I'm sitting here at the "Blogger's lounge" at Symantec Vision in Las Vegas, and I just got back from a session on Puredisk, where two customers talked about how they're using it. Turns out it actually works!
I could be accused of dismissing Puredisk a bit, as it did seem to be the latecomer to the party. I've known about Avamar for much longer, and it seemed that they had a broad depth of coverage and a long list of customers when EMC acquired them. Symantec acquired Puredisk from Datacenter Technologies, and it seemed that they had a shorter list of covered OSs and applications, and a shorter list of customers.
So I sat and watched as Symantec released it, and waited to talk to any actual customers that used it. (But I was waiting with crossed arms and a crinkled eyebrow…)
Today I got my wish. I sat in a session where JP Morgan Chase and Qualcomm talked about how they've implemented the product. They're both protecting several remote terabytes with the product, and they both seem very happy. JPMC is using it in hundreds of remote sites, and they are protecting all of their sites remotely (meaning no backup servers at the remote sites). Qualcomm has really just started with only 40 systems being backed up by it, but they're quite happy as well.
Both of them are backing the remote sites up directly to their central site, without having a local recovery server at the remote site. They said that the RTO of these remote sites can be met by restoring the data at the central site and shipping the restored server to the remote site. I was hoping to hear that one of them was using a local storage pool so they could do recoveries without having to ship things, but they weren't. I've asked to talk to somebody who has done that, and I'll let you know when I do.
OK, time to hit the craps tables.
Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data
… that I know who from JPMC was adulating all over Puredisk.
I also know why JPMC isn’t doing local tape (or even disk) backups. It’s just not their model. Their model relies on remote-to-core heavily and involves probably double-digits by now of SL8500s and (more recently) some IBM library for which I forget the model number in each of two main DCs (in Delaware) and one alternate (in Illinois) DC, with EMC/HDS redundancy between at the disk storage layer.
And maybe they’ve gotten around to disk staging/caching by now, but… there was a SunTK relationship and, you know, Indigo.