The year in storage: data protection led innovations

Computer Technology Review,  Nov, 2004  by Mark Ferelli

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2004 will soon be behind us, and a challenging new year approaches. Bellwethers suggest a slow growth in storage with faster growth in areas involved with data protection. A recent Merrill Lynch report announced that IBM's storage business grew 5% over the past year, but their tape technology business grew 22% This suggests that data protection remains very much on the minds of storage buyers and specifiers.

The data protection snowball started rolling last year with such innovations as the "time machine" replication approach from Revivio and the commonality factoring technology from Avamar. The snowball is just getting bigger, being pushed by drivers such as business continuity and regulatory compliance issues.

Several of the announcements at Storage Networking World recently support the proposition that data protection is the advance guard of data storage's future. A joint trans-Atlantic project involving EMC and Dell used a Microsoft Exchange 2003 messaging approach to demonstrate Dell's Business Continuity solution replicating data in real time between two midrange storage systems; one in Limerick and one in Texas.

Sepaton announced its new Synthetic Full Backup Application built on their ContentAware data protection platform, with pricing starting at $3,000 and based upon the total usable capacity of the $2100-ES Virtual Tape Library. EVault introduced EVault Continuum Server, a high-availability storage solution designed to provide continuous data protection and quick recovery of business-critical database applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. Pricing for the fully bundled software and hardware solution starts at $11,428.

Bocada announced the release of the next generation of its BackupReport enterprise software, which the company said enables consistent, standards-based management of complex, distributed data protection environments, regardless of the underlying technology or system architecture. Neartek announced the latest version of its Virtual Storage Engine virtual tape solution, with performance up to 38TB/hour.

Symantec's LiveState Recovery Advanced Server 3.0, a disk-based system and data recovery solution, was validated as interoperable with NetApp enterprise IP SAN storage systems, which the company said allows Windows customers to recover data stored on NetApp iSCSI volumes in a fraction of the time required for alternative tape-based recovery solutions.

Intransa announced its IP5500 SAN solution, which the company touts as the "only IP SAN solution designed with a patented, fully modular architecture to allow on-the-fly enhancements to capacity, performance and availability." The Intransa IP5500 has an MSRP of $60,000 for a 2TB system which includes hardware, software and one year of support. Pricing for the IP5500 begins at $66,000 for capacities starting at 4TB.

ILM to be Defined

Last year at this time, we discussed ILM and whether it classified as marketing catch phrase or genuine solution. The first challenge was to develop a common definition. EMC offers one, Sun Microsystems another, StorageTek yet another. IBM refers to the concept as Information Value Management, and ADIC offers their vision as Data Lifecycle Management. The Storage Networking Industry Association is taking on the issue of a common ILM definition. The Data Management Forum decided to remove the confusion by defining ILM this year at SNW. They offer the following:

Information Lifecycle Management is comprised of the policies, processes, practices and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business requirements through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, and data.

Whether this foundation will suffice for all of the vendors invested in ILM remains to be seen, but the first step to market acceptance is a common, comprehensible definition. The forum gets points for developing this basic approach.

The next step is to develop a series of practical products that take the vision forward. Several examples come to mind. One example comes from Canadian-based Asigra, which announced its BLM and Televaulting ILM-aware backup and recovery software package. The company asserts that it is the only one to deliver ILM capabilities across multiple corporate sites. With the innovations, Asigra said it reduces cost and complexity of data storage by automatically moving data to the most appropriate storage media based on predetermined policies of accessibility, security and long-term storage. Asigra BLM has a starting price of $24,000.

It should be borne firmly in mind that ILM is not a vision devoted to cost savings alone. To ultimately become true ILM, the complexity issue mentioned by the Asigra executives must be well and truly addressed.

Cluster is the Future