by Bruce Kornfeld, Lead, Dell Storage Alliances — September 07, 2010

Looking back in time, backing up data from desktops and servers to tapes made sense. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IT system; you’d be foolish not to back up your data. Having that insurance policy sitting on a shelf or at an offsite location was critical. If an “event” occurred, the clock starts ticking and it is IT’s job to bring their organization back online. How long? A few hours? A few days? A week? Looking toward the future, using tape as an insurance policy for bad things happening in the datacenter just won’t work for much longer. Data sets are too large, pipes from tape back to disk are too slow, and the time it takes to physically find tapes, ship tapes and restore from tape just doesn’t cut it anymore. The pace of information flow and business change will be too fast for restoring from tape in the future. (Are we already there today?)

Alternatives to tape backup

There are many technologies out there offering superior ways to ensure that operations can be back up and running shortly after any “event” or to avoid downtime completely—based on budget, of course.  Many forward-thinking IT departments back up data to disk so that restores happen almost instantly. No more searching for the right tapes and waiting for tapes to spin in order to get back up and running. Some of the techniques that create backup sets on disk available today include:

• Increase the snapshot frequency on primary storage—manage those snapshots with the disk vendor’s user interface or a backup application. The data is already there ready to be used. These snapshots can also be sent to another physical disk system to provide extra protection.
• Use backup software (the way you always have) and write to disk instead of tape—a pretty common practice these days. The data could also be de-duplicated within the target disk. However, I suspect many are still ALSO writing the same data to tape—is this really necessary?
• De-dupe the data at the server and then send to disk—another method that is gaining momentum because less data needs to be sent to the backup disk—less to manage.
• Send backup sets to another location for disaster avoidance—bandwidth is a lot cheaper than it was 10 years ago and if you’re sending snapshots or de-duplicated backup sets the amount of disk needed in the remote location can be price competitive with sending, storing and managing tape after tape after tape...
  

What about accessing “old" data?

All of this discussion was about backup—being ready in case something bad happens. What about accessing all the old data that doesn’t really need to be accessed frequently? SEC filings from 3 years ago. Engineering drawings from the last product revision. Surveillance video. The CEOs keynote speech from the customer event 2 years ago. This is where an active archive comes in.

As a disk vendor, we’d LOVE to think that every organization would store their data on their primary storage disk forever. But that’s just not reality. Automatically tiering data within your primary storage is a great thing. But now there are techniques to create archives on secondary disk and tape systems so that your organization can have fast access to the information they need. It might appear that I’m suggesting that data never goes away. It just moves from fast disk to slower disk to tape over time—staying online and available the whole way. That’s the whole point. Archiving software is intelligent enough these days to help IT departments decide how long data needs to stay available so managing this process is getting easier. The key difference here is that these archives can now be on tape systems. Tape for archives—YES. Tape for backup—NO. Maybe the industry as a whole isn’t ready for this yet—but more and more will be moving there over time.

by Bruce Kornfeld, Lead, Dell Storage Alliances — August 31, 2010

With a promise to be one of the best IT shows this year, VMworld 2010 is upon us. For the first time, Compellent is a platinum sponsor of the show and plans to make a big splash. The show is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and runs this week to September 2.

From what I’ve seen so far, this is the biggest VMworld yet, and Compellent is proud to be a platinum sponsor. If you’re one of the 15,000 expected show attendees, please stop by our booth #1022 and check out all that we have in store for you.

The best way to learn how to maximize your investment in VMware is to hear best practices from other end-users. Outside of the Compellent booth, we will host three customer-led discussions with two of our customers: Heineken Netherlands and BioWare.

• Super Session: “Heineken Netherlands crafts high-performance data center with Compellent and VMware”
  Date/time/location: Wednesday, September 1, 2010 from 3 – 4 PM in Room #134
  
  I have the pleasure of co-presenting with VMware and our newest customer, Heineken Netherlands. Joining me will be Mike Robers, virtualization team lead, and Luicen de Konink, project manager, of Heineken Netherlands, Parag Patel, vice president of global alliances for VMware.
  
  Not long ago, Heineken Netherlands, one of the world’s premier brewers, tapped Fluid Data storage from Compellent to help deliver new performance and efficiencies to a recently upgraded VMware infrastructure. Hear them share how this private cloud combines VMware and Compellent automated tiering, solid state drives, and robust reporting to ensure that the brewer’s data-intensive quality assurance and processing control measures guarantee that each bottle meets the lofty standards of the label.
  
  Stick around after the session to find out how you can put some “Fluid Data” in your den; we will be giving away Krups “BeerTender” with four Heineken beer glasses and $20 gift card to purchase a Heineken mini keg.
  
  
• Breakout Sessions: “BioWare’s Quest: The Search for Business Continuity”
  Date/time/location: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 from 3:30 – 4:30 PM in Room #310 and on Thursday, September 2 from 10:30 – 11:30 AM in Room #309
  Join Craig Miller, senior team lead of infrastructure support at BioWare and Scott DesBles, director of technical solutions at Compellent to learn more about using the latest storage and server virtualization technology.
  
