber of vendors—including Fujitsu, Intel Corp., Pliant Technology Inc.,STEC Inc., Seagate and Toshiba among others—make solid-state storagein standard disk formats like SATA and SAS. Approximately 44% of thosequestioned use SSDs in their servers, while 26% have implemented solid state in the form of caching appliances that sit in front of harddisk systems.

However, price is still a deterrent for plenty of storage managers andit’s the top reason (57%) for not implementing solid-state storage. Thirty-seven percent of respondents passed on solid-state drives because theirhard disk performance is sufficient, while 31% feel they just need tolearn more about solid-state storage before making a purchase.

CLOUD COVERAGE INCREASINGIf you think the whole cloud storage deal is simply too much hype, youmight be partly right. But many of your colleagues see it as a reality.The numbers are up across the board and doubling—or nearly doubling—forall types of cloud storage services.

Twenty-three percent of respondents use some form of cloud storagefor primary or nearline storage vs. 14% last spring. The most popular application is for disaster recovery (DR), with 11% using cloud services to bolster their DR plans. Last spring, 4% trusted some of their data center

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Purchased/plan topurchase storageswitches from:

Cisco 58%

Brocade 37%

QLogic 9%

CipherMax 3%

Dell 3%

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primary data to the cloud; this time around,users have more than doubled (9%). Sevenpercent use cloud storage for some nearlinedata, while 6% park remote-office data in thecloud.

And it looks like cloud storage usagecould pick up significantly. Seventeen per-cent of those surveyed indicate their firmswill use a cloud storage service for DR in2010; storing primary and remote-office datain the cloud is in the works for 11%, while10% are thinking cloud for nearline data.

Although those percentages aren’t stag-gering, the numbers for cloud storage serviceusage do indicate that users are shedding

some of their apprehensions about shipping data off site.

STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION ADVANCES SLOWLYIf you’re waiting for “the year of storage virtualization,” 2010 isn’t shapingup that way. There may never be a definitive turning point for storagevirtualization as its adoption is decidedly more evolutionary than revo-lutionary. Going virtual is still a major undertaking for a storage shop,and while the move to virtualized storage might be inevitable, it’s justnot going to happen that fast.

Thirty-two percent of respondents report their shops have virtualizedat least some of their storage systems, a slight dip from last spring’s35%, but higher than in previous surveys. While the numbers haven’tshifted seismically, they have drifted in the direction of virtualizationwith steady increases over the past two to three years.

Few companies have taken the full virtualization plunge. Seventy-four percent say some of their block storage has been virtualized, while73% have virtualized some of their file storage systems. Both of thosefigures are higher than what we’ve seen previously, suggesting thatmore organizations are running pilots or doing limited implementations of storage virtualization technologies.

TAPE REDUXWhile its overall numbers continue to trend downward, tape remains a viable part of most companies’ data protection schemes. A third ofrespondents plan to reduce their reliance on tape this year, while 22%will increase tape usage. The latter is one of the lowest figures we’veseen, while the 33% cutting back on tape is the highest.

So it’s hardly a rosy picture for tape vendors, although LTO-5 isshowing some signs of possibly breathing a little life into the technology.

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Purchased/plan to purchase tapehardware from:

HP 24%

IBM 23%

Dell 19%

Oracle 12%

Quantum 9%

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For those who plan to purchase tape libraries, 20% would outfit those rigswith LTO-5 drives—a relatively highnumber considering LTO-5’s newness.LTO-5’s 1.6 TB capacity (compressed)makes it an ideal fit for long-termarchival, but it also advances anothertrend we’ve tracked: tape libraries aregetting smaller. The average number ofslots in planned tape library purchaseshas dropped again, this time to 92,which is an all-time low on our survey.

It looks like data deduplication is alsotaking its toll on the beleaguered tapemarket. Seventy-two percent of thosesurveyed will spin off at least some backup data to tape—a drop of 14points compared to three years ago. With the help of dedupe, users cankeep more backup data nearby on disk for longer periods of time andthat means less of it hits tape.

BACKUP = DISKGeneral spending for disk-based backup is still behind pre-recessionlevels. With 39% increasing their 2010 disk-to-disk (D2D) spending (aboutthe same as last spring and a few points lower than fall 2009), it lookslike a combination of maturing D2D technologies and budgetary con-straints have slowed spending just a bit.

Using disk as a file-system target for backup is still the most popularD2D application with 47% having that current setup. Dedupe is in useat 25% of companies, and another 29% will implement data dedupethis year.

When asked specifically about their spending plans for deduplicationtechnologies, 38% will spend more while 33% expect to maintain currentspending levels. The portion of respondents who indicated “no plans” fordedupe reached an all-time low of 20%.

