Data Protection Technology

How Green is My Backup?

2008-04-17T11:13:00-06:00

Kelly Lipp - Vice President, Manufacturing and CTO

Kelly Lipp graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Colorado. As a System Engineer at Ford Aerospace, he was responsible for delivery of hardware and systems design and documentation. Moving to Digital Equipment Corporation as a systems administrator in the storage division, Kelly became an expert on the OpenVMS operating system, storage and networking. In 1995 he, along with three others, formed Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc., to work with IBM to develop the Tivoli Storage Manager client for OpenVMS. The company discovered a need to make TSM simpler and the focus changed from software to appliance development. STORServer, Inc was formed to further these efforts. Currently as Chief Technical Officer of STORServer, Inc. he is responsible for developing appliance solutions meeting diverse customer needs in the backup and storage environment.

Final Jeopardy Answer: Holds 1.6TB of data. Has data transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec. Consumes zero power and generates zero BTUs.

Green is the new buzzword in the storage industry. Practically every advertisement of every product has a green component to it. But what does it mean to be green? Specifically, what does it mean to have green backup?

The backup industry is less green now than it was even two years ago. The proliferation of disk-to-disk backup is directly responsible. Even with all the data deduplication technologies available, the growth in the number of disk drives because of backup applications has been tremendous. And what did we really gain: faster access to data IF that data is required. But if we aren’t accessing that data, why are we keeping an ever increasing amount of it on an energy inefficient resource?

What is your green backup quotient?

“I insist that all of my reference data have an access time of less than one second.” Not Green.

“I insist that all of my reference data have an access time of less than one second in two locations.” Clearly Not Green.

“I insist on having an access time to all of my archived data of less than one second on the off chance that regulators will want access to it.” Again, Not Green.

If you consider that at a minimum your reference data will be approximately six times your active data, that’s a lot of extra disk required to provide value of a dubious nature. Must you really have sub second access times to any, much less all, of your reference data?

Let’s look at the numbers. A typical disk drive consumes between 8 and 12 watts depending on what it’s doing. If it’s just spinning then it uses 8 watts. Reading and writing, it uses 12. Let’s choose ten watts to make all subsequent math easier! So, ten disks consume the same amount of power and generate the same amount of heat as a 100 watt light bulb. An average disk enclosure housing 10 drives consumes about 300 watts total. So let’s agree that each disk drive, including the ancillary hardware required to make it useful, consumes on the order of 30 watts.

Using 10TB of active data as an example, let’s do our math. Though we all wish we had the latest disk technology, this 10TB is probably housed on many sizes of drives. If we assume an average disk size of 250GB, which is probably way too high but I like easy math, this equates to 40 disk drives. 40 Drives * 30 Watts/Drive = 1200 Watts. About the same power consumption and heat generation as an electric hair dryer on low power, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And to add insult to injury you have to get rid of that heat from your computer room. We’re not even looking at AC costs here! Hmmm. I won’t speculate as to what we might say to our teenage daughter about this blatant waste of electricity.

If reference data is six times our active data add six more hair dryers to the computer room. No wonder it’s so hot in there. And how many computer rooms have only 10TB of active data? Alex, there are no rhetorical questions in Final Jeopardy.

There isn’t much we can do about reducing our energy consumption for our active data except to purchase newer, more efficient disk drives and enclosures. So, let’s focus on our reference data. Do we really need sub second access times to all of this data? We certainly may require fast access for some of it, but definitely not for all of it. In fact, the vast majority of it will never be accessed again, so why have it spinning at all? Usually, if we access reference data, we access data that is less than a couple of days old. The older the data, the less likely we are to access it. So our strategy should be to keep relatively new reference data more accessible and older reference data less accessible. How much new reference data is there? Generally new reference data is a fairly small percentage of the active data. If the reference data consists almost entirely of backup data (as oppossed to archive data) then we can use a typical 10% daily change rate factor to get started. 10% of 10TB is 1TB or about four 250GB disk drives and 120 watts. You can double or triple this number to add a couple of days of reference data stored on disk for fast access.
What should we do with the other 50 to 57TB of backup data? We want access to it. Since we don’t expect to access this data very often, we should be willing to extend the access times. How much though? That depends, but certainly if we can gain access to this data in less than an hour that should meet many if not all of our most stringent requirements.

