From a Backup & Recovery Hands-On Labs perspective, this amount of time is the exact time that I and the rest of the team working on the them have to “dot the I’s”, “cross the t’s”, “put a nice bow”, or whatever your favorite expression may be on each lab module. Be assured, we are going to make sure that this year’s EMC World Labs are the BEST and MOST AMBITIOUS we have ever showcased.

I would encourage anybody planning on attending EMC World to definitely come down and find me in the EMC World Hands-On Labs and check us out!

In this blog post, I wanted to go ahead and give you a sneak peek at some of the titles and abstracts for some of the Hands-On Labs we are working on, then it is back in the lab for me to make sure everything is working beautifully!

The following labs cover the ENTIRE EMC backup product portfolio and showcase some pretty snazzy integration with our industry partners to really provide complete backup solutions, particularly in the virtualization space:

Next Generation Database backup with vFabric Data Director and EMC Data Domain Boost for Oracle Recovery Manager

This lab walks through how a cutting-edge enterprise IT group worked to assure that the Database-as-a-Service they were providing to their business lines met the same data retention and availability requirements asked for by the business in other IT operations. Included in this lab, customers can choose between detailed scenarios involving setting up and configuring backup of individual databases deployed using vFabric Data Director and Data Domain Boost for Oracle RMAN.

Protecting VMware vCloud Director with EMC Avamar

In this lab users will follow an IT shop which has just implemented a new vCloud Director environment, and look to extend the EMC Avamar technology including VADP Image backup & restores along with extensive database backup plugins to provide full vCloud Director backup and recovery. Configuration of EMC Avamar for individual VM Image backups as well as integration with VCD for full backup and recovery of vApps will be highlighted.

Leveraging Industry Leading EMC Storage, and Backup Solutions in a Virtualized Environment

This Lab will walk the participant through some common challenges faced by IT organizations today, as they rush to get new products to market and do more with less in an ever changing technology landscape. In this lab the Participant will integrate EMC products with VMware to solve these challenges. Lab includes Isilon, EMC Avamar DT/LT, and EMC Avamar VMware Image Backup

Leveraging EMC Networker and EMC Data Domain for Business Critical Applications

This lab will leverage the standard EMC NetWorker administration tools, demonstrate the unified environment in a single-pane-of-glass GUI view.   The user will experience the ease of configuration by using wizards with auto-discovery capability for Data Domain, Oracle with DD Boost and VADP.  The user will start a backup and then view the backup details by leveraging the standard NMC reporting capabilities.

EMC SourceOne for E-Mail Management, Archiving, Reclamation, and eDiscovery

EMC SourceOne Email Management and SourceOne Discovery Manager provide organizations the necessary archiving and eDiscovery tools to improve operational efficiencies, comply with corporate and regulatory requirements, provide rapid response to discovery requests and enable good information governance. This hands-on-lab will demonstrate how this is accomplished.

As you can tell, we are jam-packed with content! So make sure you include the EMC Backup & Recovery Hands-On Labs in your busy schedule! We are open a total of 36 hours throughout the conference so there is plenty of time to come play!

See you in Vegas!

So, VSPEX, it is not just another “v” product name for us IT geeks to remember, it is a solution foundation and reference architecture for our Partners and their Customers to deploy virtualized infrastructure on an EMC industry leading storage foundation.  Ok… You’re probably asking for the translations from the wordy marketing speak I used just now… right? Ok, here it is in geek speak… We give you the storage platform and at the same time provide you with guidance in connecting your desired flavor of compute and networking infrastructure for your very own customized cloud-in-a-box. VSPEX can easily be built for various Hypervisor platforms and customized through our VSPEX reference architectures for both VMware vSphere 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V.

So what makes VSPEX different from any other similar offering that you may find out there in the industry? Well, to me it is one that is mentioned in the product info, but can be overlooked when datasheets are read… it’s Backup and Recovery! This is a detail I feel that is quite frankly overlooked by other solutions offered in the market place today.

VSPEX is a proven reference architecture leveraging not only EMC’s Shared Storage but also EMC’s Industry Leading Backup and Recovery, both optimized for virtualization environments. The specific product models included in the reference architecture were custom selected specifically for the markets VSPEX is targeted for: “Small to Medium Businesses” and “Midmarket Businesses.” I have first hand knowledge of this process, as I have provided input, with those market segments in mind, from the Backup and Recovery perspective. As “One EMC” we put together a lot of time into validating that the right product models were selected to provide the optimal solution for VSPEX.

