It was supposed to be a trivial upgrade.  Especially for a guy who does backup & recovery for a living, right?  My awesome Lenovo T420s allows for not [...]]]> A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my laptop with an SSD primary disk – and along the way, I discovered the magic that is Acronis.

It was supposed to be a trivial upgrade.  Especially for a guy who does backup & recovery for a living, right?  My awesome Lenovo T420s allows for not only a standard SATA disk but also an mSATA slot, so my thought was to back up my System Volume and C:-drive and then restore them to the SSD.  This would give me a fast OS and longer battery life, but keep my big data set on a 7200 SATA disk – sounds easy?   Actually, no.

And then my IT guy sent me a CD with Acronis on it (am a remote user) – thanks Dan!

After booting from the CD, I used their very straight-forward UI to get a copy of my C: to a USB disk – and then restored the backup to new partitions on the SSD.  DONE !!!!! 

(now I remember why peripheral manufacturers ship OEM licenses of value-add software)

• My boot time went from 85 seconds to 17 seconds (from first graphical elements to login prompt)
• My battery life on airplanes went from about 1 hour to 2.5 hours – using Word or OneNote non-stop.

Will I ever use a primary laptop without an SSD C:, NO.

Will I ever do partition management/protection without Acronis?  Why?!

My next mission is to visit with the Acronis folks on how they do that voodoo that they do so well … and what else does their magic pixie fairy dust solve for.  Maybe, I’ll even talk the ESG Lab guys into doing some validation of whatever Acronis releases next.  Maybe, I’ll be able to help them the way they helped me.  However it goes, you’ll hear about it here.

Thanks for reading.

[Originally Posted on ESG Technical Optimist .com]

Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO, started by offering “Every year, I stand up and talk about how data is growing … and every year we underestimate it.” [...]]]> Today, Symantec held live events covering the upcoming BackupExec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 releases.  According to Symantec, “Backup is broken” (I agree).  And they intend to be the fix.

Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO, started by offering “Every year, I stand up and talk about how data is growing … and every year we underestimate it.” (which is oh so very true for most IT environments today)

The launch events were recently held at the Tesla Motor headquarters, with highlights shared in today’s live webcasts along with new product demos and very active tweets.  The Tesla event was impressive (no, I didn’t get to drive one).  But the theme of innovation was the right one, and they had some cool stuff to talk about on both product lines.

You can get some insight what the new technologies are and  how they work at Symantec’s new video launch site – http://www.betterbackupforall.com/.  Kudos to the Symantec PMs and distinguished engineers on bringing some advanced functions not only to market but explaining them in a way that is meaningful and not just marketecture.

You’ll see more from ESG on both products as they come to market, and am hoping that my buddies in the ESG Lab get a chance to get some deep hands-on time with both products.  But in the meantime, the topline good stuff to me were:

Backup Exec 2012

• Easier Acquisition through Simpler SKUs, including Small-Business Edition and V-Ray editions
• Easier Operation through new UIs and workflows that seem to really make sense.
• Very cool “No hardware disaster recovery” through P2V and B2V functionality (more on that later)

NetBackup 7.5

• Up to 100X faster backups, by combining client-side dedupe during backups through NBU Accelerator
• Integrated use of snapshots from NetApp through NBU Replication Director
• Smarter retention of data through NBU Search

I was able to get a preview copy of BE 2012 and just started trying it out on my own home server – which might be a separate blog post later, along with other coverage by ESG as these products hit the street.

Until then, you can read more about what I saw and liked in a TechTarget article covering this week’s announcements by Symantec.

As always, thanks for reading.

[Originally posted on ESG Technical Optimist .com]

It was a privilege to work with two ESG Lab Engineers, Tony Palmer and Ajen Johan, to do some hands-on with the new Riverbed technologies.

To me, the really cool part of Granite is how it changes some presumptions [...]]]> This week, ESG Lab published its Lab Report on the new Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite.

It was a privilege to work with two ESG Lab Engineers, Tony Palmer and Ajen Johan, to do some hands-on with the new Riverbed technologies.