We keep expecting continuous data protection (CDP) to take off, especially as it’s so well suited to provide data protection for virtual-ized servers, but its flight has been delayed yet again. Only 9% will buya CDP product this year and the overall plans for CDP show only a onepoint hike for those who will increase their spending.

If CDP is still struggling to find its place on the backup scene, cloud—oronline—backup appears to be carving out a niche fairly quickly. Thirty-four percent of respondents use some form of cloud backup vs. 19% ayear ago and 13% in 2008. Email and databases are still the two mostpopular applications to back up into the cloud, but there’s significant

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Purchased/plan topurchase backupsoftware from:

Symantec 35%

IBM 18%

EMC 15%

CommVault 11%

HP 9%

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interest in backing up user files and laptops using cloud services.Backing up virtual servers remains a persistent problem for backup

administrators, many of whom are still using traditional backup tech-niques to safeguard their company’s virtual servers. But that’s changing:one-third use traditional backup agents loaded into virtual machines(VMs), a decline of approximately 11 points from a year ago. Althoughmarked for extinction, 22% still use VMware Consolidated Backup, andabout 10% have turned to VM-specific backup products (an increase offour points vs. a year ago). Approximately 6% use CDP for their virtualservers.

Users still stumble over the complexity of backing up virtual machines(25%), while 22% find they’re backing up too much stuff from their virtualenvironments. Another 18% have run into issues getting file access for recoveries.

DISASTER RECOVERY ON AN EVEN KEELAnticipated spending for disaster recovery is about the same as in pre-vious surveys going back through 2009, so it’s holding its own but stillfalling short of its pre-recession peak.

Remote replication is still the key storage spend for DR. It edged outoff-site tape storage a couple of years ago and has been extending itslead ever since. This year, it’s favored 48% to 28%. Broken down further,it’s clear that companies are relying less on tape for data recoveriesduring a disaster. Only 23% will increase spending on off-site tapestorage, although 45% expect to keep off-site tape charges at 2009levels. In contrast, 39% (a little less than last spring) will increasespending for remote replication technologies; a scant 4% will reducethat spending; and only 16% (the lowest number we’ve seen) don’t haveremote replication in their 2010 disaster recovery plans.

REASON TO BE OPTIMISTICIt would be easier to be optimistic about storage purchasing if the budgetnumbers were just a little more upbeat. But they are up—very modestlyso—for two consecutive surveys, which means the purse strings areloosening. What’s more apparent, perhaps, is how data storage managershave focused on technologies that deliver the proverbial bang for thebuck and help them manage their storage more efficiently. 2

Rich Castagna ([email protected]) is editorial director of theStorage Media Group.

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shot spots | terri mcclure

ERVER VIRTUALIZATION is one of the most crucial technologies in IT today. And a robust and efficient storage infrastructure designed to support the virtualserver environment is equally as important. Yet many users neglect this sup-porting framework when planning for server virtualization. If a chain is onlyas strong as its weakest link, IT needs to ensure that storage isn’t the weaklink in the virtualized application infrastructure chain. To realize the greatesteconomies of scale and achieve optimalperformance, organizations must carefullyweigh their options when choosing a stor-age protocol to support their virtual serverenvironments.

WHICH PROTOCOL SHOULD YOU CHOOSE?There’s no absolute or standard answerto this question. Both protocols—blockand file—have distinct advantages andspecific limitations. Block-based storageis the more mature technology and cur-rently has a larger installed base. NFS,though, has much to recommend it,most notably ease of management anddeployment in virtual server environments. Before choosing any productor technology, organizations should first examine their business goals,technology requirements and budgetary needs, and choose the solutionthat best suits their criteria. I’ve outlined the pros and cons of block-based and file-based storage deployments below. This is good informationfor data storage managers to have on hand when deciding how to supporttheir virtual environments.

BLOCK-BASED STORAGEStorage-area network (SAN) or block-based storage is a mature technology.Advantages to this approach include:

• Optimization for high performance and reliability for data-intensiveworkloads such as online trading.

Before choosing anyproduct or technology,organizations should first examine their busi-ness goals, technologyrequirements and budgetary needs, andchoose the solution thatbest suits their criteria.

Block vs. file storage to supportvirtual server environments

Here are the pros and cons of block-based and file-based storage deployments to help you

decide how to support your virtual environment.


• Many block-based storage deployments have their own dedicatedhigh-speed networks. This facilitates faster throughput and improved performance.

• Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI host bus adapters (HBAs) in a block-based storage implementation usually feature protocol offloads. TheseHBAs perform protocol-related functions much quicker than the main CPU and free up CPU resources to perform other tasks.

