Scenario #1 - Many IT organizations follow the ITIL and/or COBIT processes to govern they way things are deployed into there environments. Some are saddled with federal regulations and other internal corporate policies that required them to validate everything from an infrastructure perspective going into production. A few of my customers have recently deployed a very unique process that enables them to cost effectively store Gold, Compliance, and Validated VMware images on their Permabit system. The beauty of this process is that anytime they make a change to a gold VM image (Windows Security Patches, Virus Definitions, Application changes etc), they can copy that new image to their Permabit storage, and with our deduplication and compression they see significant space savings and realize significant cost savings too.

Benefits - This in turn saves large amounts of storage capacity, considering the number of gold VM images the customer has to store and the frequency of changes that occurs on those VM’s. If they use our snapshot technology, they can keep a rolling history of changes without burning any more storage capacity on the Permabit storage. Replication also provides a way for our customers to have accessible copies of those gold images with the changes available at remote locations. This way, they can spawn the changes from one location and replicate it out to the other sites that need the updates. In doing this, they see that deduplication reduced the amount of data a customer needs to replicate they also save dollars on bandwidth and storage capacity at the remote location.

This is just one of the scenarios I have seen in the field that can allow VMware shops to take advantage of value tier storage and really save significant space and infrastructure costs in the data-center. I will discuss another scenario around backups and disaster recovery for my next post.

Greetings again from the field! This is the second installment of real-world horror stories of disturbing Archival “best practices.” The second scenario (Tape as an Archive) is one I have seen many times, from companies of all sizes, and in a number of cases, is still the de facto standard for a long-term archival repository.

Company #2 Scenario- This organization’s archival strategy is to backup their data to tape and retain it for an infinite period of time. Then, the backup admin grabs those tapes on a monthly basis, puts them in the trunk of his car, and then takes them home to his basement. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up. This completely caught me off guard, as I thought at least they would use an onsite fire safe or an offsite vaulting facility. When I was asking the customer what his thoughts were on the situation, he seemed fine with it, which made me shake my head even more. I’ll bet his business owners wouldn’t be fine with it if they new the serious risks they were taking in using this method as a way to preserve their most critical data-sets.

Major Concerns- First off, a few concerns that stand out are the unbelievable storage of these archival tapes at someone’s house. Just speculate for a second on all of the problems with this scenario (Floods, Fire, My Dog ate my tapes etc). Using backup software presents many other problems for archival. One, unless they are very diligent in restoring those tapes on, at least, an annual basis and re-writing them back to newer tapes again to ensure the data and media are still viable, and two, refreshing any changes to the data-set based on a backup software upgrade and/or replacement. What happens when the backup software is upgraded or replaced by a new one? Get ready to sit for months restoring and backing up again. Finally, an immense area of concern is the ability to discover this information for litigation or simply because someone needs it. There’s another long process that, by the time you are done, if you can even find the data, your company probably lost the case already due to the time lag or your internal customer had to go without or recreate the data from memory or other sources.

The Fix – The good thing here is after meeting with this company’s CIO, not only was he unaware of this practice, but he was actually disturbed that someone from the outside discovered it first. Electing to move forward with Permabit, we were able to help them streamline this process and move the existing critical data from tape to our online Value Tier storage. Then we worked with them to put automated processes and procedures in place to ensure that there long-term data storage requirements were met with our robust data safety, reliability, and most importantly, at a price point that was as cost-effective, if not more when looking at overall management costs, than tape.

Greetings again from the field! In my travels to our customers and prospect base, I have noticed some very interesting ways that our product is being deployed. As a primary storage platform! Our customers have taken the time to understand the complete use case of a given application and / or data set. Meaning not just how much capacity they need, but business related objectives such as SLA’s tied to performance, uptime, reliability, and operational efficiencies. They begin not only to understand more of what their internal business groups are trying to accomplish out of the storage infrastructure, but also capture vital metrics that details what the real requirements are for their applications.

In doing so, this allows them to right-size the application and/or data-set to the appropriate storage platform. This, versus the standard mantra, which is jam everything either to a completely oversized and/or undersized storage platform, where they will have customers over-paying for storage and underutilizing the platform they paid for. Or by using an undersized storage platform where performance and reliability may be sacrificed for cost and customer needs. When a storage person actually takes the time to really service and understand their customer’s needs, they can deploy applications and / or data-sets to the appropriate platform.