“VSPEX with EMC Avamar allows you to back up and protect your entire virtual environment. Using application-specific plugins for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint, you can easily and centrally manage all backups and recoveries.”

Specifically, for business critical applications deployed on the VSPEX platform, we have included EMC Avamar’s industry leading support for highly efficient deduplicated backup of those apps causing you data growth concerns. This not only includes the applications listed in the quote above, but also many more. For example, in a previous post I highlight and demo EMC Avamar’s features for Microsoft Exchange Granular Restore, which could feasibly be deployed on the VSPEX platform.
 
It is the attention to detail that I believe truly leads to complete and industry-leading solutions.   I can confidently say, we have clearly made backup and recovery a required detail in this type of offering to our Partners and Customers.

Exchange and SharePoint are just some of those mission critical apps, which I hear from customers as particular pain points. Mainly the pain points stem from the fact that users (like you and I) use these applications constantly, and therefore the data explosion (emails and unstructured content) is particularly experienced within the realm of these two applications. For example, depending on your popularity, I am betting you got several email notifications that popped up on your screen while reading this post. End users and business lines demand that we keep up with their content generation levels and retain that data for longer periods of time.

This solution highlighted in this paper, was actually tested and analyzed in our EMC solutions labs and some pretty detailed performance data is included so you can really see the benefits and returns of leveraging EMC infrastructure as both a foundation for VMware, and backup and recovery.

I will leave most of the technical details to the white paper, but just to highlight some of the benefits this solution brings over to typical Exchange and SharePoint deployments:

• Enables a rapid yet application-consistent backup and restore using Microsoft VSS framework.
• Enables fast recovery to support strict recovery time objectives (RTOs) for databases and single items without requiring a slow item level based backup.
• Significantly reduces backup windows and backup storage footprints by using Avamar client-side data deduplication to only store unique daily changes, while always maintaining daily full  backups for immediate single-step restore.
• Provides easy management by using one Avamar GUI for Avamar backups.
• Provides hardware load balancing that introduces redundancy to SharePoint and improves SharePoint farm performance.

The crux of what I am getting to is this: Since you expect the best tools to attack backup & recovery from your vendors, shouldn’t the vendors also be using the best tools to perform proper and accurate assessments of your environment?

Think about this, if a vendor has no idea or method for finding out (in a detailed way) what your backup capacity requirements are exactly, the entire implementation of the backup solution will be at best “hit or miss”. A guesstimate is just that, a guess. At the end of the day, once you start backing up your environment that “guess” can quickly turn into higher than initially expected upfront cost and budget overruns. In fact, some of you may have already experienced this exact scenario.

One way to avoid the above predicament is to ask very detailed questions to your vendor on the processes they use to “size” your environment. Do they simply do a calculation relying on data you already have or may not have? Or, do they leverage specially developed analysis tools that can easily scan your environment via some quick scripting and provide data, which can be fed into a detailed reporting and analysis tool?

I will leave you to decide on which method is good enough for you. The ideal for some of the customers I have talked to would be to avoid the back and forth and uncertainty during implementation which is much more stressful and costly then having an accurate assessment done prior to even purchasing the solution. Size DOES in fact matter!

From an EMC Backup & Recovery Perspective, our sales force is armed with carefully developed tools to properly assess your needs and environment.  One specific utility in every EMC Backup & Recovery Specialist’s tool bag is the EMC Backup System Sizer (EBSS).

As you can see from the EBSS screenshot shown here, by entering a couple of key data points which are gathered directly from your environment using various application scripts (also in the specialist’s tool bag), one can depict exactly what backup solution and more importantly the proper capacity required. This is key considering we know we definitely don’t want to over-purchase capacity when deploying these solutions, but more importantly, we don’t want to under-purchase capacity leaving mission critical data unprotected

I have had first hand experience in working with the development teams for EBSS. Even though this is strictly a tool for our technical sales force it is developed with the same care and innovation as our award-winning backup appliances and software. Not only that, but the development team working on these tools are entrenched deeply with the product development teams, assuring that the results match as close as possible with actual product behavior.

