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A few years ago it was easy to divide IT organizations into haves and have nots. The haves used Fibre Channel SANs and array replication to dedicated disaster recovery sites over high bandwidth dedicated links or dark fiber. The have-nots used SCSI DAS (Direct Attached Storage) on their servers and, if they did real time replication at all, used server-based replication solutions like Double-Take or CA's WANsync.

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While heavily regulated and leading-edge organizations use dedicated systems to store their archival data, if you asked most IT managers where their archives were they'd point at a shelf of old backup tapes or the logbook of tapes at Iron Mountain. Similarly, legal hold meant taking a group of tapes out of the rotation and putting them on the shelf. When someone actually wanted all the documents and e-mail messages related to "The Incident," some poor backup boy had to restore all those tapes and use some e-discovery tool to find the pertinent data items.

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The worst news from Interop is that my fat old body just can't handle the things I did easily 15 years ago when I made a living teaching 5-day NetWare administration seminars. My Disaster Recovery Cookbook workshop went well, with 80 of my now-closest friends spending the day listening to me pontificate on the relative merits of Cemaphore Systems' MailShadow over Double-Take or WANsync. I, however, was a wreck at the end of the day. Even more disappointing, no one took me up on my offer of free craps lessons. The show seems to be recovering from a few years of dot-com bubble hangover, with bigger crowds of both vendors and attendees than I remember from the last two years.

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It's no secret that I think online backup is the best solution for the SOHO market. Unlike tape, it gets the data off-site and it's set it and forget it. The backup client runs every night and will even pop up in your face if it can't backup your data for a few days. Problem is, convincing the SOHO owner. They're afraid it will stop working, someone will steal their data from the provider, it will be too slow, etc., etc., etc. Early this month, HP announced Upline, an online backup service that allows users unlimited storage for $5 to $10 a month, including multiple system support. Last week, it had to shut it down, and down it remains. Even worse, a user "Ridz" at TechCrunch reports it connected him to someone else's data repository.

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HDS CTO and blogger Hu Yoshida started quite the little blog flame war with a post here that suggested a real world customer found their tape library was using more power than a VTL. Responses included IBM blogger Tony Pearson, The Backup Blogger, and SearchStorage's Beth Pariseau, with comments by other noted storage pundits. It didn't make any sense to me, so I decided to do the math myself.

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In its third storage acquisition in short order, IBM proved the rumor mill right Friday by snapping up deduping VTL vendor Diligent Technologies for what Israeli business site Globes says was $200 million. For IBM's spin on the deal, see the release here. If rumors about EMC and Quantum making a deal for deduplicating backup hardware are right, that leaves HP as the only major enterprise player without a deduplication solution.

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ExaGrid's been getting pretty good traction with its deduplicating NAS appliances for backup, with more than 200 customers. I wrote about ExaGrid's appliances just last month here. This week it's introducing a gateway model that lets you use iSCSI storage for your deduplicated data rather than buying an appliance with built-in storage. ExaGrid's tested the gateway with EqualLogic's iSCSI arrays and is pitching the combination as the best of both worlds.

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The editors at InformationWeek have told me I have to limit the blatant self-promotion to TechWeb-produced events, so I'm glad to announce that Interop is coming fast. On Sunday, April 26, I'll be presenting The Disaster Recovery Cookbook: Recipes for Recovery, a full-day workshop at the beautiful Mandalay Bay hotel casino and conference center in Las Vegas. Check out the program at http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/education/workshops.php . Mention you read this blog and join me for a free lesson in craps (but you must buy your own chips for the live final).

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2008 isn't turning out to be a good year for continuous data protection vendors. Mendocino Software closed it's doors, Double-Take Software snapped up TimeSpring for a nice bag of shiny beads and a few ax handles, and now IBM is buying FilesX for what Israeli business news site Globes reports to be $70 million to $90 million dollars. That would be a pretty good exit, as the VCs that funded FilesX only put in around $20 million. FilesX will be a good server complement to IBM's Tivoli CDP for Files, which is really only useful for laptops and workstations.

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Distance is the key difference between disaster preparedness and mere high-availability systems. Unfortunately, with distance comes latency, and latency can really kill the performance of TCP/IP applications. Add in even a tiny bit of data loss, say one in a million packets, and TCP/IP scales back its data-transfer window, dropping the effective data-transfer rate of your cross-country T-3 line to as little as 10 Mbps. NetEx's HyperIP appliances can boost link utilization for common replication applications to 90% by replacing TCP across the WAN link with a protocol that can have more data in flight across the net between acknowledgments.