To me, the really cool part of Granite is how it changes some presumptions for branch offices.  Traditionally, I still see large customers doing things in two very different ways:

• For their large data center facilities, SAN-based manageable and consolidated storage.
• For their remote offices, standalone servers with direct-attached disk.

The reason for this is that most presume that managing a SAN at each branch office is non-viable.  So, even though managed storage may be more effective for many scenarios, it only seems to happen in the data centers of many companies.   If only there was a way to do it for the branches?

The Granite technology effectively extends an iSCSI scenario from your data center SAN to a branch office server.   Technically, there are two iSCSI scenarios in play:

• Within the data center (diagram-left), the Granite “core” device has an iSCSI initiator to mount LUNs from your existing iSCSI SAN provider.
• At the branch office (diagram-right), the Granite “edge” device caches a copy of that LUN and becomes an iSCSI target, whereby any machine in your branch with an iSCSI initiator can mount it.

The result is that managed storage blocks that appear local are in fact replicated from a centralized data center copy.  This leads to some really interesting (and presumption-twisting) changes from a Data Protection perspective.  Maybe you still run your backups at the branch?  Maybe you want to finally adopt NDMP and back up directly from the SAN at the data center?  There are some options worth looking at, without ripping out whatever backup solution is currently in play.

There is more to the Steelhead EX + Granite solution than just the iSCSI capabilities, including a built-in VMware hypervisor inside the new Riverbed device – enabling further server consolidation to VMs within the edge device, using iSCSI LUNs that are actually from the corporate data center.

Check out the ESG Lab Validation on Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite for more.

As always, thanks for reading.

[Originally posted on ESG at Technical Optimist .com]

This announcement coincides with the publishing of ESG’s [...]]]> Yesterday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of its AWS Storage Gateway, which acts as an iSCSI target, delivered as a virtual appliance.  On-premise servers can connect to the iSCSI device and store their data locally, with snapshots being stored in the Amazon S3 cloud-storage environment.

This announcement coincides with the publishing of ESG’s whitepaper on “DR in the Cloud” using AWS.

All things being considered, I am very excited about the AWS Storage gateway (AWS SG), mostly because it reminds me in some ways of Microsoft’s for-sale backup product, System Center Data Protection Manager that I used to manage.  DPM wasn’t the most full-featured backup software on the market, but it did at least two very good things:

The AWS Storage Gateway is a credible offering for what its initial release is designed to do.  And like most cloud-based offerings, one can expect it to be enhanced in months, not years, as customers give feedback and operational lessons are learned.  As Terri points out, the AWS Storage Gateway may not be taking over the world of cloud-based storage enablement quite yet.  But the AWS Storage Gateway, when seen alongside all of the other AWS offerings, shows how Amazon is continuing to evolve its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings.   And those evolutions are good not only to Amazon and its ever-growing AWS direct customer base, but also to the partners that will develop even more solutions based on them for the rest of us.

ESG recently authored a white paper on “DR in the Cloud“, based on where we see companies struggling with home-grown DR solutions — and how the AWS offerings can help.

To read the ESG Whitepaper on “DR in the Cloud” using AWS, click here.

Thanks for reading.

[Originally posted on ESG at Technical Optimist .com]

ESG recently published [...]]]> Mozy has announced the public beta of its new Stash offering.  The public beta is available to existing Mozy Backup customers, as an add-on capability that takes advantage of customers’ existing accounts, subscribed storage capacity, etc. In other words, it’s a great example of the convergence between backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and Online-File-Storage (OLFS).

ESG recently published our market landscape report on OLFS at www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/12/online-file-sharing-and-collaboration-in-the-enterprise/

Last year, ESG shared its perspectives on BaaS at www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/02/data-protection-backup-as-a-service/

BaaS and OLFS have a lot in common, so their convergence is natural, and frankly, almost inevitable.