In our case, we have several customers using us for their primary location for their application, because as I stated before, they put the time in up-front to understand their customer’s requirements and determined the Permabit Value Tier storage met those expectations. For example, we have several customers using scientific as well as shrink wrapped applications with Permabit as the default and only tier of Storage. In addition, we provide a feature rich product-set with substantial space savings through deduplication (Dedupe 2.0) & compression, encryption for security and best of all, replication and snapshots. This ensures that not only does the customer not have to backup their primary platform (If Permabit is the default tier and replication is enabled), they have an instant disaster recovery at a very low cost.

Then there are the operational benefits that we bring to the table that they cannot get from a more traditional storage platform. Some of theses include:

· No storage provisioning or masking to deal with

· No forklift upgrades or data migrations to deal with

· Savings on capacity from day one with deduplication and compression

· Virtual storage pool on the backend

· Simple and easy-to-use management interface and CLI

In the case where our customers have taken just a minimal amount of effort to work with their internal customers, they have really seen some sky-rocketing cost savings not only in capital expenditures, but more importantly, a much more cost effective system to operate on a day-to-day basis.

Greetings from the field! I’m going to begin a new blog series where I will be sharing real-world horror stories of disturbing Archival “best practices.” To set the stage, I want to make sure it’s understood that these are real-life practices taking place right now in major organizations. Some of these strategies would be laughable, if they weren’t so darn frightening, as to the risk these companies have imposed upon themselves. So here’s our first story.

Company #1 Scenario – This organization’s file archival strategy is to purchase DVD/CD Burners for all of their employees. Then, once the data area for that employee is close to reaching its quota, they are directed to archive these files to DVD’s and CD’s. They leave the media in their desk and/or store them in a shared physical storage area somewhere on-site.

Major Concerns - Where to begin?! Just the security aspects of this should make you cringe. Meaning anyone, at anytime, can grab this company’s intellectual property and walk right out the door with it. As an example, a disgruntled employee could potentially have all security rights to the infrastructure revoked, but then could decide to go desk diving, looking for media (with company intellectual property) to give to his new employer.

The reliability of improperly stored media, possibly sitting under a bunch of pens or paperclips in a metal drawer, lends to scratched and un-readable media. If this media is the final resting place for that archival data, as in this example, that data is just gone. Let’s face it, once the backup retention has expired and the last resting place for that data is on cheap removable media, once it’s gone, it’s gone.

There are also huge concerns about the ability for this organization to react when a legal and/or eDiscovery process comes along. Just imagine how long it would take to find all of the media (if you could find it in the first place, with no process for the employees to follow) and get it back to some storage platform where it could actually be searchable and organized.

The Fix – This company has seen the light of day and realizes the corporate risk they currently have at hand. They’re desperately looking to move away from removable media as an archive platform. They realize that disk storage technology has finally come of age (and cost!) that it’s a feasible archive platform. This allows all data to be stored reliably in a central location as well as making it easily accessible for discovery scenarios. The biggest winners in this scenario? The end-users! They know longer have to manually archive their own data freeing them up to do their real job!

Stay tuned for the next company scenario where we’ll see how offsite tape is a disaster waiting to happen!

As I travel along meeting with our customers, I have noticed a few interesting things lately. The customers that were initially skeptical about embracing an archive/value tier of storage have started to smile much brighter lately, with a sort of “I told you so!” look on their faces to their colleagues. A big reason for this is the fact that the 2.1 billion dollar number EMC has assigned to deduplication, in essence, has vindicated them in saying that dedupe isn’t just a marketing byline, but a technology that should and will be embraced.

More specifically, our customers have a general “Ha!”, and have been telling me, “See I told my peers and management that this wasn’t just a fad!” As our existing customers implementations grow, they continue to realize the benefits of having data reduction in the archival/value layer of storage. This layer of storage provides our customers with the ability to take advantage of many benefits Permabit offers, which include:

• Saving Budget Dollars:
  • Considering the granular robust nature of our deduplication technology which we refer to as Dedupe2.0, our customers end up purchasing less storage than needed due to the fact that the redundant data is removed before it even touches the disk.
  • By continuing to move all sorts of data-sets from the primary storage tiers to a Permabit value tier, they ensure that they can remove funds from primary storage buckets and redirect a small portion of those dollars to the value tier. In many cases, they donate the remainder of those funds back into the company coffers.
  • Once that data has been removed from the primary tiers of storage and placed onto the Permabit Value Tier Storage, the same data is also removed from the backup stream as well. This decreases the amount of backup infrastructure that our customers need which in turn removes budget dollars out of not only the backup infrastructure, but also the primary storage tiers.
• Saving Time:
  • Our customers tell me that the amount of effort that is expanded on managing and maintaining our solution is extremely minimal, seeing as we provide a simple and easy to use web interface which rolls up all of our rich feature-sets into a single pane of glass.
  • In one case, a customer took their FTE (Full Time Employee) resources from managing their older storage from 1.5FTE and converted that into .2FTE when managing our system. This translated into real savings, not only from a FTE deployment perspective, but more importantly, storage savings translated directly back to their internal customers.
• Saving Resources:
  • Taking advantage of Permabit’s deduplication, customers tell me they love the fact that one, they only need to purchase what they need when they need it, and two, with the reductions they are getting thru deduplication they can potentially put off further purchases until the need is high.
  • In nearly all cases, our customers tell me that after they begin an archival project, the primary / transactional storage that they had spent a pretty penny for, regains much of its former performance, seeing as a good portion of those storage frames are now freed up to the job they were initially targeted for (Live Transactional Data).

Looking at the number of benefits of the Permabit deduplication and Value Tier storage, it’s easy to realize that not taking advantage of these is leaving you and your organization out in the wind, when you could be saving significant budget, time, and resources inside your small, medium or large storage landscape.

Greetings! I am now joining the blogging crew at Permabit, along with Tom Cook, Jered Floyd, and Mike Ivanov. My name is Tim Anderson and I am one of the Senior Storage Consultants for Permabit. I plan on bringing more of an operational/end-user perspective to the topics that we discuss on our site, as I have spent many years in the trenches, most recently, a 10 year long stint at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago.

As I am out in the field, most of the time, working with customers, prospects and partners, there is one thing that keeps coming up time and time again. Why don’t other storage vendors realize that their outdated legacy architectures don’t meet the needs of the growing demands of future applications and IT processes? Especially since most, if not all, storage environments are growing by 100% plus on an annual basis, and need future-proof storage architectures that can grow as they do. Many vendors are beginning to try to build newer and more unique storage architectures such as: HP (Extreme Storage), EMC (Atmos, Hulk), and others. However, in my opinion, they all have missed the boat. First, these vendors cannot really figure out which part of the storage market they are going after (High-End, SMB, NAS, SAN, archiving, dumb disk etc) Secondly, although some of the architectures are intriguing, they are limited to a massive initial purchase to achieve a low cost per gigabyte and forcing customers to purchase incremental growth in very large buckets (due to the poorly developed protection schemas). Finally, they do not provide customers a way to take advantage of net-new technology without painful data migrations and/or fork-lifting the system to get to the latest and greatest hardware.

Since the inception of Permabit, we have saved our customer’s time in management, reduction in primary storage footprints, and eased purchases of more and more backup infrastructure. Our customers really like the fact that they can continue to take advantage of new technology without ever manually migrating a single block of data. As an example, we have several customers that have multi-generational hardware inside their Permabit storage grids, which allows them to remove the old and add in the new, based on their own time (depreciation cycles, etc) and not being dictated to by their vendor when systems go end of life. Developing a grid-based architecture from the beginning has enabled us to deliver very end-user centric features around saving time and budget dollars on storage management, break-fix, and scale. But more than this, by working the flexibility into the storage grid to provide granular scale for performance, as well as storage capacity, enables our customer base to take advantage of buying only what they need, when they need it, keeping budgets easier to manage and providing an internal storage utility for their own customers.

As you sit down to plan your internal road map and/or long-range plans, I encourage you to push your storage vendors to provide a much more acceptable architecture that can grow and scale for the future. If they sing you the same old song, tell them this is not a nice-to-have, but a requirement to continue to do business with your organization. By being different, and trying new approaches, I think you will find that using next-gen storage, such as Permabit, can provide you and your organization a significant edge over your competition. Let’s face it, the less time and money you have to spend managing, purchasing, and maintaining your storage environment, the more efficient your IT organization will be and more time can be spent on projects more critical to your business.