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Setting up a disaster recovery site is a daunting task for most smaller IT departments. They'll need to find a site, contract for bandwidth between their office and the DR site, set up data replication, and learn how to babysit the whole thing, all while keeping the existing systems running. Sometimes, after I've managed the process for a client, I think changing the tires on a Greyhound bus as it rolls down the highway would be easier. Now Fujitsu Computer Systems has released a bundled solution that includes not just the disk arrays for both primary and DR sites, but also the hosting and bandwidth.

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By now you've read the news reports that EMC bought Iomega for $213 million. I can't help but wonder what they got that was worth it. Back in the days when 100 MB Zip disks were the easiest way to move more than a floppy's load of data from one place to another, Iomega was a force to be reckoned with. Today it sells USB hard drives, low-end NAS boxes running Windows Storage Server, and the REV removable media hard drive. Why would EMC, king of the services sale, want to enter the low-margin consumer market where it will compete with Seagate and Western Digital? Even if it does, is the Iomega name worth $200 million? I really can't believe it was desperate for the REV technology. What do you think?

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Just as the arrival of the first robin -- the bird, not Dick Grayson, fanboy -- is a harbinger of spring, adoption by three-letter vendors is an indication that a technology is moving from the revolutionary land of the startup to the mainstream. Sun's announcement today that it's adding deduplication to the StorageTek VTLPrime is just another indication that deduplication is mainstream, if not overdue.

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Well, after the usual two-hour delay getting out of Newark I'm finally ensconced in my 1-star hotel and preparing for another Storage Networking World. I've already gotten a few interesting "pre-briefings" before tomorrow's big golf outing. For those that don't follow such things, SNW is run by SNIA (The Storage Network Industry Association) and they seem to think the most important part of the conference is the golf outing. They must, or they wouldn't always have it at a $300/night hotel with a world-class golf course.

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I was chatting with a three-letter storage vendor today about its upcoming entry into the data deduplication market. As its reps rattled off the usual benefits of data deduplication, they said administrators could stop running differential and incremental backups and just make full backups since the virtual tape library would deduplicate the data anyway. I see the logic, but the old-time admin in the back of my head is yelling "That's just wrong." What do you think?

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As expected, the seemingly constant stream of news stories revealing how one organization after another has lost, misplaced, or allowed evil hackers (which some of you want me to call crackers) to access personal data about its customers, employees, and/or clients has spawned a new product. Fujifilm's Tape Tracker combines a GPS receiver and cellular modem to create a James Bondian tracking device cleverly disguised as an LTO tape. All you have to do is slip a Tape Tracker into each Turtle of tapes when the Iron Mountain courier comes to get them. If someone mugs him as he loads the van and steals your tapes, the Tape Tracker will call SCI's Lojack Intransit 24/7 monitoring center and you can track him to his secret lair.

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Friends, readers, fellow backup geeks, lend me your eyeballs. I come to bury mailbox by mailbox (brick-level) backups, not to praise them. Exchange server administrators shall not backup mailboxes individually via MAPI for it is so slow it causes thy tape drive to shoeshine, takes several times the disk or tape space as an information store backup, is prone to errors, and causes your backup jobs to fail, claiming disabled mailboxes are corrupted. The time has come to throw brick-level backups on the junk heap of obsolete backup technologies with tape RAID, tape multiplexing, and 8-mm tapes.

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Simplicity is the key to products for the SOHO market. Small business owners are like one-armed paperhangers; accounting, technology, and other administration tasks will always take second place to doing enough business to make next week's payroll. The backup software bundled with Quantum's GoVault uses this year's hot technology, data deduplication, to make backup to GoVault's removable hard drive cartridges simple as any I've seen. All you have to do is pick the folders to backup and set a schedule. The rest of the thinking is done for you.

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I've previously mentioned Cemaphore's MailShadow Exchange server continuity software. Today, Cemaphore's announced a MailShadow Google Edition that bidirectionally syncs data from an Exchange mailbox to Google's Gmail and Calendar. The sync is complete enough to allow cross-platform appointment booking and to keep read/unread state so your Exchange mailbox will reflect that you read Big Jim's message on Gmail. As e-mail is now the universal mission-critical application, organizations with low user/server ratios like small businesses and widely distributed organizations have struggled with how to provide Exchange continuity at a price they can afford. Now with MailShadowG, Google is a low-cost alternative to MessageOne.

