In the automotive industry, the word, “boost” is “a loose term for turbo or supercharger.” It describes positive manifold pressure in automobile engines that increases horsepower and performance. If you have ever driven a car with a turbo you can attest to the dramatic acceleration experienced when the turbo kicks in.

There are times when we all would like a boost and experience the exhilaration of accelerating past our limitations and increasing our performance. With the explosion of data that needs to be managed and protected, storage and backup administrators are looking for an extra edge that will help them accelerate their backup workloads so that they can satisfy their SLAs despite shrinking backup windows. EMC Data Domain Boost software provides the special sauce needed to accelerate your backups and turbo-charge your recovery point and recovery time objectives without disrupting your existing backup infrastructure.

With the recent announcement of DD Boost for Oracle Recovery Manager EMC expanded the growing collection of DD Boost enabled backup solutions with DBA controlled, accelerated Oracle backup, recovery and disaster recovery.

In a nut shell, DD Boost extends the optimization capabilities of Data Domain systems and significantly increases backup performance by distributing parts of the deduplication process to the backup server or application client so that only unique data segments are sent to the Data Domain system. Since it takes fewer server resources to perform distributed deduplication  than it does to push all backup data across the network, DD Boost saves valuable resources on the backup or application server and precious network bandwidth. DD Boost also simplifies disaster recovery by integrating with Data Domain Replicator software to automatically and transparently copy only unique and compressed data across existing network links to the remote system, for faster, “time-to-DR” readiness.

In addition to performance, DD Boost increases the reliability of the backup to ensure recovery through the Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture by generating checksums on the data before it is sent to the Data Domain system. As the Data Domain system ingests the data, it computes a new checksum and compares it to the values from DD Boost to ensure end-to-end verification of the data. The checksums are stored alongside the unique data that lands on disk for continuous online verification, continuous fault detection and healing and other resiliency features (see blog from March 14^th for more information).

You would think this would be enough, but there is more… DD Boost also improves reliability and performance with advanced load balancing and link failover. Multiple 1GbE or 10GbE links can be aggregated from a backup or application server to the Data Domain system so that backup and restore jobs are automatically distributed and balanced on multiple ports on the Data Domain system. Should an interface fail, in-flight jobs on failed ports are automatically and transparently moved to healthy network links.

EMC Data Domain Boost is available for the majority of the backup software market – EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, and Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exec – and leading database utilities – Oracle RMAN and EMC Greenplum.

Give yourself and your backups a boost up with EMC Data Domain Boost turbo-charged backups!

For more information on EMC Data Domain Boost visit this web page.

It’s been 3 years since we launched EMC SourceOne and we’ve been delivering enhancements and additions to the program ever since. We’ve added SharePoint support, and file system support. We’ve updated our offline access capabilities and added mobile support for archived data. Our platform support continues to grow and device support is routinely enhanced. With the release of SourceOne 6.8, I made the observation that with this release, you can truly “have it your way”. Let me provide a couple of examples:

• For EmailXtender customers looking to move to SourceOne but keep their existing storage infrastructure, our developers implemented a feature in SourceOne Email Management 6.8 referred to as In Place Migration (IPM), making the migration to SourceOne simple and transparent.  EmailXtender customers can work with our Professional Services team or our Certified Migration partners to determine whether they are best served by In Place Migration, or whether a full migration to SourceOne is the better route.  In either case, our customers have options.

• Both Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint 2010 can be found in the cloud today, powered by Office 365. This is fantastic for production email, but it’s not the best solution when it comes to archiving for compliance and eDiscovery. That’s why the SourceOne developers implemented on-premise archiving for Office 365. Now you can keep a pristine copy of messages that are sent and received through Office 365/Cloud implementations in a separate, highly available deduplicated archive. When the time comes to search for Exchange or SharePoint content, the designated reviewer can simply perform a search against the archive. After all, the original data is just waiting there, on premise and outside the production environment, to be discovered.

• What’s your hardware flavor? We don’t want to tell you which hardware platform you must use, instead EMC provides flexibility with a variety of options to meet your needs and will work with you to determine the best fit. If you are moving your storage to the cloud, EMC supports Atmos connectivity from your SourceOne server.  If you’re happy with your Centera and feel secure with the compliance options, SourceOne can directly connect to and support Centera. Perhaps you’ve invested in a Data Domain system for backup and want to expand its workload to include archiving.  If so, SourceOne can connect to Data Domain and take advantage of the storage and network efficiency benefits built into the appliance. The key here is that whatever you require for the archive backend, EMC offers it.

