Backup Central

Wow, this has been a fun topic! I’m really enjoying debating it, and enjoy even more that not everyone agrees with me.

I do not think that de-dupe is the only deciding factor in a purchase, but at this point, I do believe it is a show-stopper feature if you plan to use your IDT (intelligent disk target) as your PRIMARY storage device for backups (as opposed to only using it for staging). De-dupe makes the device cost 10 times less. That’s kind of huge. De-dupe is the only feature making disk affordable enough to be used as a replacement for tape (at least onsite).

You mention replication. I like replication, and I like the idea of replicating my backups off-site, and we’ve got some customers who have done it, and some more that are working on it right now. BUT I’d say that unless you’re talking LAN replication, or you’re talking a significantly small amount of data, accomplishing replication without de-dupe is impossible. It’s just math. A) The device that people already can’t afford (a device big enough to hold all backups, not just be a staging device) now has to be doubled in size (one onsite and one offsite) B) The occasional fulls and full-file incremental backups are going to create a whole lot of data that needs to be replicated. So without de-dupe, replication becomes prohibitively expensive.

You mention performance. I’m all about performance. I do not, however, agree with your assertion that all de-dupe vendors have performance issues at a certain level. I agree that many of them do have these issues. Once you get to the performance ceiling of a given device, you have to buy another one and they don’t share de-dupe information. However, that’s not the way all of them are. If you find yourself in need of MB/s in the thousand(s) range, there is more than one vendor that can give you that within a single de-dupe setup (meaning it will all get de-duped together).

I completely agree that this is all new. So you have to deal with that. That doesn’t change the fact that de-dupe makes the replication idea much more feasible for many, many customers.

If you don’t mind paying 10 times more (at least) for the hardware, and needing 20 times more bandwidth to replicate your backups, then feel free to stick with the more established products, and I truly mean that. It’s just that most customers I’ve talked to just can’t ignore those numbers. They’re seeing de-dupe as making the not-affordable affordable and the impossible possible.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Backup Blog < at > www.backupcentral.com
VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies


From: NICHOLAS MERIZZI [mailto:merizzi < at > rogers.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2007 12:06 PM
To: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu; Curtis Preston; Kevin.Whittaker < at > syniverse.com; jlightner < at > water.com; veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: FW: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?


Curtis - Although I agree with the other responses you have given out with respect to the tape vs. disk cost I am not sure about your statements below.



Going back for a second to the cost of tape vs. disk... if you do an analysis make sure to take all things into account when you backup to tape. This is why most people don't get a proper cost associated with tape backup i.e:

1. SAN ports

2. Tape drives -> fixing them, lost time, shoe-shining

3. media cost -> fixing media, media failure cost(cost of not being able to do a restore)

4. off siting -> the cycles/dollars lost in handling that internally, the cost of dealing with Recall/Iron Mountain (or whoever), the cost associated with the delay in waiting for a tape to be recalled...

5. library maintenance cost

6. restore duration cost (i.e. if i have 100 people waiting for a Tier 1 server to be restored...)

Anyways the list of "invisible costs" associated with tapes go on...



As for your EMC CDL comments... First I believe they are now called EDL (EMC Disk Libraries) because they take into account their new Symmetrix backend devices. Although I agree with you that de-dup is important to the future of backups you make it seem that it should be the only deciding factor in a purchase! If you push de-dup aside for a second what do most customers want? My guess is performance, availability, stability, integration with backup application. This has been my thought process and these de-dup companies you speak about such as Sepaton, Diligent, Data Domain all at one point or another have HUGE performance hits (i.e. we have tape drives that go faster then some of these), little capability to scale (without combining multiple devices together), or have un-explainable single points of failures.

I also agree that replication is important and if you can minimize the amount you replicate then great. Here is my dilemma: Most of the de-dup vendors out there (i.e. I am thinking of Sepaton) that can perform de-dup have only been in the replication business for a year (probably less) and have very little maturity in that space! That scares me a bit...



As for backup integration I personally like the fact that with EMC I can have a built in media server on top of my VTL and control everything from what I am familiar with... no other vendor offers that!



Anyways just my two cents... Bottom line is that I agree that de-dup is important but if you can push that aside and look at the other technical merit (assuming that all vendors will have de-dup sooner than later) suddenly the list of enterprise level candidates drops significantly from what I am seeing.



