Deduplication – is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who cares?
Actually, I’ve discovered it’s not just me – thank goodness. When you go through a product launch process there is always a chance that the general ”noise” is you banging on about stuff and is limited to inside your own head.
Not so in BE 2010 case … I’ve been running around Europe in the last month or so, and the feedback I’ve been getting is that there is an awful amount of interest in deduplication. Even smaller companies who thought that deduplication was probably too much for their needs are seriously looking at getting rid of some of the duplicate data on their primary storage, but even more are looking at deduplication as a way of improving backup and restore times.
I was at an event a couple of months back where every conversation I had was around the length of time it takes to backup. As data continues to grow across the IT infrastructure, everywhere: laptops, disparate storage devices, remote offices, as well as the good old Data Centre, it has created a fundamental shift in the way organisations need to manage information. Keeping information on disk for faster DR restores is all fine and dandy, but there is simply too much data around. Disk based backup is now getting a tricky to manage and as cumbersome as tape-based backup.
A number of customers are turning to deduplication technologies in order to facilitate faster backups, reduce primary storage, and reduce not just the amount of disk being used up but also improve tape media rotation and management.
Deduplication gives you the ability to tape a strategic approach to storage and backups. Organisations now have the ability to deploy an integrated platform that is easy to manage and supports source and target-based deduplication.
Primary storage deduplication will become widely deployed in the next 6 to 12 months. Most organisations have not yet gone down this route, however, with the Option now built into Backup Exec 2010 this is all the more likely because it’s available simply, really easy to install and the benefits are huge.
Introducing Backup Exec 2010
Today is a big day for us at Symantec – huge launch of our backup products, NetBackup 7 and Backup Exec 2010, offering a unified backup and recovery portfolio that reaches from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises.
We are really excited about this launch which must be one of the most significant in the last few years, and there is a considerable amount of interest in the industry.
Businesses today rely on information technology and systems to run their businesses; help to drive new opportunities; operate efficiently and comply appropriately with governance. Most organisations today are organised around servers, storage and applications with islands of static information. The sheer volume of data and its continued growth means that IT is struggling to keep up with growth with the added pressure to do more with less.
The new products are really impressive with integrated deduplication everywhere and archiving, reducing the complexity of storage management, as well as centralised information management and enhanced virtualisation capabilities.
Small Business: Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 provide a simple, cost-effective backup and recovery solution that helps minimise downtime and avoid disaster by easily recovering individual data files/folders or complete Windows systems in minutes even to different hardware, virtual environments, or remote locations – for a multitude of SB environments.
Small and Medium Businesses: Symantec delivers reliable backup and recovery designed for growing businesses. Backup Exec 2010 helps protect more, store less and save more by reducing storage and management costs through integrated deduplication and archiving technology on both virtual or physical systems.
Enterprise: Symantec NetBackup 7 simplifies the protection of heterogeneous enterprise information by automating advanced technologies across applications, platforms, and virtual environments. Integrated deduplication, replication, and virtual machine protection improves storage efficiency, infrastructure use, and recovery times through one console.
Benefits of Next Generation Information Management from Symantec
- Reduce Costs: Gain 10-20 percent net savings from a single platform
- Recover data up to 5 times faster for less downtime
- Reduce unstructured data storage 40-60%
- Compress remote office backups up to 95%
- Protect virtual and physical machines
It doesn’t matter what is the issue – the answer is Symantec!
General availablity 1st February 2010
Server Sales – Worst First Quarter in 12 Years
I don’t know if any of you have noticed but the first fiscal quarter of this year has been pretty bad for server sales. It doesn’t matter what the pundits say, however, it is important for all of us to save money, cut costs – but absolutely not at the expense of our backup.
Whatever else you gamble with, backup shouldn’t be one of them. IDC recently reported that server sales from January to March was the worst quarter in the dozen years that they have been releasing quarterly server figures. The current economic crisis has injected a disconcerting amount of uncertainty into the business climate. Organisations are loath to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary.
The silver lining here is that IT departments can use this opportunity to consolidate existing projects and focus on optimising existing backup systems . Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 are built on complete protection and recovery providing central management protection for both virtual and physical systems – everything from multiple virtual servers to individual directories and files; a new generation of data protection management tools, powered by Altiris technology, for both Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery.
BE delivers unmatched granular recovery capabilities for Exchange, Active Directory and SharePoint environments reducing the overheads associated with managing Exchange mailbox backups, restoring Active Directory user preferences and attributes without multiple reboots and overall simplifying the recovery process for critical Microsoft applications.