• A large pool of experienced administrators.• A wide variety of available physical management tools from virtual-

ization vendors like VMware, as well as third-party suppliers.

The potential disadvantages/drawbacks to block-based storage are asfollows:

• Switches and HBAs can be significantly more expensive than thestandard network equipment required for NFS.

• There’s a layer of complexity and cost associated with acquiring andmanaging a separate storage network.

• Greater degree of deployment and ongoing administrative complexity.Creating and managing LUNs—including switch zoning, LUN sizing and determining how many virtual servers can be mapped to the LUN—can get very complex. In a traditional physical server-based storage network,LUNs are the logical components that convert physical disk space intological storage space, which the host server operating system can thenaccess and utilize. In a virtualized storage environment, LUNs are the layerthat sits between the physical disk and the application.

• Requires experienced storage administrators familiar with the specificvendor’s storage.

• VMware’s file system has a 2 TB data store limitation for block data,which, with today’s data growth characteristics, can mean creating andmanaging many relatively small data stores.

FILE-BASED STORAGENFS is a file-based protocol and is used to establish a client/server rela-tionship between a NAS device that acts like a server and the client (ex., VMware ESX or vSphere 4.0 host). In contrast to block storage, the file storage manages the layout and structure of the files and directorieson the physical storage. It also handles some aspects of shared accessand provides primitives that can be used for coordinated access frommultiple servers. While NFS wasn’t initially supported by VMware, it’squickly coming into its own as a foundational storage infrastructure tosupport virtual server environments. Individual NAS and SAN products may offer advanced data management features such as data deduplica-tion and thin provisioning that become even more valuable with virtual infrastructures.

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Among the advantages of NFS:• NFS is standards based and runs on IP networks.• It’s easy to configure, deploy and manage in a virtual server environment.

IT managers can quickly and efficiently provision storage environments.• NFS typically doesn’t require the IT department to use separate,

dedicated Fibre Channel storage management resources. Instead, theycan use their Windows or Linux system administrators to simultaneouslyoversee and administer the server and storage.

• Users can deploy a consolidated Ethernet infrastructure across all appsinstead of a separate Fibre Channel network just for storage traffic.

• NFS supports larger data stores of multiple terabytes, eliminating the2 TB data store limit associated with using block-based storage. Users canstore a large number of virtual machines (VMs) in fewer data stores.

• Resizing NFS-based file systems is done online and relatively easily.• NFS offers advanced features and functions via file systems. NFS-

based storage offers more granular support for snapshots and clones,which are done at the file, file system or directory—rather than LUN—level.

• Thin provisioning is the default for NFS data stores and reduces initialstorage consumption.

The potential disadvantages/drawbacks to NAS storage are:• TCP/IP performance overhead. While some vendor tests indicate NFS

can perform as well as block-based systems, in some instances raw devicemapping and block storage may be required to eliminate TCP/IP chatter andoverhead.

• NFS lacks the efficiency of native multipathing, a feature common toblock systems. The impending availability of NFS 4.1, featuring parallel NFS,will alleviate this drawback.

• Block storage is still the predominant data center protocol. As complexas managing SANs, mapping LUNs and zoning ports is, it’s what IT storagemanagers know and are comfortable with, and it works.

The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages when it comes to usingNFS to support virtual server environments. Using NFS simplifies the storageenvironment, enabling users to “do more with less”; this means fewer datastores supporting more VMs, greater deduplication ratios, less provisioningwork and time, and the list goes on and on. There’s no way to know whichapproach is best for your IT shop until you’ve evaluated which protocols andrequirements (performance, parallel NFS, data store limits) are a priority foryour organization. Knowing those priorities and understanding these prosand cons is a good, strong starting point for optimizing your storage environ-ment for virtualization. 2

Terri McClure is a senior storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, Mass.

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mCapacity optimization isstorage’s newest hot topic

With demonstrated results for backup, data reduction techniques are now being aimed

at primary storage. It’s a hot market, but there are still plenty of wrinkles to iron out.

ERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS are alive and well in the storage industry, particularlywhen it comes to storage capacity optimization (SCO). SCO technologies,such as data deduplication and compression, increase the utilization of primary, secondary and/or archived storage by shrinking the amount ofstored data.

Despite being a relatively new market, we’ve seen a recent surge of SCOconsolidation. In a single month, Dell Inc. scooped up compression anddedupe vendor Ocarina Networks Inc. and IBM picked up real-time compressionsupplier Storwize Inc. And don’t forget EMC Corp.’s acquisition of Data DomainInc. last year.