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Aiming for the SME market, ExaGrid System's built a line of data deduping NAS appliances with 5 models designed to protect from 1 Tb to 5 TB of source data. A year ago a vendor coming out with a deduping NAS would have been noteworthy on its own, but this market moves fast and I'm not that easily impressed any more. What makes the ExaGrid boxes intriguing now is that you can stack up to 5 appliances into a single grid with 34 TB of disk space and a data ingestion rate of over 2 TB per hour.

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In a stunning demonstration of branding over substance, Network Appliance, the market leader in corporate NAS, has decided that its biggest problem is that its target market of the top 5,000 storage-using organizations in the world had never heard of it. To address this problem it, like FedEx before it, adopted the company's nickname of NetApp as the official name and decided to use the worst stylized N logo since NBC in the '80s. Various other bloggers have compared it to Stonehenge, a staple, and a Lego piece. The Register points out that a Dutch JiffyLube-type operator has a logo at least as similar as the Nebraska public TV log was to NBC's.

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Israeli business news site Global Online reported last week that negotiation for IBM to buy data deduplicating VTL software vendor Diligent Technologies for $200 million had reached an advanced stage. http://globes-online.com This would follow on IBM's acquisition of Israeli grid storage startup XIV a couple of months ago. Considering that XIV Executive Chairman Moshe Yanai remained a director of Diligent after it was spun off from EMC Israel in 2002, he just may have tipped his new bosses off to a good deal.

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It happens to the best of us every once in a while. The CEO broke his laptop screen, or the desktop power supply of the VP of HR, who insists on storing data on his C: drive, bit the dust. Now you have a hard drive full of data in a dead system. How do you mount the drive so you can recover the data? Put it in a spare desktop? Is it PATA, SATA, or the mini-PATA connection for laptop drives that also carries power? For around $30 you can stick a USB drive dongle in your bag of tricks and read them all.

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In my life as a consultant I seem to attract clients that need a network janitor. Regardless of whether the cause was a CIO past his prime trying to squeak out a couple last years by keeping the budget down or just a network that grew past its designer's ability, the network's not working right. I've also learned that if the network's not working right, the backup system isn't working at all. As a result, I frequently have to specify a new tape library before I have good capacity planning data. Since I have to guess at how many tape drives and slots the client will need for the next 10 (or even 2) years, I pick a modular library that can grow with the client's needs.

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E-mail, and more particularly Microsoft Exchange, is a classic example of how user adoption can turn an application mission critical before the IT guys catch on. Most IT departments protect Exchange servers with the same techniques they use to protect other applications. Replicate the data to another disk somewhere and have an idle Exchange server mount the database for failover. Rather than collect data at the file or block level, MailShadow collects Exchange objects at the transaction layer for replication. Working higher on the stack brings MailShadow some significant advantages.

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Like many guys, I have to admit a certain fascination with explosions and explosives. If there had been a Patriot Act when I was a young man, I would almost certainly be blogging from a federal pen somewhere as I did combine my fascination with my studies as a chemistry major to make my own little toys. The statute of limitations having run out and the heat being on, so to speak, I limit myself to Mythbusters and other televised explosions. When surfing the Web this afternoon looking for good visuals for my Interop Disaster Recovery Cookbook workshop, I tripped across a video HP made where they blow up a simlulated data center with five racks of servers and an XP disk array. To see it yourself, go to this site.

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In an e-mail yesterday, MozyPro resellers learned that the price hike for server protection that was to go into effect March 1 has been postponed until the 12th (next Wednesday). The delay was "due to the overwhelming amount of feedback from our resellers and the lack of time we've had to respond and address a lot of you." The e-mail includes a FAQ section I've posted below. The biggest news there is that users grandfathered in will be able to expand their storage for existing servers at $0.50 per GB per month indefinitely.

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I received an e-mail from Robb Moore, the president of ioSafe, responding to my recent post wondering if the whole concept of fireproof storage devices for on-site backup was a bad idea. Restraining myself from making snarky comments to his points I'm posting his message as is, and with his permission, below. I'll probably make snarly comments soon since restraint isn't my greatest strength.