-Nicholas






From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Curtis Preston
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 1:13 PM
To: Kevin Whittaker; Jeff Lightner; veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?




The only issue there is that the EMC CDL does not support de-duplication, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be doing it any time soon. I know they’re working on it, but they haven’t announced anything public, so who knows. Compare that to the other de-dupe vendors that announced probably a year before they were ready, and you’ve got some sense of my opinion of when EMC de-dupe will actually be GA – if not later.



Your design would work great if you had de-dupe. Without de-dupe, you are going to be replicated 20 times more data (or more), requiring a significantly larger pipe.



---

W. Curtis Preston

Backup Blog < at > www.backupcentral.com

VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies



From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Kevin Whittaker
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 7:48 AM
To: Jeff Lightner; veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?




We have it on our plan. We will be using tape for only long term retention of data.



Our plan is to purchase another EMC CDL, and mirror our existing EMC CDL to the EMC CDL at our DR site. Our master server already is duplicated, and this will allow us to start restores of stuff that is not tier 1 applications that already are mirrored to the DR site.



I would prefer not to save the long term on tape, but we don't have a solution for any other way to do it at this time.



Kevin




From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Jeff Lightner
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 9:44 AM
To: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Yesterday our director said that he doesn’t intend to ever upgrade existing STK L700 because eventually we’ll go tapeless as that is what the industry is doing. The idea being we’d have our disk backup devices here (e.g. Data Domain) and transfer to offsite storage to another disk device so as to eliminate the need for ever transporting tapes.

It made me wonder if anyone was actually doing the above already or was planning to do so?


_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
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And yet there are many companies backing up well beyond a Terabyte from remote offices back to their central office using de-duplication. Consider JPMC’s presentation at the last vision. They’re backing up over 200 remote offices using Puredisk, a de-duplication backup product. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but many of them were quite large.

I don’t think that bandwidth is free, but neither are trucks. AND if you’re going the truck route, make sure you add the cost and risk of an encryption system to the mix.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Backup Blog < at > www.backupcentral.com
VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies


From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2007 9:35 AM
To: 'Jeff Lightner'; veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?


Here’s some simple math that may help (complements of ExaGrid’s web site).

If you have 1TB of data with a 2% change rate, you’ll need to back up 20GB of daily incrementals. To replicate this to another site in 18 hours requires 3Mbps of bandwidth. If you have lots of bandwidth or not too much data, replication to an offsite location may make sense. But to think that you can replicate your backups for 20TB of data to another state is going to make your network group squirm. Iron Mountain looks pretty cheap comparing to offsite electronic replication.

We have 1 application by itself that adds 30GB of new data every day. It’s being replicated within the metro area over a 1Gbps pipe (real time, not via backups). We sure couldn’t replicate everything…

As the OLD saying goes, never understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

…/Ed

--
Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts < at > ewilts.org


From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Jeff Lightner
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 8:44 AM
To: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?



Yesterday our director said that he doesn’t intend to ever upgrade existing STK L700 because eventually we’ll go tapeless as that is what the industry is doing. The idea being we’d have our disk backup devices here (e.g. Data Domain) and transfer to offsite storage to another disk device so as to eliminate the need for ever transporting tapes.
It made me wonder if anyone was actually doing the above already or was planning to do so?

A 1 TB array that can store 20 TB of de-duped data in it will cost about
$20K. (A general rule of them is to base your pricing on a 20:1 de-dupe
ratio, then price it at about $1/GB of effective storage. If you do
that, you'll be close to list price of a lot of products.) At that
cost, it's very close to the price of a tape library fully populated
with tapes and drives.

As to whether or not it's worth it for a given setup, you should
obviously test it vs the pricing, but it's very uncommon for it to not
make sense financially. I can think of three setups that are known
issues:

1. If you're using it for disk staging and not storing any retention on
it. A lot of the de-dupe comes from de-duping full backups against each
other.

2. If you're trying to de-dupe non-dedupe-able things, such as seismic
data, medical imaging data, or any other data types that are
automatically created by a computer (as opposed to database entries and
Word docs.)