• They work by installing an agent on the range of consumer devices that you carry. After installation and a usually user-friendly (wizard or push-button) experience, they routinely if not near-continuously transmit changed data to the cloud.
• They rely on a massive cloud-based storage architecture, whether it is self-maintained by the original vendor or leveraging a public cloud’s storage platform, e.g. Amazon.
• They’re sold usually on a subscription basis, almost always with tiered offerings, based on how much storage you plan to consume

So, what is different between OLFS and BaaS?

• BaaS is focused on multiple recovery points as a key design criteria, often including a definable retention period for past versions
• OLFS is focused on sharing – whether that means across your varied devices, or between you and your friends/coworkers, will vary based on the OLFS offering

Some OLFS offerings do support previous versions, though its usually within the context of restoring that Word document that you just accidently overwrote — and not preserving your data for a year. And while whole-machine recovery may not be a primary design function of most OLFS, the reality is that if your machine is re-image-able from either it’s factory DVDs, a monthly backup to a USB drive, or perhaps your corporate backup solution … and your data is regularly uploaded to some OLFS cloud — then whole machine recovery really can be a fairly trivial event.

BaaS-only solutions know that that they are "backup" solutions, so sharing options aren’t typically part of the model — which makes sense.

So, how does Mozy’s Stash solution stack up?

I took the opportunity to try out both the Mozy Backup and Stash offerings on one of my home machines. The setup for backup was relatively straight forward and I found it interesting how they pre-define data types and then simply prompt you to either back them up or not. I will look closer at its BaaS capabilities in a later blog post (or ESG Lab validation) but for now, I just wanted to get it installed so that I could be one of the millions of Mozy Backup customers that could now try the Stash feature.

Stash functionality enabled pretty easily, with the standard OLFS concept of defining a root-level folder for data storage. And as exciting as it sounds, I dropped some files into it and watched my drive light and network lights start blinking away. Sure enough, by installing the same Mozy client software on my work laptop, the files were there. Yay! But let’s be clear — it is a beta of a first release in the space. I am actually an avid user of another OLFS service which has a key feature that Mozy doesn’t yet offer — sharing between users. For that reason alone, I can’t use it yet. If you don’t share data with others, is Mozy viable for you? Maybe.

Although it is ‘beta’, it isn’t fair to call their offering a ‘1.0’ — because they aren’t standing it up from scratch. Mozy has oodles of experience with what it takes to create a lightweight agent technology across a variety of consumer devices. They understand how to build and operate a cloud-based storage platform at scale. They have millions of subscribers. Some of them may be using another OLFS, and if they aren’t sharing with others, may be happy to run one less agent and pay one less monthly bill. Other Mozy subscribers may have been thinking about OLFS, and the Stash offering will be what gets them started. And don’t forget, it is still only in beta.

So, more functionality will eventually come, and like most cloud-services, incremental features will come months, not years, later. Some of Mozy’s backup users will jump on this (likely increasing their storage consumption subscription in the process) — and Mozy will invariably hear the feedback of what their install base wants vs. needs. And with Mozy’s agility, as well as their commitment to cloud-enabled storage, things can only go up.

What excites me the most is seeing examples of the convergence between BaaS and OLFS. And if Stash helps more folks to get their data into the cloud, that is goodness. Beyond the convergence, I’m also looking forward to seeing what happens with Mozy Stash 1.1 … 1.5 … 2.0.

[Originally Posted on ESG at Technical Optimist .com]

Data protection processes and technologies are vital to ensuring an organization’s operational, regulatory, and financial health. As a result, data protection infrastructure is included in every IT budget and is top of mind for data center staff. However, due to the complexity and often high cost [...]]]> [Cross-posted from my ESG blog – Technical Optimist .com]

Data protection processes and technologies are vital to ensuring an organization’s operational, regulatory, and financial health. As a result, data protection infrastructure is included in every IT budget and is top of mind for data center staff. However, due to the complexity and often high cost of backup, restore, and disaster recovery, many organizations are willing to invest in methods and solutions that can save time, reduce costs, and simplify management.

