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.

Maybe it stems from years of studying mathematics at the undergraduate level, or perhaps it’s a byproduct of a 10-year stint as a high-tech journalist. I’m not sure.

But what I do know is that if you give me a topic to research, a study to conduct or a third-party report to thumb through, I’m happy. Similarly, if I’ve got a paper to write, rest assured I’ve waded through market data before my pen goes to paper.

Why? Because data is knowledge. It provides insight into the behaviors and thinking of real people, doing real things at real points in time. It makes me a better journalist, a better analyst and a better marketer. And, importantly, it makes you a more informed buyer.

That’s why when I heard that my colleagues in APJ and EMEA had conducted region-specific disaster recovery surveys, I was thrilled.

True, it meant more data for me to sift through, but more importantly it meant real data about the solutions, technologies and trends in East Asia Pacific and Japan, as well as in the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco. The 360° view of the industry this blog promises!

So, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to take a look last week’s posts from our own Kelly Ferguson, director of EMEA marketing, and Shane Moore, director of APJ marketing. If nothing else, be sure to take a look at the embedded infographics. But, if you have the time, click on the links in each of the articles and immerse yourself in detail from each of the regional surveys.

One thing you’ll discover is that while there are differences among these regions, they share similar high-level concerns about:

• The ability to recover from a disaster
• The amount they are spending, or not spending, on backup and recovery
• The need to eliminate tape from their disaster recovery environments

Not to exclude the US and EMEA, I will share some recent data points from ESG’s “2012 Data Protection Modernization” study in an upcoming post as well as provide an update on the IDC Purpose-Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) report I wrote about in January (“Got PBBA?”).

But before then, EMC World awaits. We’ve got a lot of great stuff planned, including coverage of Stephen Manley’s keynote and the debut of a new blog series “Accelerating Transformation with Smarter Backup.” Be sure to check back.

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.

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!

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.

During my college years, Margo Seltzer rewarded her research group with a nice dinner at a lovely Spanish restaurant. Unfortunately, my dish required me to cook my own food – raw chicken, shrimp and fish – on a hot rock. As you may have already surmised, I didn’t cook my food long enough. And so the following 24 hours culminated in a moment of true clarity: “Do It Yourself” is often not good enough.

WARNING: “Your Mileage May Vary”
There is no phrase in the technical lexicon that infuriates me more. When I buy technology, I want to know how much load it can handle in my environment. Anything less and I feel like I’m getting some raw products and hot stone. And that’s why I am a true believer in the concept of an appliance. 

For those of you who haven’t read about my background on this site, I joined NetApp straight out of school in 1997, when it was still Network Appliance. I loved the idea of being able to buy a pre-baked NAS solution instead of trying to “cook your own answer” with host-based file system software, volume managers and storage infrastructure. With an appliance, you knew the pieces would interoperate and you knew how they would perform, which meant you knew “your mileage wouldn’t vary much.”

However, as with so many IT terms (e.g., “social media,” “platform,” “cloud,” etc.), the meaning of “appliance” was diluted over time (often by clueless companies and well-intentioned media). Even more frustrating, the technology itself became so complex that you really didn’t know what you were getting from an appliance anymore. “Your mileage did vary.” And backup was one of the main causes. In fact, I still have nightmares…

Sales Rep (at deal close): “Of course you can store 1 billion files on this box.”

Customer: “Why don’t your backups run faster?”

Young Stephen Manley: “No, there’s no viable way to back up those 1 billion files via NDMP.”

Customer (clearly not listening): “Why don’t your backups run faster?”

Young Stephen Manley (aging quickly): “Because you’re running network backups over a 10-Mbit Ethernet to a DLT4000.”

Customer: “Well, we didn’t have enough money to pay for upgrading our backup environment.”

Young Stephen Manley (to himself): “Aaaauuuugggghhhh!!!!! Then what did you expect?!?”

The Rebirth of the Appliance
The introduction of converged infrastructure offerings like Vblock and FlexPod rekindled my faith in appliances; it was the first evolutionary step in years. As one customer put it, “Now I’m not just buying files in a box… I can buy a chunk of data center in a box.” Network, compute, storage and protection – proven to interoperate with qualified performance levels.

While Vblock represented the new wave of appliances that focused on simplifying your environment, it’s not a fit for everyone. We want to spread the “next generation appliance” to a wider audience.

Therefore, I’m very excited about our VSPEX launch. While VSPEX is not the sheet-metal-enclosed appliance form factor of my youth (things have evolved since then), it does deliver the appliance value proposition:

1. Certified interoperability
2. Validated to deliver specific performance/scale

Of course, the part I like best about VSPEX is that the appliance includes backup – Avamar or Data Domain, depending on the configuration. This is a huge leap forward for appliances. No longer is backup an afterthought to the solution. No longer are you condemned to deploy an environment that has only enough horsepower to serve the application, but not enough to protect it. And that sure beats trying to cook your own over a hot stone!

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.