DEDUPE SLIMS BACKUPSSCO technologies have traditionally had their greatest impact on backupstorage, with data deduplication playing the leading role. Dedupe vendorscan often reduce needed backup capacity by 90% to 95% or, put anotherway, increase effective backup capacity by 10 times to 20 times. But whiletraditional deduplication can pay big dividends in shrinking backup capacityrequirements, it hasn’t been as effective in primary storage environments.So for primary storage, the focus has shifted somewhat to compression-based technologies.

OPTIMIZING PRIMARY STORAGE WITH COMPRESSIONPrimary storage has particular characteristics that make it difficult to shrink.Unlike backup storage, it doesn’t consist of a lot of nearly identical data. Andmany primary storage environments are performance-sensitive and can’t beslowed down by optimization processes.

Storwize’s technology compresses file-based data in-line with little or no impact on application performance. The Storwize appliance sits betweena NAS array (NFS or CIFS) and users of the data, and typically reduces thestored data footprint by 50% to 90%.

Storwize only works with file storage, and its compression algorithmsaren’t optimized for specific file formats. But what it does, it does well. ForIBM, Storwize will work with its N series and SONAS NAS systems; it will also

read/write | jeff byrne


work with non-IBM NAS systems from EMC, Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co., NetAppand others.

In contrast, Ocarina Networks compresses data using an out-of-band,post-process approach, reading and compressing stored data and then writingthe smaller files back to storage. Ocarina’s technology is content-aware so its optimization is tailored to the particular type of content. Overall, thecapacity savings afforded by Ocarina are on a scale similar to those deliveredby Storwize.

Dell has offered (or shown interest in) several competing storage capacityoptimization technologies and will now need to sort out its product portfolioto see where Ocarina Networks best fits. Ocarina recently introduced a soft-ware-based deduplication product that can be embedded in other vendors’storage arrays, but Dell is likely to discontinue that OEM business. That wouldleave Permabit Technology Corp. as the only vendor that will provide an em-beddable SCO solution to other storage system vendors. Looking ahead, webelieve Quantum Corp. might also OEM an embeddable SCO solution, combiningits StorNext file system with its dedupe capabilities.

THE HOLY GRAIL: END-TO-ENDOPTIMIZATIONSo what’s driving this wave of storagecapacity optimization market consoli-dation? All of the leading data storagecompanies are in need of effectiveSCO solutions, and they’re scurryingto acquire technology from the rapid-ly dwindling ranks of independentSCO vendors. Typically, vendors accumulate technologies to shore upor fill gaps in their SCO portfolios, andthen try to piece the technologies to-gether into a coherent whole. More often than not, the results are collectionsof poorly integrated, often incompatible point solutions.

Users are the biggest losers in this game. Consider this scenario. A storagemanager selects a deduplication product for backup, and successfully reducesbackup storage by 90%. So far, so good; but what comes next? Maybe theynow want to move inactive chunks of deduplicated backup data to an archivewhere it can be searched, used for e-discovery and so forth. But that can’t bedone without rehydrating the deduped data back to its original file format,thus losing the benefits of the original deduplication effort.

Now suppose our storage manager decides to use a compression app tooptimize primary storage. Once again, there are some limitations. In somecases, compressed files will need to be rehydrated before they can bemoved among different storage tiers. And the same could happen if you

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All of the leading data storage companies are in need of effective SCOsolutions, and they’re scurrying to acquire technology from the rapidly dwindling ranks of independent SCO vendors.


want to dedupe the compressed data during backup—you may have torehydrate the data.

That might not seem like such a big deal, but rehydrating consumesnetworking and CPU resources, as well as the disk capacity to store thedata once it’s rehydrated. Rehydration may also result in the loss of infor-mation, where data has beendeduplicated or compressed using a “lossy” algorithm.

There’s currently no easy wayfor users to “knit together” di-verse SCO solutions to enablestored data, once optimized, toretain the benefits of that opti-mization throughout its lifecycle.Instead, you’ll have to be contentto choose the best optimizationsolution for each storage tier(backup, archive and primary)and put up with the inefficien-cies caused by data crossing those boundaries. It’s not likely to get betterin the short term, as vendors focus on building and differentiating theirown proprietary stacks and interoperability standards fall by the wayside.All of that makes planning a capacity optimization strategy for the nextthree years to five years pretty tough.

We recommend you try to stick with a single vendor that’s in theprocess of integrating its various storage capacity optimization tech-nologies; it’s probably the best opportunity to achieve something closeto end-to-end optimization at some point. Several vendors are pursuingend-to-end strategies, but none is delivering on the promise yet.