In fact, ESG’s 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey reveals that improving data backup and recovery is the most commonly identified IT priority over the next 12-18 months. Earlier ESG research exploring data protection priorities indicates that the most significant data protection investments were in the areas of:

• Improving disaster recovery (35%)
• Backing up virtual server environments (30%)
• Improving application backup (26%)
• and desktop/laptop backup and recovery (23%)

For years, Microsoft has delivered Volume Shadow copy Services (VSS) for third-party backup mechanisms to help achieve these goals.  More recently, Microsoft System Center’s Data Protection Manager has also been offered to help satisfy the needs of Windows customers that are very much in-line with ESG research findings:

• Improving disaster recovery – Through a feature Microsoft refers to DPM-2-DPM-4-DR, DPM replicates data from secondary onsite storage to tertiary offsite storage, including to third-party partner clouds
• Backing up Hyper-V virtual machines – DPM offers both host-based and guest-based options
• Improving application backups – DPM uses only VSS-based or other application-supported methods developed in alignment with System Center’s peers in Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint
• Desktop/laptop protection – This was first released in DPM 2010 (v3), including online and offline scenarios

This week, Microsoft announced the availability of the Release Candidate for its System Center 2012 management products, including v4 of Data Protection Manager.

What is new in 2012

I spent some time talking with Microsoft on what was coming in DPM in 2012, with key features being:

• Centralized Console using Operations Manager, thereby also providing better integration of DPM functionality across the System Center line
• Enhanced SharePoint recovery options
• Better Hyper-V protection capabilities, including the ability to run DPM within a VM
• and Generic Data Source Protection for non-Microsoft applications that run on Windows

Click here to read the ESG brief of DPM in System Center 2012

As always, thanks for reading

Thursday, January 19 – the System Center Universe 2012 community-driven event will be going through many of the technologies in that release.

Am very excited to be speaking about [...]]]> Tuesday, January 17 — Microsoft held a webcast on their Private Cloud offerings and announced the Release Candidate of their System Center 2012 management tools.

Thursday, January 19 – the System Center Universe 2012 community-driven event will be going through many of the technologies in that release.

Am very excited to be speaking about data protection at the System Center Universe 2012 event in Austin on January 19th.  The SCU planners were kind enough to invite me, along with a great lineup of Microsoft program managers/speakers and industry SME’s to talk about what is coming soon. 

The in-person event is sold-out in Austin, but you are welcome to watch the live all-day event from several local user-group venues or via the web.  Originally, I had intended to share the data protection hour with a DPM MVP, but it appears I will be going solo.  So, I hope that I remember how this stuff works. 

You can also watch the tweets at #SCU2012

Thanks for reading

“We’re small – so we can’t afford enterprise stuff”

“We only have 40 people. If we have to recreate something, it isn’t too bad“

Respectfully, none of these are reasons — they are all excuses — and they are mostly inaccurate.

The US Dept. of Labor once surveyed what [...]]]>

“All we can afford is tape.”

“We’re small – so we can’t afford enterprise stuff”

“We only have 40 people. If we have to recreate something, it isn’t too bad“

Respectfully, none of these are reasons — they are all excuses — and they are mostly inaccurate.

The US Dept. of Labor once surveyed what happened to small businesses who experienced a significant crisis, including fires, hurricanes, tornados, etc. What they found is that not all businesses were able to re-open at all. Some that did eventually re-open later closed for good because they weren’t able to re-capture their clientele. Overall, the survey found that 2/3 of those SMBs failed because of a major crisis.  I would suggest that the primary cause was a lack of preparedness, likely because of one of the reasons above — so let’s revisit them.

“All we can afford is tape”

WRONG — no one, of any size, can only afford tape. For most crises, ranging regional weather catastrophes to single hard-drive failures, you don’t need last month’s or last year’s data from tape. What you need is yesterday.  You need it online, now! By definition, that is not tape — that is disk. The reality is that what you cannot afford is “just” tape. Whether you start with an external disk drive or engage with a cloud-backup provider, you can afford something (anything) better than tape.