Finally, we’re VMware ready! That means we’ve gone through all the extensive testing and certification in order to guarantee that our product takes advantage of all the goodness that VMware has to offer.  The beauty of a VMware and SourceOne solution is that it can adapt to your environment, large or small. I have customers that run SourceOne entirely in a virtual configuration (come listen to my session at EMCWorld, BRS.02, and hear all about it!) and then there are  large organizations, such as EMC, that virtualize many of their SourceOne worker services through VMware, while running other server services on a physical machine. Have a big discovery coming up? Just spin up another virtual worker and let it take care of the additional load! Yes, it’s that simple.

Come see us at EMC World and let us show you how nimble our SourceOne archiving platform is.  I know you will find that we’ve designed the solution with our customer’s best interest in mind. Have it your way.

While natural disasters are fresh in everyone’s mind, especially across Asia, due to recent floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, the results of a recent survey show that it’s not the extraordinary events that cause downtime and data loss. In fact, the research shows that the causes of disasters are often the commonplace events such as hardware failure, data corruption and power loss.

With a tsunami, there are often warning signs, including earthquakes and receding water lines, which give people some chance to escape the ensuing calamity. Unfortunately with IT, there’s usually no warning. But this does not mean that companies can’t better prepare themselves to recover their data in the event of a major incident or malicious activity.

The critically important question asked by this survey was: How confident are organisations that they could fully recover systems/data today? The answer: 81% said they were not very confident at all. How confident are you on this key question, and if you are not confident, what action do you need to take?

The full report with all of the data is available in ‘The Disaster Recovery Survey 2012: Asia Pacific and Japan’. Data is available across the region and also by the 10 countries we surveyed. In total, there were 2,500 companies who participated.

In the not too distant past backup was very straightforward; the mainframe backed up data to proprietary tape formats, UNIX and Windows had their own processes and IBM i (formerly iSeries or AS400 way back in the day) had its unique process for backup data. In effect separate islands but everyone was aware of where the lines of demarcation were drawn.

Well the lines have blurred considerably since those simpler times. Head counts were reduced, people were asked to do more with less, and new technologies emerged. Consolidation was the operative word as people began to understand that all of these islands of data had very similar characteristics and processing requirements.

Today, organizations are looking to reduce storage footprint, consolidate backup workloads and manage them all through a single interface. For mixed operating environments, EMC’s recently announced Disk Library for mainframe DLm1000 delivers on these requirements.  The DLm1000 is a standalone mainframe tape emulator that delivers gateway functionality between a mainframe and Data Domain deduplication storage systems. As a gateway solution, the Data Domain storage system being used by the mainframe can simultaneously be utilized as a backup target for open system servers, including IBM i.

Combining the DLm1000 with Data Domain storage systems, organizations can leverage common backup storage for mainframe and open system environments while taking advantage of all of the unique capabilities of Data Domain systems, including:

• Scalable Deduplication Storage – provides 10 to 30x average reduction in backup storage required
• Support for leading backup and archive applications
• Multisite Disaster Recovery – 99 percent bandwidth efficiency for network-based replication
• Flexible replication topologies for tape-free DR or tape consolidation
• Data Domain Invulnerability Architecture  - for ultra-safe storage for reliable recovery

So now, rather than islands of backup data users can have all of their mainframe and open system backups stored together on the industry’s leading deduplication storage platform, ensuring their data is protecting while also dramatically reducing cost and complexity.  Sounds like a match made in heaven…

Onder Sonmez, EMC Turkey Country Manager, and Kelly Ferguson, Director, EMEA Marketing.

Greeting from sunny Dubai!

I find myself in the Middle East to launch survey results about tendencies of the region around backup and recovery in the region. What we found is that the vast majority of respondents are not very confident that they can recover after an incident.

The message we want to raise to the region – and around the world – is that it pays to be prepared. In the region, 64% of organizations have suffered either from systems downtime or from data loss over the last 12 months. The top 3 consequences afterwards were:

• loss of employee productivity,
• loss of customer confidence and/or loyalty,
• and lost revenue.

The full report with all of the data is available in a new report: The Disaster Recovery Survey 2012: Middle East, Turkey and Morocco. Data is available across the region and also by the 5 countries we surveyed. In total, there were 1,000 companies who participated.

