It was a wild week in Vegas as some 400 attendees gathered for the
second annual West Coast Storage Decisions. A conspicuous crowd of
cowboys in leather, denim and distinctive 10-gallon hats, in town
for a rodeo convention, wandered around the conference center
alongside Storage Decisions' attendees; a gas main break early
Thursday morning left nine of the strip's major hotels without hot
water; and stories flew (names will be withheld to protect the
not-so-innocent) of post-session losses at the craps tables.
Luckily, all the colorful distractions didn't put a damper on
the conversations about storage. Here are a few tidbits we heard
floating around the halls:
Quantum upgrades backup/replication appliancesQuantum Corp. briefed us early on its new disk backup and
replication appliances, the DXi3500 and DXi5500. These devices
replace the company's older DX3000 and DX5000 boxes. Both systems
include block-level deduplication software from Rocksoft, a file
system from Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) and
compression technology, asynchronous replication and remote
diagnostics from Quantum. Assuming typical data mixes and standard
backup methods, the company claimed these appliances can offer up
to 216 terabytes (TB) of disk-based retention capacity, using an
average 20-to-1 deduplication ratio -- enough capacity to retain
months of backups on disk for an 11 TB primary data set.
Blue chips talk backup
Qualcomm Inc., Clark County government (the county where Vegas
is located), MGM Mirage and Yahoo Inc., discussed their trials and
tribulations with backup. Most of the big companies had few
complaints about the products or technologies they had in place.
Most of the challenges they encounter nowadays, according to the
blue chips, has to do more with human processes than technological
glitches.
"One of the biggest challenges of backup is that it finds every
problem in your environment," said Paul Ferrarro, storage manager
with Qualcomm, who estimated his company's backups at around 1
petabyte (PB) a month. "We're always going to the storage
architects with bad news."
"We're constantly in firefighting mode," agreed Clark County's
senior systems engineer Rich Taylor. He said the constant struggle
to keep on top of day-to-day issues made it difficult to come up
with long-range plans: "When the alligators are all coming out of
the swamp, it's tough to think about finding the drain plug."
Marcellus Tabor, manager of storage and data protection for
Yahoo, said the problem stemmed largely from a lack of good
monitoring tools. "None of the backup monitoring tools out there
had everything we needed," Tabor said. "It's really difficult to
scale into the thousands of devices -- there aren't a lot of
products that are able to give you the whole package at that
point." Tabor said he and his staff had written their own
application to manage and monitor the backup environment.
After the session, an attendee from another mammoth enterprise,
David Ping, data center storage team lead, information systems and
technology services for Pacific Gas and Electric Company
(PG&E), said part of his staff meets regularly as a tactical
advisory board, which so far has kept mostly on top of backup
issues. But another deluge of data is coming when the company
installs Smart Meters, which report information electronically back
to the company's data center rather than requiring a human reader
to take down the information manually.
"The biggest challenge isn't really finding primary storage for
all that data -- just about any vendor can put as much disk on your
floor as you could ask for," he said. "But storage architects don't
often factor in backup when they're designing something -- they're
concerned with IOPS, memory and disk space -- not how it's going to
get backed up."
The company is planning to add more Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)
servers, but Ping wondered aloud if that "is just a Band-Aid.
"We began 2006 worrying about the tactical issues," Ping went
on. "But as we approach 2007, we're beginning to wonder how we can
take a step back and address long-term needs."
Backups are not archives -- But users want one
process
In one session on encryption and archiving, attendees peppered
speaker W. Curtis Preston, vice president of data protection
services for GlassHouse Technologies Inc., who gave his "backups
are not archives" talk, with questions about archiving "plug-ins"
that would fit into their current backup environments. Preston
named both Index Engines Inc.'s TE-200 Tape Engine, which keeps
track of data in tape-based archives and Symantec Corp.'s Veritas
Enterprise Vault, which can share information with NetBackup. But
users still talked of one tool that would both backup and archive
from the same data stream -- why deal with the same data twice?
Excellent question; the market awaits the vendors' answer.
Dedupe hashing doubts are academic, analyst says
Preston can always be counted on to hold forth on something
interesting at the "Ask the Experts" session during the show floor
expo and reception, and this conference was no exception.
Preston, previewing an upcoming feature in Storage
magazine, said it's time for debates and worries about "collisions"
while deduping with the SHA-1 algorithm to end.
"I'm not a numbers guy," he said. "I had to sit down and work
this out, but I figured out that the likelihood of a collision with
a 180-bit SHA-1 hash is one in two to the180th power.
"Meanwhile the chance of writing a bad block to disk, without
even knowing it, is one in two to the 50th power … And two to
the180th power is a bigger number than all the blocks in the known
computing universe."
Next time you're at a Storage Decisions show, buy Curtis a
drink. You'll be well prepared for your next cocktail party.
ISCSI -- All or nothing?
Based on a poll of about 100 attendees at the Emerging
Technology Showcase session on Wednesday afternoon, the use of
iSCSI looks at this point like an all-or-nothing phenomenon. While
47% of the respondents said they weren't using iSCSI at all, the
majority of those who were using it (22%) said they were running it
for their mission-critical applications.