I can’t think of a more accurate method to assure that as a vendor we provide you with a backup & recovery Solution with industry best TCO and ROI while meeting or exceeding your business requirements. Together with our Data Protection Advisor product, we make sure you are the most informed about your environment after implementation and throughout the product service life. It’s not only about making great products, but making sure those products are optimally implemented for your specific environment and IT budget requirements.

Sometimes those DBAs seem like they get all the fun – don’t they? Backup Admins never get a chance to be excited about anything, and when they do, DBAs just yawn, or give us weird looks. And to hurt you even more, it seems that database application developers never really think fully about backup and recovery when they are architecting their platforms. This just makes your job that much harder while they seem to give the DBA as much time in the sun as possible. Well, I think the Microsoft SQL Server team has realized this and decided that enough was enough. It’s time for the Backup Admins to reap some benefits as well! Oh, and about those looks you get from the DBAs, trust me, they go away the minute you successfully perform a restore for them.

What I am referring to is one of the key features of the SQL 2012 (Codename “Denali”) release, called AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG).   Availability Groups…. Availability Groups… where have I heard that before? Ah, yes! Microsoft Exchange! While named differently, they deliver essentially the same functionality with the exception of some very minor differences that we backup administrators don’t really need to worry about. (If you would like to learn more about Exchange Database Availability groups, see my previous blog post on the subject which also has a recorded demonstration.)

Like Exchange’s Database Availability Groups (DAG), the ability to be able to have multiple “passive copies” of your production database can have some unrealized advantages when it comes to managing backup workloads and their effect on transaction response time for your production database. With the ability for any node in an SQL Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Cluster to access and perform aggregated read-queries from the passive copies, we can completely isolate the burden of backup I/O from the production database volume and server. That standby replica, and corresponding SQL node servicing backup I/O, can even be in a different physical location from the primary replica. All options which allow greater flexibility in implementing your Database High Availability and Recovery architectures. When we start talking about numerous SQL database backups and the corresponding replica I/O spread across multiple sites and nodes of a SQL implementation, we begin to quickly see the real power and efficiencies EMC backup software and Purpose-Built Backup Appliances (PBBA) can provide by leveraging these new capabilities from Microsoft.

The day has finally come for Backup Administrators to get excited about Database Server Features!

Well, it has been about 3 days or so since I have returned from VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) in Las Vegas, and to be honest, there still hasn’t been enough time to fully digest all of what I took in while at the conference. At the same time, I thought it would be a good idea to not delay it any further and work through some of the highlights of my involvement at VMware PEX in this Blog post with all of you. So, as hard as it may be to do, amongst thinking about all the great dinners and social events, along with epic experiments in Social Media exploits at tech conferences, what are some of the main themes I took away at PEX?

First off, the VMware Hands-On-Labs were once again well received by all the attendees, and continued to show the stability and scalability of VMware’s Lab infrastructure, serving up well over 20,000 Virtual Machines in 1800+ labs provisioned over the course of 4 days! Here are some photos to give you an idea of some of the highlights of the week from the HoLs:

Seats beginning to fill in on Monday morning!

Customers continue to enjoy labs throughout the week on the 120 stations available in the HoL.

This was the view of the stat display on Thursday morning (the last day the HoLs were offered).

I want to thank VMware for allowing EMC to be a partner and host a lab module (Lab 26) within the HoLs. I got a lot of good feedback from users running through the lab and that is definitely something great to hear. I am definitely looking forward to the continuation of the HoLs @ VMworld!

Within that feedback from HoL attendees and other conversations I had throughout the conference, it seems to me that from a Partner perspective, we already understand the need and value in shifting the way IT operations are performed to keep up with increasing business compute demands. It was already understood from walking in the door at this conference that this aspect of adopting the cloud model was assumed. For me, the question I started to see churning in attendees’ heads was what is the next big step?  For example, I felt everybody at the conference understood the basic infrastructure involved in delivering and implementing cloud services, but were ready to move on to thinking about “How do I really leverage that base infrastructure of ESXi servers and vCenter/vCloud infrastructures I have started to deploy and take my IT services to the next level for true iPad/Tablet like delivery model that my end users are asking for.”  This view was definitely at the fore front of conversation and PEX presentations, but let’s not also forget an interesting statistic brought up by Scott Aronson, SVP of Global Channels and Alliances for VMware (and highlighted in Scott Lowe’s blog here) during the first general session of the conference. He mentioned that enterprise customers are only 50% down the way of the virtualization path. On top of that, Small to Medium Business and Enterprises are less than 50% down that same journey. So it’s a good idea, while always anticipating the next turn on the journey, we don’t forget what we have been implementing from a technology foundation perspective to make sure all of our customers are ready to deploy Next Generation IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).

