This is a wonderfully animated video that helps understand what Big Data really is:

Facts of Life!

There are few facts in life that are indisputable, death and taxes are two of them, data growth is another!

The problem is that these funky new big data, next generation, whizz bang, data generating applications don’t make it easy on backup!!

The repeated backing up of the base chunk of data plus the increasing daily change of data is straining backup infrastructure to breaking point.

The result of this strain and the need to hold all “the old versions” plus the daily influx means that you start to make the WRONG decisions about backup infrastructure. Decisions such as “the target backup devices needs to be cheap and big…” mean that recovery is sacrificed.

If you think about what you really want from backup you should get a list like this:

- fast backup
- fast recovery of files and servers
- over 90% of restores from the last backup

What about compliance I hear you cry! Yes, very important, but provided by your backup system… Really?

When you talk about data retention for compliance you get a requirements list like this:

- 7 years worth of data retained
- Offsite from primary site
- In a data format readable in 7 years
- Ability to prove the data is unaltered

Well this is a whole different set of requirements which a lot of people will try and cram into their backup system. The result of this is:

1. The backup system is designed to do two tasks which have different storage and recovery requirements.
2. The resulting design will be a compromise. Compromise does not make for the best design (usually).

So what should you do!?

Dead easy, design your archive and data protection solution properly. The steps you should use are:

1. Assess all the “quiet data” on your system. This is all the data that produces that huge weekly full backup. The data that is never accessed or modified.

2. Choose the mechanism for getting it from where it is to an archive platform. EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance is a great way of scanning Filesystems or NAS devices and moving the data to an archive platform.

3. Choose the archiving platform. If you are strapped for cash you may want to make this the same target device for the backup solution. If you had a Data Domain for instance your archive and backup data would dedupe against each other. If you want more flexibility and governance then a purpose built archiving platform such as EMC Centera is needed.

4. Now that your archive platform is dealing with compliance, alter the backup design to keep fewer versions on a fast recovery platform.

Summary

Classify your data, stop backing up the same “quiet data” up time after time, reduce your backup retention requirements by archiving data. Improve backup performance, save money on storage and ensure you are compliant with regulations.

Simples…

Hi

The big news over the past week has been about the new VDP backup software within vSphere 5.1.  Depending on your perspective, you may be really angry that EMC have been chosen as the partner for VDP, or really happy.  If you are a 3rd party vendor like Veeam or vRanger then life has just got a whole lot more difficult.  If you are selling Avamar your life just got a load easier.

Either way the following video is a great introduction to the new VDP product:

Oh and did I mention that it uses EMC Avamar technology?

CRN leaked some interesting information about EMC Avamar and vSphere – read the article below:

VMware To Embed EMC Storage Tech In vSphere, Could Shake Up Partnerships