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Like BASF in their TV commercials, Hifn is one of those companies that doesn't make the storage and computing products you buy, they make the parts and ingredients that make them better. Amongst those that know it at all, Hifn is best known as patent holder for the LZS compression algorithm used in everything from Cisco routers to just about every tape drive you own. Hifn's main product nowadays are compression and encryption chips that speed up everything from VPN gateways to most of the major virtual tape libraries. Now it is shipping a card, four-way PCIe or 64-bit PCI-X, that in addition to compression and encryption also generates hash values for deduplication.

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Once again last week the utility industry's version of Jimmy McNulty (see HBO's The Wire) disabled two separate protection devices while diagnosing a bad switch at a south Florida substation causing a fault that propagated through the grid. In the process it cut out power to a nuclear power plant causing it to shut down (And why is it nuclear power plant's can't run on the power they generate?) along with power for 3 million people from Miami to Tampa. While most users got their power back in a few hours this incident leads me to ask: How reliable is our power? and What if this had happened in August when Florida's air conditioners are working full out?

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I reported in a previous post Its_Hard_To_Beat_Free that German storage vendor Open-E was giving away its open source-based DSS Lite software that turns a typical PC server into a NAS/iSCSI initiator and target/Fibre Channel initiator and target till Jan. 31. Apparently enough people downloaded the Lite version with its 1 TB storage limit and then decided to buy Open-E's bigger versions to make it worthwhile, so Open-E is again providing free downloads.

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Over the past couple of years ioSafe, Sentry, and Schwab have introduced a new generation of backup targets, fireproof storage. A Frankenstein like crossbreeding of USB hard drive or NAS and fireproof safe, they can protect your backups against fire, flood (as they're waterproof, too) and gloom of night. Last Interop our own Steve Hill drove out to the desert with the friendly folks from ioSafe, poured a flammable liquid on one of there NAS boxes and had himself a nice little computer barbecue so they could demonstrate that the data inside laughs at fire. Cool I thought but why?

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In an e-mail sent to MozyPro resellers this week, EMC announced new pricing for online backup of servers via its MozyPro division effective March 1. Users that purchase plans under the current pricing will be grandfathered in, so if you were thinking that MozyPro was the right answer for your servers, sign up now. Of course, you also may want to consider another provider, like Intronis Technologies' eSureIT or IBackup Professional, now that MozyPro is in their price range.

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IT budgets and tech staffs were clobbered during the recession of the early 2000s. But how would they survive this time around? Hasn't most of the "fat" already been slashed, or has much of it returned?

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The new 3.0 version of its RecoverPoint CDP/Replication appliance extends the technology EMC acquired with Kashya in 2006. The version provides both local replication to a CDP volume and journal on the same Fibre Channel SAN as the primary storage and remote asynchronous replication via IP to another array at the same time. Unlike array-based replication options, the source and destination arrays need not be the same type, or even from the same vendor.

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This week Symantec released the first services from its previously announced Symantec Protection Network (SPN) and, as Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise, Surprise, Surprise," online backup. Symantec Online Backup is a middle of the road service for small businesses that should have some appeal, especially after Symantec takes the time to add a few features the competition already has. Symantec Online Storage for Backup Exec, on the other hand, breaks new ground providing online off-site backup capabilities to the legions of Windows shops running Backup Exec after they update to the new version 12.

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Just two years ago it looked like Continuous Data Protection might actually replace the weekly full backup, nightly incremental backup tedium that's ruled the data center since T.Rex walked the earth. Microsoft's Data Protection Manager endorsed the concept, but was so limited it did more to open the market for other players like TimeSpring and FilesX than box them out. At the high end, Revivio, Mendocino Software, and Kaysha had Fibre Channel appliances that would split off writes to even the busiest database and journal them without putting a load on the database server. I even wrote a comparative review.

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In the four short years since Data Domain introduced their original DD240 appliance, hardware data de-duplication in the data center has evolved from interesting technology to accepted, if not yet standard, practice. While big enterprise data centers with petabytes of data and hundreds of terabytes of nightly backups are still more interested in raw speed than storage efficiency, most of us could improve our backup infrastructure significantly with de-duplication. With the new DD120, Data Domain brings the cost of data de-duplication down to the point where it makes sense for branch offices.