With BE you can ensure fast, efficient recovery of individual emails or documents from a full or incremental backup. Why take the time to recovery an entire database when all you need is an individual document or email?
Backup Exec System Recovery has offered capability to quickly convert physical systems to virtual environments for several years now. BESR enables immediate system recovery to virtual systems by allowing IT administrators to schedule physical to virtual conversions. Through a virtual conversion wizard an IT administrator can schedule P2V conversions to occur monthly, daily, weekly even hourly if desired so that in the event of a failure, you have a virtual system ready to go. In addition to dramatically reducing system downtime, this reduces management time and set-up for IT organisations as well.
Also new to this release is support for the latest virtual environments including VMware ESX 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer 4.x (when using VMDK or VHD file types). When you add this functionality to the off-site copy capability it really helps organisations address their disaster recovery needs.
If someone wants a high availability solution without investing in a lot of clustering or replication software that are outside their budget BESR technology is a great way to copy these images to other locations, convert them on a schedule, and if the original server goes down those images can be brought up immediately for high availability purposes.
IT has to make do with what they have – what they need to do is make sure that they are “making do” as efficiently as possible, tweaking here and there, centralising management, adding agents and options to optimise the backup and recovery of critical data and applications and slim-lining processes to improve backup process efficiencies.
You might want to take another look at Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery …
BE Self Assessment
You might have had a really (really) good backup strategy 2 or 3 years ago, but does it stack up today? Every vendor you’ve ever heard about is always banging on about backup and recovery being even more tricky than it was yesterday; and how it is now ever more challenging than it ever was, and, frankly it was pretty trick then … what with data growth going crazy, sprawling physical and virtualised environments, shrinking, nay, shrunk backup windows (what’s backup window?), and escalating storage management costs.
Gosh, haven’t we heard it all before? But, it is certainly true that the age old conventional backup solutions have not kept up with the data protection requirements, as well as the growth in data itself forcing substantial investments in hardware and dramatically increased administrator workload.
You might already have a good data backup strategy in place. But if your server hardware were lost or your building suddenly off limits, could you access your data and maintain business continuity? It doesn’t take much to wipe out a critical database of information. Any backup is only as reliable as its ability to restore business data, applications and systems when they are needed most.
A data protection strategy sets out how we go about minimising data protection risk. It has to be concerned with ensuring maximum effectiveness or it remains a pointless exercise. But end users I speak to in organisations large and small are still not convinced that they have reliable backup solutions in their environments – or perhaps more accurately that the backup solution isn’t quite covering everything …
There are also analyst rumours that virtual machines will outnumber physical servers in 2009. The adoption of x86 servers is making virtualisation a crucial factor, but at the same time making traditional backup solutions redundant.
We’ve put together a backup strategy assessment tool – why not have a go at it to find out how robust your Data Protection is?
Links to assessment tool: http://www.emea.symantec.com/mybackupexec/assessment/
Backup Exec Sites:
UK: www.symantec.co.uk/mybackupexec
La France: www.symantec.fr/mybackupexec
Deutschland: www.symantec.de/mybackupexec
Italia : www.symantec.it/mybackupexec
España: www.symantec.es/mybackupexec
Nederland: www.symantec.nl/mybackupexec
Thinking of Cutting Backup Budgets – Think Again!
I saw an analyst report the other day that predicts that in spite of the economic downturn companies, large and small will be spending the same, or even increased, amounts on backup and recovery in fiscal year 2010.
Huh?
To make matters more “huh-like”, this study found that the adoption of disk based technologies is accelerating. Actually, when you think about it this makes sense – disk based backup improves recovery capabilities, backs up virtual environments more effectively and eliminates or reduces the physical requirement (and security hazard) for tape transport.
Actually, it’s making more sense the more you think about it. Older backup solutions or older hardware is less effective, more administratively heavy, time consuming, costing money and effort; new hardware technology on the other hand is more efficient and with new software there is more opportunity to automate more. The automation of IT processes can improve overall IT performance as well as specifically storage, server, and application performance. It also gives IT a fighting chance of managing this unruly thing we call IT saving time, effort and money by better staff productivity, better utilisation rates of servers and storage, better efficiency and understanding of all the assets in the IT environment.
So, we all need to be focused on solving the fundamental challenges of backup: improving recovery objectives, improving success rates, and backing up virtual servers (by the way, if you’ve not sussed this out yet server virtualisation will have a significant impact on backup and data protection strategies in the next year). Backup Exec provides automated backup and recovery that easily integrates into your existing environment. BE’s Agents and Options enhance and extend platform and feature support for BE Environments.