  At BioWare, a division of Electronic Arts, a team of talented engineers bring entire fantasy worlds to life through popular video games like Mass Effect, Sonic Chronicles and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. To provide the most robust test environments, speed development time and ensure data protection, the BioWare IT team relies on a dynamic combination of Fluid Data storage from Compellent and VMware. See how the company uses a combination of snapshots, replication and archiving to recover data back as far as 15 years and manage more that 150 TB of active data.
  
  
• Customer Roundtable Discussion from VMware Social Media and Blogger’s Lounge
  Date/time/location: Tuesday, September 2 from 8:00 – 9:00 AM at the VMware Social Media and Blogger’s Lounge, Moscone South street level entrance
  
  A live discussion featuring Aethion, a technology consulting firm, and Alphastaff, a leading HR services company, moderated by Dave Vellante, Wikibon analyst and founder.
  
  
• Stuck at the office? Join us online!
  #SANChat: Wednesday, September 1 from 1 – 2:30 PM Twitter for #SANchat to talk about what’s going on at the show and what we’ve learned about what’s next for virtualization. Guest moderating will be blogger @rootwyrm, otherwise known as Phil Jaenke, and @AmandaJZook, a Compellent customer from Biola University. Follow them and @DellCompellent for more details.
  
  

During show hours, stop by our booth #1022, across the aisle from VMware booth and take part in all that we have planned for you:

• Product demos: Compellent will demonstrate our virtualized storage platform and how it works with technology partners like VMware and Cisco. Technology demonstrations in the Compellent booth will include: vSphere 4.1 Client Plug-in, Live Volume and Enterprise Manager. Compellent end-users from Aethion, Alphastaff, Biola University and BioWare will also be available throughout the show to discuss best practices and real world implementations.
• Savvis Symphony demo: In our booth, Savvis, a cloud computing infrastructure outsourcing provider, will be demonstrating their cloud service “Symphony” using VMware, Cisco and Compellent technologies. The services they will be demonstrating are: Symphony VPDC, Symphony Open, and Symphony Dedicated.
• VDI Performance Demo: Atlantis Computing, a leading provider VDI storage and performance optimization solutions, will showcase how its Atlantis ILIO solution can boost VDI desktop performance by 10 times using VMware View, Cisco UCS and Compellent technologies at booth 1140.
• Join us on Tuesday, August 31 for the VMworld “Hall Crawl” from 4 – 6 PM. We’ll have a cold Heineken waiting for you!
• Relax and unwind in our “Fluid Data” lounge where you can take a seat on our comfy couches and enjoy some compelling company while networking with peers and Compellent end-users.
• Register to win one of five $500 Visa cash cards to be given away at our booth on Thursday, Sept. 2 at 1 PM. But remember—you must be present to win.

by Bruce Kornfeld, Lead, Dell Storage Alliances — February 22, 2010

Last week NetApp’s Tom Georgens said the concept of automated tiered storage is “dying” and his comments were reported on The Register and Storage Soup from SearchStorage.

The only thing that's dying in storage is static data and the belief that the same old storage systems are intelligent enough to sort and store ever-increasing amounts of data in a budget-constrained world. Any vendor who believes that automated data movement is not the future of storage either misunderstands where the industry is headed, or simply can’t offer this feature in their portfolio. For some vendors, automated tiered storage is hard to deliver but most acknowledge that it is becoming a core requirement – just look at EMC’s recent intentions with FAST.

Typically, entire volumes of data need to be moved, which is time consuming and could cause application interruptions or slow-downs. When automated tiered storage is done inside the volume at the block level, there is no disruption to applications and admins don't even have to think about it. The fact is, if data isn’t being actively used or accessed by applications, why would anyone keep it on expensive storage if they don’t have to?  

We believe this is a waste of scarce resources that could be better used. Furthermore, solving customers performance needs with very expensive cache is a throwback to the way things were done in the '80s and '90s and is a never-ending proposition for users—once you start you just can't stop.  IT departments can't afford to manage data that way anymore.

Compellent’s Fluid Data storage enables automated tiering at a granular level between any drive technology, speed and even RAID level and we’ve been delivering this capability for over 5 years. We move all the inactive blocks of data to the lowest cost tier possible and free up the performance tiers to handle the active data. Shifting data between SSD, FC, SATA, and SAS works quietly and unobtrusively in the background. Our customers love our “set it and forget it approach”  and 80 percent of their upgrade orders are for the slowest spinning, low-cost SATA or SAS drives. That’s why automated tiering has proven popular – because it saves customers  a lot on disk drives, space and power costs. The fact that most large, legacy storage vendors are now introducing their own solutions only validate that customers are asking for automated tiered storage. Automatic tiering is one party no storage vendor can afford to miss.