Over the long term, we think your interests would be better served bystandardized, cross-vendor solutions that enable interoperability amongdifferent SCO solutions. With a standard way to communicate amongoptimized systems, it might be possible to migrate or re-tier optimizeddata without the overhead of rehydration. In addition, vendors would beable to use their optimization technology outside of single storage boxes,or cross-license their technology as part of a richer SCO ecosystem. Butright now, standardization seems unlikely.

Still, we can be optimistic that the best days of the capacity opti-mization market lie ahead. Several major vendors we’ve spoken withsay they understand the ultimate goal even as they’re amassing piecesof the puzzle. 2

Jeff Byrne is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. He can bereached at [email protected].

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There’s currently no easyway for users to “knittogether” diverse SCOsolutions to enable storeddata, once optimized, toretain the benefits of thatoptimization throughout its lifecycle.


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Space and time are still backup bugaboosBackup has never been much fun and with IT shops typically doubling their disk capacity every couple of years, there’s little light at the end of the backup tunnel.Considering the magnitude of the responsibility and the sheer number of things thatcan go wrong, it’s remarkable that only 33% of the respondents to our survey citedfailed backups as their biggest headache. But the amount of data they have to wadethrough is definitely a sore point, with 58% saying their biggest struggle is meetingnew capacity requirements. Toward that end, 38% are currently using data dedupli-cation, while 44% are seriously evaluating it. If space is one dimension that’s vexingbackup administrators, time is another: 46% say it takes too long to complete theirbackups and 44% note the same about data recoveries. Adding disk to the backupmix has helped to ease some backup woes and reduced the importance of tape fordaily backups and operational recoveries. Sixty-two percent of respondents are addingdisk capacity to deal with backup issues, while only a third are adding tape capacity.Continuous data protection (CDP), which could turn the traditional backup paradigmon its ear, is finally getting some serious attention, with 32% using CDP now and 38%actively kicking CDP’s tires. —Rich Castagna

“We are investing a huge amount on backup hardware, but the problem remains more or less the same.”

—Survey respondent

snapshot

How much storage capacity are you currently managing?

Managing rapidly growing capacity requirements

Securing backup data

Meeting multiple app and/orbusiness requirements

Performing backups for remote or branch offices

It’s getting too expensive to back everything up

Backing up virtual server environments

Negotiating vendorsupport/managing licenses

58%

44%

35%

34%

27%

27%

12%

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60


What are the biggest backup and recovery issues you’re facing today?*

52%Less than

10 TB31%11 TB to 50 TB

12% 51 TB to100 TB

62%

5% More than

100 TB

What backup and recovery problems do you experience most often ?*

51% We’re backing up redundant data

46% It takes too long to back up data

44% It takes too long to recover data

33% We have too many backup failures

29% Our reporting and monitoring capabilities are inadequate

*Respondents could select up to five choices

are adding more disk to solve backup problems.

*Respondents could select up to five choices


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EMC Backup and Recovery Solutions, page 10E-Guide: Best Practices for Data Protection and Recovery in Virtual Environments

E-Guide: How Dedupe and Virtualization Work Together

IBM, page 21Learn More About IBM Comprehensive Data Protection Solution Express

See Additional IBM Solutions Designed and Priced for Midsize Companies

Iron Mountain, page 12How to Compare Enterprise PC Online Backup and Recovery Service Providers

Achieving Security With Cloud PC Backup

Nexsan, page 4DCIG 2010 Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide

Pillar, page 7Special Report: Top Ranked Midrange Array Storage Controllers

Gartner Webinar: “A New Approach to Designing a Modern Storage Infrastructure”

Quantum, page 16Why Choose Quantum for Deduplication?

DXi Disk-based Deduplication From Quantum Improves Protection and Reduces Costs

Check out the following resources from our sponsors:

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http://www.quantum.com/Products/Disk-BasedBackup/Index.aspx

http://www.quantum.com/Solutions/datadeduplication/Index.aspx

http://www.quantum.com/

http://go.pillardata.com/forms/Gartner-Webinar-2010

http://go.pillardata.com/forms/DCIG-Controllers-Special-Report-Reg

http://www.pillardata.com/

http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1276010513_256.html

http://www.nexsan.com/


http://www.bitpipe.com/data/document.do?res_id=1282837231_998

http://www.ironmountain.com/

http://www.ibm.com/engines

http://www.ibm.com/engines/data2

http://www.ibm.com/us/en/



www.emc.com/solutions/business-need/backup-recovery-archiving/backup-recovery.htm

Documents

to make your storage work better with virtual servers andmedia.techtarget.com/searchStorage/downloads/... · The buying company is just looking to kill off potential competition (or