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MessageOne's whole premise is that it's easier and possibly cheaper to provide e-mail filtering, continuity, and archiving from the Net than for organizations to use software and appliances and roll their own solutions. For many organizations, especially those with many distributed servers, it may be. Let's take a look at how each of their services looks against the popular alternatives.

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Dell coughed up $155,000,000 for e-mail continuity specialist MessageOne, a company that just happened to be founded by Michael Dell's little brother, Adam. The official press release describes all the hoops Dell jumped through, including throwing a small pile of money at Morgan Stanley to bless the price, to make this look like an arm's length transaction. After all, various Dell family investment vehicles owned almost 10% of MessageOne. While I suspect no one at Dell would have gone looking for MessageOne just because they had money to spend, after all there must be an online backup provider still available. With Michael giving his share of the money to charity, the real question is was it a good deal?

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Reacting to the seemingly endless conga line of companies announcing one of their employees lost a laptop or tape that held un-encrypted customer data, some organizations rushed into encryption solutions that may have caused more problems than they solve. While pundits recommended SAN encryption appliances for performance, the market turned out to be smaller than expected, forcing vendors Kasten Chase and NeoScale out of business in the past 18 months. Customers of these defunct vendors have a whole lot of ugly work ahead.

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Much as I always respected the engineering of NEC's products in the past, the one thing you wouldn't call them is exciting. The short form of the review of the S2500 disk array I wrote a couple of years ago in Network Computing would have read "Solid modular disk array has all the features you'd expect, but mothering unique. They sell a lot of them in the home market, so don't worry about being a guinea pig." Well, with HYDRAstor, it has something unique.

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Expanding on its existing resale arrangement with Diligent Technologies, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is now shipping preconfigured virtual tape libraries combining Diligent's ProtecTEIR software and HDS' AMS modular Fibre Channel disk array. Based on customer feedback that indicated customers would rather buy, and VARS would rather sell, preconfigured systems than server, software, disk storage, and the inevitable professional services separately.

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Every once in a while a vendor comes up with a catchy title for a white paper. Today, Cybernetics' "The Risk of a Disk-Only Backup Strategy: The Case for Disk and Tape" crossed my desk. Being an open-minded kind of guy, I figured I'd give it a read. After a couple of sensible pages about how hard drives fail in use and tapes on the shelf are pretty stable, it tries to prove its point with laboratory tests of how well hard drives and tapes work after being dropped. This begs the question: "Who takes their backup disks out of the RAID array and drops them?"

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Two events in the past few weeks drew my attention back to holographic data storage. InPhase Technologies announced it raised $20 million in a D round of financing. Its Tapestry 300 GB disk and drive has been about a year away for about 18 months. Now, development delays are nothing new in technology development, ask Microsoft about just about any version of Windows, and Turner Broadcasting has been using the InPhase drives in a pilot for a while, so it probably will ship it eventually.

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When I ask organizations to list their mission critical applications, e-mail is always on the list. While organizations are investing in all sorts of high-availability solutions for their e-mail servers, I'm amazed at how often they skip the inexpensive steps that will insure that legit e-mail doesn't get bounced if the e-mail server is down. When your mail server, or Internet connection, is down, a backup MX, or mail exchange, server will accept mail for your domain and forward it automatically to your mail server when it comes back on line.

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In our last installment, a disgruntled employee deleted files from the computers at the small office where she worked. Her boss should have known better, but we don't expect Florida architects to be IT mavens. In episode 2, cable TV operator Charter Communications, whose chairman and largest stockholder is none other than Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, accidentially deleted 14,000 e-mail accounts and their contents.

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On Tuesday night, two unrelated undersea cables in the Mediterranean were cut within hours of each other, disrupting Internet and phone service to Egypt and, more significantly, to India, the call center capital of the world.

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Today's large IT environments are dynamic places; applications, volumes, and file systems are added, deleted, and reallocated on SANs on a daily basis. The disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, is updated and tested on an annual basis. As a result, most organizations think their data is better protected than it really is.

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CommVault's new Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) will watch your backups for you, assuming, of course, you use CommVault's Galaxy backup program. And if you spring for the diamond level, a human being will even call you in the middle of the night to discuss what went wrong.

Backup administrator is a thankless job at best. People only notice when something goes wrong and then they’re breathing down your back, acting like 6-year-olds in the back seat, saying "When will we be back up?" instead of "Are we there yet?" As a result, most small and midsize IT departments stick the new guy with being "Backup Monkey."

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