Final Jeopardy Question: Alex, What is an LTO4 tape cartridge? That is correct! Let’s see your wager.
If we assume an LTO4 cartridge capacity of 1TB, all of our reference data will fit on 60 cartridges. Let’s do our power math on a tape library that holds 60 cartridges. The library consumes on average 250 watts. Each tape drive, when reading or writing data, consumes about 50 watts. When the tape drive is sitting idle it consumes about 10 watts. Writing 1TB of data to tape requires approximately four hours of tape drive time at an average of 250GB/hour/tape drive. To write our 1TB of incremental backup data in a two tape drive library we’ll consume 350 watts of power for two hours a day and then 270 watts the rest of the day. We’ll use an average power consumption of 300 watts.

60TB of reference data on disk consumes 1200 watts. That same 60TB of reference data with 1TB on disk and the other 59TB in a 60 slot, two tape drive library consumes about 420 watts (300 watts in the library and 120 watts on four disks) or almost three times less! That’s three times less power you need to purchase to store your reference data. Oh, and a 120 slot library with two drives consumes the same amount of power so you can double your reference data size for no additional power dollars. If you double that same reference data on disk you’ll double your power dollars. And that does not include increasing your AC requirements to remove all the heat from the computer room.

Will you triple your power consumption to provide nearly instant access to all of your reference data? Not Green.

Data Protection, Archiving and Disaster Recovery Challenges for the SMB in 2008

2008-02-06T00:00:00-06:00

Laura Buckley – Vice President, Product Development and COO

Laura received her B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Regis University. She developed her technical and management expertise while employed by Ford Aerospace Corporation, and Digital Equipment Corporation as a systems manager, technical software support specialist, technical marketing consultant and software engineering manager.

She has worked extensively with customers to solve their technical and system problems related to systems and storage management. She is a is a certified IBM Tivoli Storage Manager consultant and instructor.

Laura manages the Product Development group at STORServer, Inc. In this capacity, she is responsible for directing the planning, development and marketing of STORServer’s line of system, storage, and data protection appliances and software products.

Many IT administrators at small and medium businesses (SMBs) are facing a new budget cycle as the New Year dawns. One of the items which many are considering investing in is data protection technology. Most have experienced an explosion in the amount of data requiring protection while not experiencing an equivalent increase in their IT budget. Additionally, the responsibility of complying with new governmental and industry regulations for data retention, archiving and electronic discovery has fallen squarely in the lap of IT staffs which stretches their budgets further.

Data Protection, Archiving and Disaster Recovery Challenges for the SMB in 2008

Data Protection Has Become More Complex

Data protection used to be an easier proposition. You could simply designate a system as the backup server, install some backup software, attach a tape library and start backing up production servers to it. But, with the advent of critical production applications, server and storage virtualization, critical data stored on desktops and laptops, and increased recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) data protection has become much more complex.

Companies Must Now Do More with Less

It is easy to say that organizations must be more current and comprehensive in their backup, recovery and archiving procedures. Yet, few companies have the luxury of being able to assign the resources to address all these tasks optimally. The reality is that most organizations now count on increased productivity to drive profits. This means accomplishing more with fewer resources.

New Data Protection Technologies Abound

For companies looking to improve their data protection technology and procedures, there are a bewildering number of point solutions and possible combinations for data protection and archiving to be considered. It was not long ago when the backup solution was based on one piece of software. Now organizations must decide on all the hardware, too, including the compatible and scalable nature of each piece. In addition, they must consider a number of capabilities: disk-to-disk backup, VTLs, replication, snapshots, CDP, de-duplication, sophisticated archiving, email archiving, data encryption and security. Many options exist and many more are coming.