3. If your backup product doesn't do full backups of filesystem data,
you will not get as much as other people.

Everything is also negotiable. If you've tested and you're not getting
the advertised de-dupe ratio, use that in the negotiation stage. If
they generally advertise 20:1 and you're only getting 10:1, it would
seem reasonable to assume a 50% discount.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Backup Blog < at > www.backupcentral.com
VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Wilts [mailto:ewilts < at > ewilts.org]
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2007 9:47 AM
To: Curtis Preston; 'Justin Piszcz'; 'Jeff Lightner'
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

But Curtis, a disk drive by itself isn't very useful either - you'll
need to
a controller or two.

And don't forget to factor in the price of the de-duplication appliances
or
software. Those suckers are *NOT* cheap. An appliance to support 1TB
of
compressed data lists out at about $20K. Unless you get a *lot* of
de-duplication - and not everybody does - that appliance is going to get
killed on price compared to not de-duping it.

It took me only 30 minutes with a de-dupe vendor last week to eliminate
their product from consideration in our environment.

.../Ed

--
Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts < at > ewilts.org


-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-
bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Curtis Preston
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 12:10 PM
To: Justin Piszcz; Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

First, you can't compare the cost of disk and tape directly like that.
You have to include the drives and robots. A drive by itself is
useful;
a tape by itself is not.

Setting that aside, if I put that disk in a system that's doing 20:1
de-duplication, my cost is now 1.65c/GB vs your 3-9c/GB.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Backup Blog < at > www.backupcentral.com
VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Justin
Piszcz
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 7:36 AM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?


I believe disks are 33c/gigabyte and tapes are 3-9cents/gigabyte or
even

cheaper, I do not remember the exact figures, but someone I know has
done
a cost analysis and tapes were by far cheaper. Also something that
nobody
calculates is the cost of power to keep disks spinning.

Justin.

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Jeff Lightner wrote:

Disk is not cheaper? You've done a cost analysis?

Not saying you're wrong and I haven't done an analysis but I'd be
surprised if disks didn't actually work out to be cheaper over time:

1) Tapes age/break - We buy on average several hundred tapes a year
-
support on a disk array for failing disks may or may not be more
expensive.

2) Transport/storage - We have to pay for offsite storage and
transfer
-
it seems just putting an array in offsite facility would eliminate
the
need for transportation (in trucks) cost. Of course there would be
cost
in the data transfer disk to disk but since everyone seems to have
connectivity over the internet it might be possible to do this using
a
B2B link rather than via dedicated circuits.

3) Labor cost in dealing with mechanical failures of robots. This
one
is hidden in salary but every time I have to work on a robot it
means
I
can't be working on something else. While disk drives fail it
doesn't
seem to happen nearly as often as having to fish a tape out of a
drive
or the tape drive itself having failed.


-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Piszcz [mailto:jpiszcz < at > lucidpixels.com]
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 10:08 AM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?



On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Jeff Lightner wrote:

Yesterday our director said that he doesn't intend to ever upgrade
existing STK L700 because eventually we'll go tapeless as that is
what
the industry is doing. The idea being we'd have our disk backup
devices here (e.g. Data Domain) and transfer to offsite storage to
another disk device so as to eliminate the need for ever
transporting
tapes.

It made me wonder if anyone was actually doing the above already or
was
planning to do so?


That seems to be the way people are 'thinking' but the bottom line
is
disk
still is not cheaper than LTO-3 tape and there are a lot of
advantages
to
tape; however, convicing management of this is an uphill battle.

Justin.


_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

Ed Wilts said:

1) Disk ages and breaks too.

But with RAID, no longer will the failure of a piece of media cause a
backup or restore failure.

2) Transport is cheap. I'd be surprised if I couldn't transport a
thousand tapes for the cost of a terabyte of storage. Bandwidth to
move >data is *NOT* cheap. 20GB/day requires 3Mbps of pipe.

I've done a number of cost comparisons lately, and you're right. It's
not cheap, but it's not astronomical either. And you need to weigh that
cost against not having the risk of a lost tape and all the
multi-million dollar costs that come along with that these days.

3) I spend more time replacing disk drives than I do replacing tapes
or
tape drives. To back up my 1200 SAN-based spindles, I have 6 LTO-3
drives.

You have 200 times more disk drives than you have tape drives. Of
course you spend more time replacing them. But those drive failures
never have to cause backup or restore failures, as tape/drive failures
do. Try having a few hundred tape drives and see how your life changes.
I have a customer with 100 drives and their tape drive vendor is in once
a week swapping something, and each one of those swaps is associated
with a backup or restore failure.