The BE 12.5 Media Server and Agent of Windows Systems licenses include Advanced Open File Option (AOFO) and Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option (IDRO). Advanced Open File Option (AOFO) and Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option (IDRO) are included with each core Backup Exec 12.5 license and with each Agent for Windows Systems providing complete out-of-the-box data protection. Comprehensive Data Protection for VMware Infrastructures and Microsoft Hyper-V Servers provide fast, efficient data protection from a single console. One agent efficiently backs up unlimited virtual guest machines to disk or tape and Backup administrators can easily restore an individual file or folder saving management time and resources.
BE’s agent and options can help provide efficient, flexible database and granular data recovery down to an individual emails or documents with Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) for Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directive and virtual servers. BE provides CDP for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, file servers, and desktops/laptops almost eliminating any backup windows-without disrupting user productivity or application usage.
Where the core product is pretty powerful – why not take a look at how you can enhance your backup strategy with the agents and options you can add to your backup strategy to give you more backup for your bucks.
New Technology Is Making Much More Possible But More Complex as Well
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that a backup redesign is sweeping through IT departments. I think everyone is aware that backup has been identified as a primary IT pain point. And the reason is pretty simple actually – disk. There is so much of it. You know that most companies approach the protection of their data in a very dated manner. Although backup and recovery has been around for years, data protection solutions of old are failing to keep pace with today’s overwhelming data growth and complexity.
Although many companies have started to deploy disk-based data protection in the form of virtual tape libraries (VTLs), much of the thinking in data centres and by vendors is still tape-centric. But not just tap-centric but, more to the point, NOT application centric, NOT site centric, NOT virtual machine centric. Protection is getting harder because data centres and remote offices have evolved. Server consolidation through virtualisation technologies has changed the way companies need to think about protecting their data. How long is the backup window if there are 10 virtual machines per physical machine?
Much more is possible now with disk-based data protection: shared disk pools for protection and recovery, continuous data protection for remote office data as well as consolidation or recovery of data centre applications. (Backup Exec provides granular recovery technology and continuous data protection and Backup Exec System Recovery … does what it says on the tin.) Centralised management capabilities have improved to automate global data protection from remote offices to core data centres.
The next generation data protection with Backup Exec provides comprehensive management of enterprises’ complex environments. That means a single data protection solution that covers all databases, and applications. It also means supporting the broadest set of disk (SAN, NAS, and DAS), tape, and virtual tape library vendors, and delivering the latest data protection technologies such as virtualization, granular recovery, and continuous data protection.
Disk-based data protection is the future of backup and recovery for reasons of performance, reliability, and cost. Next generation data protection therefore means support for basic commodity disk, deduplication, replication, and continuous data protection.
Take the Backup Exec challenge – does your backup – stack up?
http://eval.symantec.com/flashdemos/other/be12_challenge/
Virtualisation is Causing Re-Evaluation of Backup Plans
Symantec recently carried out its annual IT Disaster Recovery survey of 1,000 or so IT managers across 15 countries. Now, there are a bunch of really interesting facts and it’s well worth a read, but the staggering revelation I think is that the number of applications that IT managers consider mission-critical has jumped 20% in the last year.
We all know that apps like email have crept up on us and become really important to business over the last few years. But what I think is interesting is that at some point in the last 10 years IT has ceased to support the business and become the business! What do I mean – if the lights go out the business stops. The IT Disaster Recovery survey shows that on average 56% of applications are now considered mission-critical. Such a rapid increase may well pose considerable difficulties for, not just high availability but things we take for granted like Backup.
This is particularly true for those organisations who have implemented server virtualisation projects. It is dead easy to deploy virtual machines, but quite as simple to make sure they are backed up properly. I feel particularly sorry for those poor sods using either different backup solutions for backing up virtualised infrastructures or those who do not have an agent for virtualised environments. It must be a nightmare typing to write scripts for each virtual machine! Thank goodness we have Backup Exec!
If you don’t know there is an offer on the Backup Exec Virtual Agent currently – runs to the end of June 2009, so if you upgrade to the latest Backup Exec 12.5 virtual agents and Save Up to 35% off !
Virtualisation is the major factor causing organisations to re-evaluate their disaster recovery plans today. A major challenge is deploying and maintaining the different tools for backup that are needed for their physical and virtual environments–indicating a need for tools that work across multiple operating systems and virtualisation technologies. The top challenge when backing up virtual systems involves resource constraints, which highlights the need for simplified and automated backup solutions that reduce manual tasks for administrators.
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