But how do we raise the sense of urgency in the region on why they need to look at their backup strategies now to make sure they are prepared for both operational and disaster recovery?

The answer came to me in a sign – literally. Along the highway in Dubai there was a sign that promoted “Tan Safely.” A next generation backup approach is like applying sun screen and wearing a hat before exposure to prevent sunburn. The old tape-based approach is applying sunscreen after you’re burned, but it’s too late to avoid the sunburn. It’s time for companies to stop easing the pain after a burn and prevent the burn with a proactive approach to backup and recovery.

Summer has arrived!   Most of my weekends are spent participating in activities filled with adrenaline and a little touch of risk.

This weekend we were rock climbing in an area that is very popular and filled with experienced climbers.  While waiting for a route we were observing climbers in other groups.

One thing that I found shocking was the unnecessary risks the experienced climbers chose to take.  We watched a guy take a fall of 25 feet.  His confidence and experienced allowed him to make the decision to limit the protection he placed in the rock. During his fall he smacked his head on the rock (luckily he was wearing a helmet) and only suffered from a few scrapes and bruises.   In the end he managed to walk away from the fall.

After speaking with other climbers in his group we learned the climber had completed the route successfully multiple times in the past and on this day was over confident and took safety for granted.

How does the climbing story and over confidence play into the life of a backup administrator?  Well, let’s talk about this for a minute.

How many times have you completed the same task over and over again, taking the steps for granted, being confident in the outcome and not rethinking your plan? For example: How many times have you checked the backup console, found the backups and the DR copies were successful, and later found you could not recover data from tape?  Did your confidence and past experience allow you to move through the familiar steps with confidence, only to realize later that you should have spent more time with validation?

Like the climber I met last week, backup administrators have the option to lessen the chances of “taking a fall.” For example, we can always reduce our risk of data loss by being more diligent about checking the status of our DR tapes (to avoid the over confident factor). We could randomly re-load backup tapes and verify their validity.  How feasible is this really? We all know that validating backups will take a back seat to the day-to-day fire-drills that we all encounter; and even if they are verified, a tape could still fail on the next read pass.

So for those of you who are experienced and confident backup administrators – Let me ask you, are you sure that your experience and over confidence is not placing a risk on your ability to recover data?

I was recently on a call with a customer talking about this exact scenario. Management had full confidence in the backup administrators, and the backup administrators had full confidence in their backup software and hardware.  There was little to no validation of their backups.  This lack of attention to detail and an unreliable tape-based infrastructure resulted in the inability to restore important data. The root cause was that the disaster recovery tapes could not be read.

Customer’s before scenario:

• Backups were not completing within the available backup window.
  • Full backups for remote offices ran for 3 days.
• The backup software was linited in its ability to validate the status of the backup and the cloning process.
• They had no reporting capabilities.
• The backup  target was tape for both primary and secondary (DR).
• Tapes were sent off-site manually to a vaulting location.
  • There was no internal tracking of the off-site tapes.
  • Backup tapes were rarely sent off-site, even though the company policy was to have then sent off-site nightly.
• Restores were slow and unreliable.

 Customer’s Next Generation Backup (implemented today):

• EMC NetWorker provided centralized management and reporting of backup, cloning and recovery.
• Data Domain is the backup target complete with replication managed to a remote Data Domain through NetWorker.
  •  The customer is running with a tape-less backup environment.
  • Clone Controlled Replication makes it very easy and quick to test recovery of the data from the remote Data Domain appliance.
• The three day backups were noe completing in a few hours.
  • High data Deduplication rates of 40X.
• DR data is automatically replicated and easily monitored within the NetWorker Management.
  • Data replication efficiency – increased by 100%
• Restore rates are now down to seconds and extremely reliable.

To find out more on how you can legitimately feel confident that your backup environment is meeting your business needs check out the links on EMC NetWorker and Data Domain

Reach out to the EMC NetWorker Community and collaborate with your colleges: www.emc.com/networkeronline  

To see a complete list of NetWorker modules: http://www.emc.com/backup-and-recovery/networker/networker.htm

A full list of the EMC backup and recovery portfolio: http://www.emc.com/backup-and-recovery

Plan on attending the backup and recovery sessions at EMC World: http://www.emcworld.com/

As we recently discussed in our blog on SQL server backups, there is oftentimes tension between database admins (DBA’s) and backup admins rooted in the need to protect mission critical application data.  The issue is  both DBAs and backup admins want control over database backup and recovery processes, often resulting in parallel database backup processes – by the DBA and backup admin – with silo’d storage on the backend.