“We’re small — so we can’t afford enterprise stuff”

PARTIALLY TRUE – you can’t afford “enterprise stuff”. But hey, you don’t need enterprise stuff since you aren’t an enterprise. If you did run an enterprise infrastructure, with all of its scale and complexity, then you could afford enterprise stuff. But you don’t because you are an SMB. As an SMB, you’ll likely have a more straightforward collection of IT assets, such as file serving devices, some applications which are likely based on some SQL platform, perhaps a mail platform or two (unless you run from a cloud-provider) and perhaps a custom application platform. The great news is that these kinds of platforms are very cost-effectively protected. File serving can replicate, either within the file system (e.g. Windows Server DFS) or the storage layer, applications like databases and email can often replicate between multiple instances — often yielding not only resiliency but higher performance due to load balancing. Any server platform that isn’t natively resilient can usually be encapsulated into a virtual machine and then replicated and re-booted from a mirrored virtualization host.

The punch-line: you don’t need “enterprise stuff” to protect your SMB IT infrastructure. In fact, in many cases, resiliency features are already built in to what you already own.

“If we have to recreate something, it wouldn’t be too bad”

Almost definitely WRONG, because most SMB data is unique. This means that if something took you 60 minutes to do the first time, it will likely take you 45-50 minutes to recreate something that was done recently and potentially 90 minutes to recreate older content that you still need. You’ll potentially gain some efficiency because you already have the intended outcome in your head — but it still will take the majority of time to repeat. But if you lose several days of data, can your SMB workforce tolerate the several days of recreating work that you’ve already done and likely already gotten paid for.

Since I’ve tried to dispel some presumptions, here are some factual SMB IT realities:

Limited Cashflow

One of the key differences between how enterprises and SMBs tolerate crises is cash flow. Based on the kinds of business that has recurring and/or pipelined revenue or just because their bank accounts are bigger, they are often able to suffer cash flow issues while they reconstruct. SMBs typically lack those deep coffers or assured income, so it is even more important that SMBs proactively deal with business continuity since they won’t be able to roll up their sleeves and bear through their recovery efforts

Limited Expertise

Another reality is that most SMBs don’t have deep IT veterans on-staff and waiting to throw on their superhero cape and jump into action during a crisis. This isn’t meant as a disparagement, as I know several IT Pro’s that work in SMB who have built near-enterprise quality and services into their smaller IT infrastructure. But as is much more common, I have met many brilliant IT implementers working for systems integrators and consultants, who provide their services to SMBs. In this way, SMBs get deep IT expertise when they need it (billable), but don’t have to pay for it when they don’t — often as a project-level supplement to their in-house part-time IT person. And like most things in IT, that works great when everything is working … and is painful when something breaks. First, because when an SMB has an urgent outage, the right guy may not be available for immediate resolution. And secondly, while the SMB is down and likely losing revenue, they have to do the one thing that they don’t want to — pay for something expensive, a billable IT expert.

So, what is an SMB to do?

Invest pennies now … instead of dollars later. Today, most key workloads that an SMB relies upon are natively resilient — if you turn the features on:

• SQL Server and Exchange both offer replication with transparent failover through Database Mirroring and DAG, respectively.
• Windows infrastructure services (AD/DNS) are natively resilient and easily solvable with a simple secondary instance (running in a VM)
• Windows Server (file services) has DFS to transparently replicate/load-balance and resume service between servers and sites
• Even virtualization platforms can be made resilient for far less money than you might think

The reality is that SMBs arguably need resiliency as much, if not more than, some enterprises — and the tools that they need are more often than not already owned by them.  I am so passionate on this (using the built-in HA/DR technologies that you’ve already paid for) … that I wrote a whole book on it = Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers … also viewable at DataProtectionBible.com.

Whether you read the book or not; if you are an SMB, look at what core workloads that you are running in your shops – and then look in their product documentation for “availability” or “replication”.  You may be happily surprised with what you find – and already own.

Thanks for reading.

[originally posted on my ESG blog – Technical Optimist .com]