Which brings me to the role that I feel EMC can play as both a strong member and alliance with VMware in the Partner Ecosystem. During the EMC VMware PEX boot camp, a good portion of the discussion was dedicated to backup & recovery of virtualized environments. And rightly so, providing a tried and tested industry leading solution protecting and retaining data for a virtualized environment is key.  This theme wasn’t just something EMC was discussing in its presentations, but other partner presentations as well as attendee’s I talked to in my time spent on the Solutions Exchange floor and Hands-On-Labs. This is really where the rubber met the road – hearing from partners firsthand what they were looking for from a data protection perspective, and realizing during the conversation that the approaches taken by implementing EMC solutions met those needs nicely.

This sentiment and theme in the discussion I just mentioned was really summarized nicely by Brad Maltz from ICI who was gracious enough to share his time and words with our attendees in the EMC Boot camp. To paraphrase, he mentioned that EMC and it’s solutions have really enabled his organization to be a more consultative partner with his end users. Allowing him to be more of a trusted advisor to his customers for the long haul which is really where customers see the value add!

For me, that is the pinnacle of what we at EMC are working towards together with VMware in this continuing Journey our Industry is taking to the cloud. This I was glad to see.

Next Stop?! Back to the Venetian in Las Vegas for EMC World in May! See you there!

While there’s no debating the value of DAGs for providing fault-tolerance and ensuring high availability of Exchange database volumes (DAGs allow for a secondary passive copy of the database to be available at a moment’s notice) or the coolness of all the “vStuff” (VMware tools can efficiently reduce downtime and the risk of data loss due to Exchange Server or database outages), these tools aren’t necessarily the “get out of backup free” card you may think they are. You still need to perform Exchange server database backups for other major business requirements (e.g., regulatory compliance, data retention, etc.) and DAGS + vMotion/HA/DRS don’t protect against all scenarios.

While DAGs are a great high availability solution, they don’t protect against accidental user deletions or instances of software database corruption. With these types of events, every write to the primary volume in a DAG group is logged and then passed over to be applied to the passive copy, which means soft errors or corruption are propagated. Backup and recovery solutions ensure data is properly protected at a particular point in time should any of these events occur. Further, product features of some backup and recovery solutions, such as deduplication and VMware integration (to optimize performance and management), can help you protect your email data as well as greatly reduce the time you spend managing and ensuring your backups are completed and kept safe.

For this particular use case, a great example is EMC Avamar and EMC Networker’s plug-in, which allow backups to occur automatically from the “less stressed” passive DAG copy. While the active DAG member is busy ensuring your business has instant access to all its email data, the backup software can adjust automatically to your current environment and  target the currently assigned (and underutilized) passive copy to scan the email database. This alleviates the I/O load on the Exchange production database, known as the “active” DAG member. EMC Avamar, for example, because of its awareness of the Exchange DAG architecture, backs up the Exchange environment with little impact on the production database. And that’s a very good thing.

Check out this video for more detail. It shows how you can easily leverage EMC Avamar when using DAG:

As we talked about in Part I of this series and at recent Forums, Vblock is a key component of a virtualized infrastructure. But without the right backup and recovery solutions to protect the environment, its benefits are minimized. As VM-to-ESX server ratios increase, there’s a tendency to forget to factor in the ESX server resource drain that will occur during backup. The strain of this process can cause users to scale back VM-to-ESX server densities and re-evaluate, or even delay, virtualization plans. However, with the right backup infrastructure, you can improve ratios and move forward with, or even expedite, virtualization plans.

At the Forums, we talked at length about the challenges and solutions for Vblock backup and recovery, but for those of you who haven’t made it to one of these events, I’ve put together the following list of backup and recovery solution “must haves”:

1. It’s got to be fluent in VMware. Any Vblock backup solution worth its salt has to speak VMware. Being able to automatically interact with VMware’s system database structures and APIs is key. Management efficiency in orchestrating backups in a VMware context is also essential (think “single pane of glass”). This allows both VMware and backup admins to monitor and manage the environment collaboratively.
2. It needs to work with and fully understand “blocks.” This will reduce overhead; it’s that simple. Beware of backup software solutions that extend file-based backup catalogs for virtualized environment backup; they can create backup performance issues particularly in larger VM environments. Having to conform to a legacy backup file system structure only introduces more overhead.
   
