Recently Kelly Polanski (another DCIG analyst) and I had a rather lengthy discussion about the value of keeping archive and backup data on disk versus tape long term. We were both in agreement that using disk in some form as an initial backup target makes sense in most environments but as we started to debate the merits of keeping data on disk versus tape long term, the issue can get more cloudy. While DCIG has previously argued that eDiscovery is becoming a more compelling reason to keep archive and/or backup data on disk long term, the concerns we had centered on the fact that some disk-based archival and backup storage systems can become as problematic as tape. (read more)

Over the last few months DCIG has spent fair amount of time researching and documenting specific reasons why tape will not die. Green IT is the one reason we most often hear cited for retaining tape, though new disk-based deduplication and replication technologies coupled with new disk storage system designs that are based on grid storage architectures can offset some of those concerns. So before organizations think that after 30, 90 or 180 days that they should immediately move their archival and backup data, deduplicated or otherwise, from disk to tape just to save money, there are certain intangible savings from an eDiscovery perspective that keeping data on disk provides that are not always feasible on tape. (read more)

Almost 3 years ago now, Robin Harris over at Storagemojo.com starting posting the list prices for different vendor's products so customers have at least a starting point when comparing product prices. Though I suspect the list prices associated with these vendors' offerings have changed since he originally posted some of them, what I specifically found remarkable is how difficult it is to ascertain what a deduplication solution will cost for an organization. The difficulty in pricing deduplication solutions had less to do with making sure you getting deduplication than making sure you include in your configuration all of the options that your environment needs, such as failover, NAS or VTL interfaces, data retention periods or replication, to effectively compare different solutions. (read more)

Innovation within the data center seems to be on the lips of IT managers, vendors, and analysts alike. Innovation, it is said, will pull us through this economic downturn even as organizations experience cutbacks in budgets, staff and just general doom and gloom. These innovations include maturing technologies such as virtualization, grid computing and deduplication coupled with management initiatives like consolidation, outsourcing and reduced expansion. These ensure organizations can continue to cut costs and stay on budget while creating more efficient data centers that are ready for whatever tomorrow brings. (read more)

Are deduplication guarantees really something you can take to the bank? As more companies look towards using disk in general as a backup target and deduplicating systems specifically, deduplication guarantees are emerging as a way to influence users' decision to deploy deduplicating systems. But in these tightening economic times, deduplication guarantees do not necessarily guarantee money in the bank and may shift your attention away from more critical evaluation criteria such as system reliability, scalability, and performance. (read more)

Having managed multiple types of storage systems from multiple different storage vendors, there are two flaws that are common across many vendors' storage systems: the inability to transparently migrate data to subsequent generations of their own hardware and the inability to share administrative permissions with other like storage systems from that vendor. How acute this problem is depends on how many storage systems a company manages and how often it replaces them. However any administrator that is responsible for managing five, ten or more storage systems in today's enterprise corporations understands exactly what I am talking about. (read more)

NAS is sometimes viewed as a challenge by enterprise shops if their intent is to use it as a target for disk-based backup. Two reasons often cited is that there is only a finite amount of storage capacity available on NAS and backup software does not handle out-of-space conditions on file systems very well. This causes failures in backup jobs as well as performance bottlenecks when multiple backup jobs are occurring . The use of grid storage architectures in products like the NEC HYDRAstor are helping to put some of these concerns to rest and making NAS a more practical option for use as a target for disk-based backup in enterprise shops. (read more)

When I recently attended VMworld 2008, I had the opportunity to get a closer look at NEC's latest HYDRAstor release, the HS8-2000, and some of its features. Of course at a trade show all you generally have the time and opportunity to do is take a quick look at some of the product's hardware and software features. But in this case there was a feature on the HYDRAstor that struck me just from the short time I spent evaluating it: the ability to create a 256 petabyte (PB) or larger file system. (read more)

The ease in which HYDRAstor's underlying grid storage architecture gives companies to migrate to higher capacity and faster performing hardware found in its new HS8-2000 make it easy to overlook some of its other new features. Part of the reason I devoted the last blog entry to HYDRAstor's self-evolving architecture is because I usually have to do just the opposite: educate readers about the advantages of upgrading to a new product so they can justify the pain of going through the migration. In HYDRAstor's case, it is so painless to upgrade and migrate to the new HS8-2000 release that it is almost easy to overlook its new features. (read more)

A self-evolving platform is one of the promises behind products like the NEC HYDRAstor that are based on grid storage architectures. Grid storage architectures automatically take over data migrations during technology refreshes which eliminates the need for application downtime or for companies to do forklift upgrades. Yet up to this point it was difficult to establish the validity of that promise for the NEC HYDRAstor since its HS8-1000 series was still in its first release. (read more)