_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

With VTL there is no need to multistream.

Instead of writing 8 stream to 1 drive, just create 8 Virtual drives,
and not multiplex.

It's not because of a performance issue, it's an advantage of
virtualization.

As far as performance goes, with a Disk as disk config, to create a high
perf target, you would need to create HLUNs which are striped over many,
many LUNs on your array, or present LUNs which are stripes of segments
of many RAID groups.

Many VTLs (the one I'm using, for instance) distribute the writes over
many LUNs. I'm currently writing dozens of simultaneous jobs distributed
over 28 separate LUNs.

The data reduction (compression) & throughput I'm getting with VTL is
definitely better, on a "per client job" basis than I was getting to
MPX'ed jobs going to LTO2.

Offsite is SUPER easy....we replicate our LUNs caontaining the de-duped
data to our DR site.
To bring up the other site, once the DR LUNs are made R/W, we just start
the daemons on the DR VTL and away we go.
The devices are available there as they were at head office.

Don't even need to rediscover devices on the NBU servers.

Vault works great for spinning off copies to Physical tapes, if
necessary.

Paul


--


-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf
Of Clem Kruger
Sent: September 22, 2007 5:12 AM
To: Jeff Lightner; Justin Piszcz
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Compression on a VTL is done by the operating system (normally LINUX)
which we all know is a slow process and therefore not
recommended. Your
VTL supplier will also recommend that you do not multistream as this
also slows down the process.
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I currently backup 9TB of data to VTL during a FULL window which writes ~100GB of data to the VTL repository in that window.

Another state is one thing, but across town via DWDM is no prob.

out of state is handled by duping that data to phys tape....wouldn't want to dupe disk outside of a DWDM connection.

Paul

--

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
Sent: September 22, 2007 9:35 AM
To: 'Jeff Lightner'; veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?



Here’s some simple math that may help (complements of ExaGrid’s web site).

If you have 1TB of data with a 2% change rate, you’ll need to back up 20GB of daily incrementals. To replicate this to another site in 18 hours requires 3Mbps of bandwidth. If you have lots of bandwidth or not too much data, replication to an offsite location may make sense. But to think that you can replicate your backups for 20TB of data to another state is going to make your network group squirm. Iron Mountain looks pretty cheap comparing to offsite electronic replication.

We have 1 application by itself that adds 30GB of new data every day. It’s being replicated within the metro area over a 1Gbps pipe (real time, not via backups). We sure couldn’t replicate everything…

As the OLD saying goes, never understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

…/Ed
====================================================================================

La version française suit le texte anglais.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This email may contain privileged and/or confidential information, and the Bank of
Canada does not waive any related rights. Any distribution, use, or copying of this
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unauthorized. If you received this email in error please delete it immediately from
your system and notify the sender promptly by email that you have done so.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it.
The first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i
didn't know existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does
the software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer
which has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a
link between the sites but the customer will probably frown on increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being required
to be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i
thought by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly
backups lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the
bandwidth transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to
disk i thought.

I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on 100Meg
lan with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

For on-demand type database backups, I had great success with setting up
a simple SATA-based DSU which was seen by one of the media servers. It
had a vault policy to dump it to tape after 4-5 days, then expire the
DSU image. It worked out great for informix onbar log dumps
especially...

Harry S.
Atlanta


-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Justin
Piszcz
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2007 10:28 AM
To: Ed Wilts
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu; 'Jeff Lightner'
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Don't even get me started on SANs, I have seen the entire loss of an MTI

(now EMC) SAN and with the new Claiiron SANS I have seen entire shelves
go
off-line due to bad SPAs etc, IMO not reliable.

Also with disk, I have a question with VTLs, etc, if I am feeding
multiple
LTO-3 tape drives using 10Gbps; what type of disk/VTL (not SAN) is out
there that can accept multiple 10Gbps streams/data and will not choke?

VTLs seem like a good idea for filesystem backups but for on-demand
database backups, I do not see them as the holy grail.

Justin.