3. It’s got to do deduplication. Vblock environments are designed to be the foundation for a wide array of OS/application combinations. With varying file formats and block structures, employing intelligent deduplication algorithms is the best way to keep compression ratios at a maximum across applications. “Variable-block” solutions should be at the top of the list because they provide efficient and flexible capacity optimization across the multiple applications typically running inside virtual environments.
   
4. It needs to be work in physical and virtual environments. It is more cost-effective to use backup solutions that can protect the configuration of the physical infrastructure as well as the data within applications and VMs.

In the next post, I will take a look at the Vblock components and their specific backup and recovery requirements, and show how customers are leveraging EMC backup and recovery solutions within these environments.

I remember learning this Lingo program in grade school, and I remember using one of Steve Job’s creations – the Apple IIe ─ to do it. Yep, instructing a “turtle” to draw a square on the screen started it all for me. (There was the game “Oregon Trail,” but that is another story for another post.)

I can honestly say Steve Jobs is a major reason ─ if not the reason ─ I do what I do today. Not only was Jobs a main contributor in making personal computing mainstream, but he also played a key role in developing technology that betters society and our daily lives. Jobs had the vision and technical know-how to turn the backroom lab magic of engineering wizards into tools that help us all work more productively and, yes, play harder.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say Jobs was the perfect “marketer” ─ if ever there were one. He knew just which features would resonate with audiences, how much technical “geekiness” users could consume and, boy, did he know how to sell. He knew how to relate technology to our everyday lives and, in doing so, made us “have to have” the latest Apple gadget.

Listening to Jobs speak was always something to look forward to and follow closely.  In fact, his keynotes were one of just a handful that I actually anticipated watching. In my own job, creating this excitement and passion in users is at the center of what I do, and I aspire to be as effective as Jobs was.

True, not every project or idea Jobs touched was successful, but through successes and failures, he remained true to his commitment to create products that better people’s lives, not just create products for innovation’s sake.

As those of us who are standing in line today for the iPhone 4S, let’s not forget that great products are fueled by great passion.  As Jobs put it:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

No need for you to choose what servers are the best for your compute needs, no need to think about which network interface you should use to get your bits and bytes of data flying quickly in and across your data center and definitely no need to figure out what type of storage you need to support your environment and keep it up and running 24×7. It’s all been taken care of for you!

Well, that’s the premise behind the Vblock integrated infrastructure package from VMware, Cisco and EMC – offered by the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company. And it holds true to this promise. But what about once everything is implemented? More specifically, what about backup and recovery? While the initial thinking may be to try to extend legacy backup solutions to the Vblock environment, there are better approaches – ones that are more efficient and, yes, sustainable (environmentally pleasing and scalable). You just have to think out of the box, and I know this can be difficult to do for a number of reasons (e.g., budget, uncertainty, learning new methodologies, etc.).

The key issue with trying to apply traditional backup approaches to this type of environment is that they simply weren’t architected for today’s virtualized world. To quote Sid Waddell at the BBC: “It’s like trying to stop a water buffalo with a pea-shooter.” You will just get trampled in the end. Okay, well, maybe trampled is a bit extreme, but it is not going to be easy and there will be consequences for your business.

Vblock speaks virtualization, so the backup solution you use needs to too. It needs to speak in terms of virtual machines and .vmdks, and not in collections of files. It needs to have a user interface VMware that administrators can feel right at home in (not look tape backup interfaces of years past), and like the Vblock package itself, the backup solution should be easy to manage and deploy. Purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) are great here because they, like the vBlock, are optimized to be implemented in a stress-free manner while assuring optimized operation throughout the solution.

Over the course of the next few blog posts in this series, I will explore Vblock backup in much greater detail – how to implement, how to ensure recoverability and optimize Vblock disaster recovery scenarios. Until then, I encourage you to check out the EMC webcast ­– Blazing Fast VMware Backup & Recovery with EMC Avamar. I, along with EMC Avamar Product Marketing Manager Phil George, take a look at optimizing backup and recovery in VMware environments, including Vblock.