In Oracle environments, Data Domain systems have successfully addressed this challenge by providing a consolidated storage platform for both DBA and backup admin initiated backups.  The DBA can use the Oracle native backup and recovery utility – called Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to send data directly to Data Domain and the backup admin can leverage their existing backup software, which integrates with RMAN, to backup the same Oracle database.

With both users backing up to the same deduplication storage system, only unique segments of data from the Oracle server will be stored and backup storage requirements are reduced by 10 to 30x on average.  In addition, Data Domain network-efficient replication sends only unique data across the WAN for faster time-to-DR readiness.

Not resting on our laurels, as of April 24^th the best just got better.  Our new Data Domain Boost for Oracle RMAN (which Ben first talked about back in October) provides faster, more efficient Oracle backup and recovery by distributing parts of the deduplication process to the Oracle server.  This means that RMAN will only send unique data from the Oracle server to the Data Domain system, which speeds backups by up to 50% and reduces LAN bandwidth requirements by up to 99%.

In addition, DD Boost enables DBA’s to control Data Domain replication via RMAN.  Unlike any other Oracle backup solution, since RMAN can manage Data Domain replication it is fully aware of both the primary and remote backup copies of the Oracle database.

Data Domain Boost is focused on making backup and recovery faster and more efficient and empowering application owners to take control of these processes…and helping us all get along.

Traditions are wonderful things. Opening a few gifts the night before Christmas, sitting in the first five rows at Shamu stadium, and wearing green on St. Patrick’s day are just a few favorites. For many companies, the use of network attached storage (NAS) systems has become a tradition too, and for good reasons. NAS solutions are often easier to manage, provide faster access to data, and are easy to setup. And for many Backup Administrators, backup and recovery methods are based on tried and true traditions, including the good ‘ol weekly full (level-0) and daily incremental (level-1) dumps.

NAS solutions continue to evolve and many now scale to hundreds or thousands of TB’s with blazing performance that can challenge even cutting edge networks. Now companies can retain more stuff for longer periods of time in a smaller footprint. A quick peek at the EMC VNX Family of unified storage reveals a range of solutions that support just about any environment. So what does this mean for backup and recovery? Surely those “traditional” NAS backup solutions were designed to keep pace with future technology. Right. And keep that lucky rabbit foot on your keychain just in case.

Traditional NAS backup and recovery methods worked just fine a decade ago. But as technology evolves, Administrators are often forced to limit the size of volumes or number of files on their NAS systems in order to meet the backup window. Without the proper balance, weekly full backups often consume the entire weekend and extend into business hours, hurting application and user productivity. It’s like driving a formula one race car at 55 miles per hour.

Fortunately, a proven NAS backup and recovery solution is available. And it provides fast, daily full backups and one-step recovery for the entire enterprise. By removing the backup bottleneck, Administrators are free to optimize their NAS volumes and number of files to meet performance, availability, or other objectives. Learn more about EMC Avamar for NAS backup, recovery, and disaster recovery. And call it the new tradition.

A governor, or speed limiter, is a device used to measure and regulate the speed of a machine, such as an engine.

Just as you probably would not appreciate speed limiters on your personal automobile, you don’t want your backup solution to impose limitations on meeting your backup windows. With explosive data growth pushing data volumes into zettabytes and backup windows shrinking with 24 by 7 global data access, something has to give. You cannot afford unexpected bottlenecks slowing down your backup, particularly if you are about to invest in disk based, backup storage. Next-generation backup solutions must be extremely fast, just to keep up with this unparalleled growth in data, but  also must be affordable.

So what is the obvious bottleneck that exists when designing a disk-based deduplication backup appliance? Answer… the disks. Reading and writing to disk takes milliseconds, which is forever in the computer world. But what can be done to overcome this overt speed limiter?

Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore’s axiom, often quoted as Moore’s law, states that, “the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years.” Over the past 20 years CPUs have indeed improved in speed by a factor of millions. However, over the same time the speed of hard disk drives has only improved modestly (~ 10x).

The Data Domain engineers at EMC have leveraged Moore’s law to overcome the speed-limit bottleneck of disk I/O performance characteristics.  By partnering with Intel, the CPU-centric design of Data Domain systems takes advantage of this continuously accelerating processing power.