On Sat, 22 Sep 2007, Ed Wilts wrote:

1) Disk ages and breaks too.
2) Transport is cheap. I'd be surprised if I couldn't transport a
thousand
tapes for the cost of a terabyte of storage. Bandwidth to move data
is
*NOT* cheap. 20GB/day requires 3Mbps of pipe.
3) I spend more time replacing disk drives than I do replacing tapes
or
tape drives. To back up my 1200 SAN-based spindles, I have 6 LTO-3
drives.
It sounds like you need to either replace your tape drives or treat
them
better. We do work on our robots perhaps once every few months. We
replace
disk drives on a weekly basis. NetBackup requires a *lot* more time
than
the robots or the disk drives ever will.

.../Ed

--
Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts < at > ewilts.org

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-
bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Jeff Lightner
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 9:34 AM
To: Justin Piszcz
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Disk is not cheaper? You've done a cost analysis?

Not saying you're wrong and I haven't done an analysis but I'd be
surprised if disks didn't actually work out to be cheaper over time:

1) Tapes age/break - We buy on average several hundred tapes a year -
support on a disk array for failing disks may or may not be more
expensive.

2) Transport/storage - We have to pay for offsite storage and
transfer
-
it seems just putting an array in offsite facility would eliminate
the
need for transportation (in trucks) cost. Of course there would be
cost
in the data transfer disk to disk but since everyone seems to have
connectivity over the internet it might be possible to do this using
a
B2B link rather than via dedicated circuits.

3) Labor cost in dealing with mechanical failures of robots. This
one
is hidden in salary but every time I have to work on a robot it means
I
can't be working on something else. While disk drives fail it
doesn't
seem to happen nearly as often as having to fish a tape out of a
drive
or the tape drive itself having failed.


-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Piszcz [mailto:jpiszcz < at > lucidpixels.com]
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 10:08 AM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?



On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Jeff Lightner wrote:

Yesterday our director said that he doesn't intend to ever upgrade
existing STK L700 because eventually we'll go tapeless as that is
what
the industry is doing. The idea being we'd have our disk backup
devices here (e.g. Data Domain) and transfer to offsite storage to
another disk device so as to eliminate the need for ever
transporting
tapes.

It made me wonder if anyone was actually doing the above already or
was
planning to do so?


That seems to be the way people are 'thinking' but the bottom line is
disk
still is not cheaper than LTO-3 tape and there are a lot of
advantages
to
tape; however, convicing management of this is an uphill battle.

Justin.

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Data Domain makes a hardware storage device (disks) which does
deduplication. Rather than backing up block for block all the time it
does it only for the first backup. For subsequent backups rather than
doing an incremental backup at file level it backups up incrementally at
block level meaning only the blocks that changed in the source are
stored on the target.

The benefit to this is good for things like databases on filesystems
where the datafile gets updated for any write to the datafile. A
standard file incremental would backup the entire datafile but a
deduplication incremental would only backup the blocks modified within
the datafile. One can get what appears to be a very high level of
compression to the deduplication storage. I've seen numbers like 20:1
and even one person on this list last year said something like 80:1
though that wouldn't be typical.

Data Domain isn't the only deduplication company out there and we
haven't yet implemented the ones we bought (though we will before the
end of October). I was contacted off list by another company called
Sepaton but there solution seemed to require one to one correspondence
between original storage and target storage. I believe there is at
least one other company doing deduplication but I don't recall who
(Falconstore maybe)?


-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Markham [mailto:dave.markham < at > fjserv.net]
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 11:35 AM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it.
The first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i
didn't know existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does
the software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer
which has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a
link between the sites but the customer will probably frown on increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being required
to be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i
thought by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly
backups lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the
bandwidth transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to
disk i thought.

I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and
media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on 100Meg
lan with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose


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On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Dave Markham wrote:

Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it.
The first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i
didn't know existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does
the software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer
which has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a
link between the sites but the customer will probably frown on increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being required
to be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i
thought by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly
backups lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the
bandwidth transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to
disk i thought.
LTO-3 = 400GiB


I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on 100Meg
lan with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

Hi Dave,

Yes it is a difficult decision I have looked at DataDomain with
NetBackup. I have found that the backups are faster and there is a vast
amount of disk being saved.

NetBackup 6.5 includes de-duplication and I have become a great friend
of it. To use the words of a supplier, "Saving me Time, Saving me Space
and Saving me Money"


Kind Regards,
Clem Kruger

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Dave
Markham
Sent: 24 September 2007 17:35 PM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it.
The first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i
didn't know existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does
the software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer
which has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a
link between the sites but the customer will probably frown on increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being required
to be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i
thought by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly
backups lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the
bandwidth transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to
disk i thought.