Deciding on a Solution – Conventional Approaches Do not Meet Today’s Requirements

Traditional solutions for data protection, email archiving and SAN storage are too complicated. There are too many parts to manage and consider: software, hardware, disk, tape, network, SAN – the decisions are overwhelming. Once the technology decisions have been made, the pieces have to be put together which can take weeks or even months.

Total Solution Appliance Solves Many Problems

Now, more than ever, organizations need the best products available to provide them with effective data protection. A new approach for companies to consider for their storage and data protection is an all-in-one, automated solution preconfigured to address all data storage and protection functionality, usually called an “appliance.”

Organizations piecing a solution together will need to work with several companies. Each will have a comprehensive and in-depth view of what their specific product can do to address a particular problem. These vendors, however, do not have a total view of the organization’s requirements and are not able to address the entire problem. When buying individual components, an organization makes a huge trade-off. Buyers search for components optimized for their specific function; not for a best-of-breed total solution. This time-consuming purchasing process involves a complex set of comparisons to work with compatible vendors. An appliance vendor, by contrast, picks the best and most compatible components and takes ownership of them. Most SMBs will only solve their backup problem once. The appliance vendor has solved the same problem hundreds of times.

When a company purchases an appliance, it forgoes the relationship with the individual component vendors. Thus, an appliance vendor is motivated to install a reliable product because they will have to support it! The “data protection” appliance vendor will have a more holistic view of an organization’s problem and is more concerned that the entire data storage and protection solution works to satisfaction.

Upgrading an appliance is also simpler for the end user. When an organization upgrades, it can be sure that all components remain compatible with each other. With an individual components solution, an upgrade often results in an entire system overhaul. Finally, a data protection appliance allows a company to buy the capacity and capabilities it needs now and expand the appliance as the company’s requirements grow. The business dictates the functionality of a storage solution, rather than the reverse.

The conventional integration of a component approach requires manual integration and diagnostic activities that consume both human and system resources. An appliance addresses this problem by providing a pre-integrated simple-to-install solution. This is a benefit for all companies but is particularly useful for SMBs that normally have only a few minutes a day to address any one problem.

Selecting an Appliance Solution

Below is a short laundry list of things to consider when evaluating a data protection appliance:

Easy to purchase, install, manage and support.
Optimizes backups, archives, restores, disaster recovery and electronic discovery to meet corporate RTO and RPO.
Complies fully with regulated retention policies.
Efficiently uses media.
Automates daily functions and reduces administrative hours.
Provides an adaptable and scalable foundation for future data protection and storage needs.

In sum, organizations must look beyond the conventional approaches and toward recovery solutions packaged and implemented with appliance approaches that incorporate the best in component technologies. To do less will probably assure being an early casualty of the tremendous data changes coming in the 21st century.

Data replication vs. Data Backup

2007-11-08T00:00:00-06:00

Kelly Lipp - Vice President, Manufacturing and CTO

Let's get this started!

No, data replication and data backup are not interchangeable either in word or in application.

Replication allows for very rapid (in some cases) restoration of data (usually an entire logical drive, or volume) to a relatively recent point in time. The goal of replication should be high availability of an application, not backup/restore. Using replication, it should take seconds to restore all of the required data. Replication is generally very good at restoring large objects (and entire disk of data or a very large application file).

Backup / restore allows for restoration of a piece of data to a particular and flexible point in time. The desired data may have been backed up on a daily basis for the previous month and we may want a file from three days ago. Backup/restore provides an easy mechanism for viewing all versions of the file and an easy way to initiate a restore. Finally, generally speaking, backup/restore should be very good at recovering small objects. Store them on disk rather than tape to speed this type of restore.

The goals of the two technologies is different. To find a specific file from 30 days worth of snapshots, especially if you are not quite sure which file is required, is tedious. From backup/restore it is easy. On the other hand, restoring a very large database, let's say a couple of hundred GB of data, is time consuming. From replication, that is easy.

Replication? Lots of data, fast and most recent.

Backup/Restore? Some data, perhaps a bit slower, and a specific point in time.

So really, you may need both to have an effective strategy for handling data corruption.