The Data Domain Stream-Informed Segment Layout (SISL) scaling architecture delivers high-speed, inline, data deduplication that keeps getting better with every advance in CPU design. Intel continues to push the speed limits of CPU processing power, which is ideal for Data Domain systems because they are  not bound by disk spindle speeds. This means that the throughput of a Data Domain system increases as CPU performance increases.

The Data Domain system architecture optimizes deduplication performance by minimizing disk accesses. SISL identifies duplicate data segments in RAM, inline, before storing to disk. It also stores related segments and fingerprints together, so large groups can be read at once. These patented techniques enable Data Domain systems to utilize the full capacity of large SATA disks for data backup and recovery without increasing system memory and the number of disks needed to deliver high throughput performance; overcoming the speed limits of disk.

EMC breaks through the disk speed limit bottleneck and transforms your backup into sizzling fast backup, recovery and disaster recovery.

For more information on Data Domain Stream Informed Segment Layout read, “EMC Data Domain SISL Scaling Architecture – A Detailed Review”.

I recently had a contractor in to update the kitchen in my house.  The quality of the work was outstanding, and for once was completed on schedule.  At the end of the work I wrote him a check to cover his final fees and post-dated it three days to account for transferring funds from my savings to the checking account.  I thought we were done – great new kitchen, everything done on time, payment delivered.

I was wrong.

What happened was the contractor forgot about the post-dated check and cashed it immediately.  And my bank has no responsibility to proactively tell me that my checking account balance was going to be exceeded.  Instead, what they did was wait several weeks to send me a monthly account summary, which of course showed the account overdraft, several overdraft (penalty!) fees, interest fees, etc.  ARGH!

So, yes, in hindsight I could have been actively involved in tracking the deposit of the post-dated check.  I could have verified daily if that check had been cashed early.  I could have done more….but who has time for that??  I expected everything to proceed as designed.

The bottom line was that there was NO automated message or warning sent to me about the change in status and that my account had been impacted.  Granted, that’s why banks offer lines of credit….but I should have been notified in advance that they needed to dip into this “emergency fund” so I could choose to fix the situation before penalties occurred.

A similar scenario holds true in backup environments.  Administrators are tasked to ensure backups happen on time, every time, and that Service Level Agreements for internal and external customers are met, as designed.  However, customers often tell me “80% of failures are due to someone changing a setting on a server and not communicating that change to the backup team”.   And often that lack of communication translates into missed backups, and sometimes missed SLA’s.  This lack of communication is the same as the contractor cashing that check early.  Had there been communication back regarding this change in check-cashing plans, or about a change in backup configuration, this whole mess (and the missed SLA’s) could have and should have been avoided.

While change is a fact of life in every computing environment, it is particularly important to those processes which protect an organization’s data – the very lifeblood of any company.  And due to the highly dynamic nature of today’s computing environments, the large number of uncoordinated changes occurring on a daily basis can impact heavily on backup administrators, who risk being unsure of what they are to be backing up as the environment evolves.

Unfortunately, often changes introduce unexpected problems.  So the question is: how can administrators stay on top of changes in the environment?

Data protection management software is specifically designed to take this change-tracking guesswork out of the equation.  Sure, you may be thinking that data protection management software provides reporting on the environment, and that’s largely passive information.  I absolutely agree – what administrators need is a proactive tool to keep a constant watch on backup and recovery operations to ensure everything is working as designed.

As an example, EMC’s Data Protection Advisor provides detection and correlation of issues across the entire environment, and then provides automated alerts to administrators on any changes which may impact backup policies and processes.  Data Protection Advisor’s root cause analysis digs deep into all monitored systems to identify what changed in the environment to cause the issue.  DPA can also allow companies to look at historical changes and correlate them with their impact in the data protection environment.

Data Protection Advisor’s visibility into activity of your backup and recovery operations not only drives cost and operational efficiency, its powerful troubleshooting capabilities enable you to be ready to quickly identify and respond to any future events.  By comparing data across different domains, problems can be found quickly and then corrected, eliminating wasteful effort and spending on the wrong hardware.

By leveraging data protection management software, you can stay on top of changes in your backup and recovery environment.  After all, ignorance isn’t bliss.  And with software such as Data Protection Advisor, you’ll always know what’s happening.