One of the lead stories in the November 2006 issue of Storage
magazine featured their annual Quality Awards for backup software.
In that story, there was a quote attributed to Lynn Laueter, a
senior systems engineer with Alliance Coal LLC in Tulsa, Okla., who
said, "There's no backup solution in the world that doesn't require
daily intervention." I took that statement a couple of ways.
On one hand, I find it encouraging that Alliance Coal takes
backups sufficiently serious to justify
spending time on it on a daily basis. On the other, that
statement leaves me with the distinct impression that much of
Alliance Coal's motivation for checking backups each day was
that they lack confidence that their backups completed
successfully the previous night. The phrase "daily intervention"
doesn't imply to me that Alliance Coal is spending quality time
with their backup software but rather is spending too much of
their time troubleshooting problems.
This is a bit disconcerting because most backup software vendors
are determined to pull more feature functionality under the
umbrella of their backup software package. Most of the major backup
software vendors -- BakBone Software, CommVault, EMC, HP, IBM and
Symantec -- already or will offer more
continuous data protection (CDP), data
replication, deduplication and
snapshot options as part of an integrated
backup software management package sometime in the near future.
So if users aren't happy with the backup software package they
have now, why should they expect more success in the future?
Don't get me wrong -- on one level it makes perfect sense.
Vendors are obviously integrating this functionality to take
advantage of the increased role that disk plays in backups and
managing the movement of data from one media to another. But what
concerns me is if they can't manage what they already have, why
should we believe these same vendors are going to have any more
success integrating and managing these additional features under
the same management umbrella?
To start to answer these questions, I am going to turn the focus
of this blog into an examination of how the execution of the
different vendors' plans to integrate backup software, CDP,
deduplication and replication software are progressing. I also plan
to follow up with users to see if, and how, their experiences
correlate to what the vendors are saying.
Already, I have spoken to BakBone Software and EMC, and after
speaking to them about their plans, I have mixed feelings. Both
BakBone Software and EMC were quite candid about the challenges
they face in pulling technologies, like CDP, deduplication, data
replication and backup software, together and managing them from a
central console.
Of the two, I see EMC as potentially having the better product
mix if they can succeed in integrating them. In the last year or
so, they have acquired Kashya's network-based CDP and replication
product, and Avamar's backup deduplication technology. Couple these
acquisitions with their existing base of EMC array-based snapshot
software products, their emerging InVista product and NetWorker's
backup software, and one would think this could become a slam dunk
in terms of meeting users' multiple backup and recovery needs, and
the different RTOs and RPOs they are trying to satisfy.
However, the conversation I had with EMC the first week in
January 2007 was still long on the benefits of this type of
integration and short on specifics. The fact that EMC had three
different individuals on the call indicated to me that they
themselves are still trying to figure out what to do with this mix
of products and how best to position them; though further product
announcements with more specifics from EMC are planned over the
next six months.
BakBone Software seems to already have a solid plan in place.
Though they lack the breadth of products that EMC can offer, they
plan to capitalize on their November 2005 acquisition of Constant
Data's replication software that they rebranded as
NetVault:Replicator.
One key technology that they are going to build on is
NetVault:Replicator's indexing technology. BakBone Software's
senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, Ken
Horner, finds that 80%-85% of backup time is not spent moving data,
but rather indexing files on the server. By giving their
NetVault:Backup product access to the file index built by
NetVault:Replicator's product, NetVault:Backup will be able to
quickly identify what files have changed and then only backup those
files, thereby reducing backup times. BakBone anticipates this
functionality being ready by mid-2007.
These are the sorts of facts I hope to uncover and communicate
to users in coming months. For next month, I will take a closer
look at what Symantec has planned. Though they declined to talk to
me about the topic at this time, they indicated they have a series
of announcements around this topic scheduled for release in
mid-January and we are planning to talk then.
I also intend to speak with CommVault, HP, IBM, Symantec and
other data protection vendors in the coming weeks and months about
their integration plans. So stay tuned and, in the meantime, if you
have any specific questions that you want to know or for me to pose
to them -- on or off the record -- let me know, and I'll do my best
to ensure they get asked and answered.