Sunday, July 19th, 2009
Side Note: As I travel the country talking to companies, I have been asked why I have not posted another blog entry in a long time. I guess I could justify it by saying that I don’t have anything new worth saying, and that I don’t want to waste your time with a lot of marketing hype. That may be true, but the real reason is just a lack of time. There is a saying that, “there are those that do, and those that teach.” For those rare cases where an expert does both well, I tip my hat to them. I enjoy the rare ability to actually work with the technology in customer environments as well as sell and architect the solutions. Hopefully I can share some valuable insites that keep you coming back.
So what have I learned that might be of value to you?
There seems to be an industry trend to look to simplify. Our friends at Data Domain (recently acquired by EMC) taught us that you can sell a limited ‘lunchbox’ dedupe engine and make a lot of money. It is not fair to say that Data Domain did a good job of “putting lipstick on a pig.” (But I will anyway.) They have taught me that it is important to have solutions supported with detailed process and best practice documents. This proves more challenging the more features and capabilities that the product has. Our OEMs will often restrict the use of certain features to simplify the support and complexity. You should be able to have the best of both worlds.
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Monday, March 9th, 2009
You can attach baseball cards to the spokes of a bicycle wheel and call it a motorcycle, but you still can’t take it out on the highway. I don’t care how much you write about how fast you can peddle, you won’t keep up with the big boys with real engines.
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Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Most companies can get a better Return On Existing Assets (ROEA) by simply adjusting their backup policies.
The economy is forcing all companies to look for ways to make their existing assets go further. Although I work for a company that has many products that can help do that, the first area every backup administrator should look is at their existing backup policies. Make sure that you define what the actual requirements are and re-look at the reasoning behind the current process.
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
If you are going to run your VTL near it’s capacity, you need to understand how to insure that you are not retaining data that your backup application has already expired.
An advantage virtual tape has over physical tape is that the storage for a virtual tape can be assigned to other virtual tapes when not in use. This Capacity On Demand (COD) assignment provides better storage utilization and performance by spreading the I/O throughout the storage system. The problem with this scenario is that the backup software does not tell the VTL when the virtual tape is no longer needed, so the data on the virtual tape stays until the virtual tape is re-written.
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Thursday, December 18th, 2008
It is hard for a technical person to not ask how something works. How does one deduplication technology differ from another? How big of a block size does it use? What form of hashing is it using? These are all great technical questions, but what are the really important questions?
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Does it meet my requirements?
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How much will it cost?
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Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I thought it was a joke when I first read about Sepaton’s 40:1 defuplication rate guarantee, and when you look closer… it is a joke! Here are the details if you want to confirm… Sepaton 40 to 1 Guarantee
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Monday, June 9th, 2008
I am not as comfortable talking ROI at the executive level as I am talking technology with other architects. Most of my career was trying to solve problems with the tools I was given or in many cases, not given. When you spend most of your time looking at ‘the other end of the horse,’ you forget to take a step back and look at the big picture. The bottom line with data protection is that if you continue to use the same old tools and technology, you will not be able to control cost with the continuing data growth.
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Friday, April 18th, 2008
Almost as difficult as explaining when to use affect versus effect in a sentence, I spend a lot of time explaining why it is difficult to accurately size a deduplication solution for a specific customer’s environment. The simple answer is, “the deduplication ratio will depend on your data and backup methods.”
Before we get into the ‘why’, let me clarify how deduplication effectiveness is measured.
The effectiveness of deduplication is quantified in two measures; The REPOSITORY deduplication ratio, and the DAILY deduplication ratio.
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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
So much for New Year’s resolutions. February flew past without me posting a blog. Cut me some slack, it was a short month. I have also taken on the additional role of VTL Product Manager in order to better direct the development of VTL/SIR. So sending me your comments and concerns is a short path to the top.
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Friday, January 11th, 2008
Happy New Year!
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to post more regularly to this blog, but to keep them short and hopefully interesting so you find them worth reading! So hear goes…
All the hype continues about the different de-duplication technologies and how important they will be in 2008. However many publications continue to talk about the two types of de-duplication engines; In-Band and Post Process without adequately describing how a Post Process works. To keep it short as promised, we won’t get into the pros and cons of these methods in this blog entry.
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