I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and
media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on 100Meg
lan with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

On a similar note how does NDMP play with Disk de-dup? All of the de-dups
I've seem are NAS devices. NDMP only talks to tape or VTL. Are there VTL's
with De-dup that would solve the NDMP problem?

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Markham
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 8:35 AM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?


Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it. The
first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i didn't know
existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does the
software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer which
has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a link
between the sites but the customer will probably frown on increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being required to
be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i thought
by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly backups
lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the bandwidth
transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to disk i
thought.

I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on 100Meg lan
with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu


_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

There are several.
FalconStor, Diligent, Quantum and Sepaton I believe will all present a
"tape" to an NDMP device, and provide de-dupe on the backend.

Paul

--


-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf
Of Jim Horalek
Sent: September 24, 2007 12:43 PM
To: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?


On a similar note how does NDMP play with Disk de-dup? All of
the de-dups
I've seem are NAS devices. NDMP only talks to tape or VTL.
Are there VTL's
with De-dup that would solve the NDMP problem?

Jim
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Do you need a special license for 6.5 or can those with 6.0 licenses
upgrade? I assume you need to open a case with NetBackup to get the
download links?

Justin.

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Clem Kruger wrote:

Hi Dave,

Yes it is a difficult decision I have looked at DataDomain with
NetBackup. I have found that the backups are faster and there is a vast
amount of disk being saved.

NetBackup 6.5 includes de-duplication and I have become a great friend
of it. To use the words of a supplier, "Saving me Time, Saving me Space
and Saving me Money"


Kind Regards,
Clem Kruger

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Dave
Markham
Sent: 24 September 2007 17:35 PM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it.
The first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i
didn't know existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does
the software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer
which has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a
link between the sites but the customer will probably frown on increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being required
to be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i
thought by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly
backups lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the
bandwidth transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to
disk i thought.

I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and
media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on 100Meg
lan with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

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I am not quite sure how it is done there. I would contact Symantec in
your area and ask how they will manage your license.





Kind Regards,
Clem Kruger

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Piszcz [mailto:jpiszcz < at > lucidpixels.com]
Sent: 24 September 2007 19:16 PM
To: Clem Kruger
Cc: dave.markham < at > fjserv.net; Jeff Lightner;
veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Do you need a special license for 6.5 or can those with 6.0 licenses
upgrade? I assume you need to open a case with NetBackup to get the
download links?

Justin.

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Clem Kruger wrote:

Hi Dave,

Yes it is a difficult decision I have looked at DataDomain with
NetBackup. I have found that the backups are faster and there is a
vast
amount of disk being saved.

NetBackup 6.5 includes de-duplication and I have become a great friend
of it. To use the words of a supplier, "Saving me Time, Saving me
Space
and Saving me Money"


Kind Regards,
Clem Kruger

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Dave
Markham
Sent: 24 September 2007 17:35 PM
To: Jeff Lightner
Cc: veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments?

Guys i've just read this thread and can say im very interested in it.
The first thing is i learned a new term called deduplication which i
didn't know existed.

Question : I gather Deduplication is using other software. DataDomain
i
think i saw mentioned. Where does this fit in with Netbackup and does
the software reside on every client or just a server somewhere?

Ok, so im trying to kit refresh a backup environment for a customer
which has 2 sites. Production and DR about 200 miles apart. There is a
link between the sites but the customer will probably frown on
increased
bandwidth charges to transfer backup data across for DisasterRecovery
purposes.

Data is probably only 1 TB for the site with perhaps 70% being
required
to be transfered daily to offsite media.

Currently i use tape and i was just speccing a new tape system as i
thought by using disk based backups, and retentions of weekly/monthly
backups lasting say 6 weeks, im going to need a LOT of disk, plus the
bandwidth transfer costs to DR site

LTO3 tapes are storing 200gb a tape which is pretty good compared to
disk i thought.

I guess in my set up its a trade off between :-

Initial cost of disk array vs initial cost of tape library, drives and
media

Time take to backup ( network will be bottle neck here. Still on
100Meg
lan with just 2 DB servers using GigaBit lan to backup server.

Offsite transfer of tapes daily to offsite location vs Cost of
increased
bandwith between sites to transfer backup data.


Im now confused what to propose



_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

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