SNW: Backing up and tuning out

Right, so I'm flying out for the the Boston Blogger dinner tomorrow this is an adventure on my own time so I'm probably going to drop off the radar and not take the concrete slab I call a laptop with me.

It'll be good to tune out for a bit.

Speaking of tuning out Chris Evans made a save where I dropped the ball, I was informed that there was a new version of the Celerra simulator available via a comment on the blog more than a week ago but the fact it was free to anyone with a PowerLink login zipped right past me.

What didn't zip past me was yesterday's SNW announcements. Lets take two off the top. There's a third I want to cover as I think it's important but we'll swing back to that at a later date.

Now NetWorker is a product which just doesn't get the respect it deserves but that's something inherent to Backup & Recovery (The products, processes and the people who manage it) anyway. The changes in NetWorker over the past few years have been interesting to say the least but as of yesterday people should start seeing where EMC is going with it all.

Lets break backup technologies into three segments:

• Traditional backup (Tape)
• Backup to disk (B2D/VTLs/etc)
• Advanced Backup (Array based Point in Time copies/CDP/and so on)

The tape war is over NBU won that years ago. B2D and Advanced Backup are only getting warmed up but NetWorker has a significant technology lead as it's been integrating disk based technologies like crazy for the past few years.

File type devices were introduced back in 1996 (Backup to a FS) Advanced FileType devices (Parallel Read/Write access) in NW 7.0. So that's writing your backup to a tray of ATA as you clone a previously written backup off to a different media type such as tape handled.

Consolidated Media Management on the EMC Disk Library (NetWorker Storage Node running on the DL engine(s) ) gave NetWorker control over the cloning, staging and replication operations of the VTL at an individual saveset level and therefore made all such operations catalogue consistent. No more unmanaged copies floating around the place. 

NetWorker PowerSnap supports TimeFinder, SRDF/S, SRDF/A, SnapSure for Celerra, SnapView for Clariion and RecoverPoint CDP. So that's replication, array based point in time copies and CDP with a single point of control.

Avamar integration adds global de-dup and is an ideal way of backing up desktops, laptops, ROBOs, and VMware farms. You have 1000 VMs all built from the same profile how about you use Avamar to backup the OS on one and then you can watch as it only backs up what's different in the 999 other images?

That's real space savings right there and if you're only sending what's different across the network you're not going to saturate the physical NICs the VMs are sharing when you run a backup as you're not shoveling redundant data across the network.

Want to backup VMware using VCB? Use the NetWorker Interoperability Module. High Density File Systems? SnapImage for NetWorker. VSS compliant point in time copies either locally or on an array? NetWorker client for Microsoft Applications.

The list goes on and on and on but the bottom line is that if you haven't looked at NetWorker for a while an awful lot of things have changed so you might want to look at it again.

Moving on to the EDL 1TB drives have brought RAID 6 into play but do so without changing the performance profile of the systems.

This is outside the scope of the the EDL but EMC's implementation of RAID 6 on the CX3 differs somewhat from other implementations as it rotates parity evenly amongst drives in the RAID group, thereby preventing a situation where dedicated parity drives become a bottleneck. There's a detailed review of Clariion RAID 6 technology here that's worth a read.

Well that's the blogging parked for the next few days I've packing to do and my GPS to update. While my sense of direction in MMOs is amazing it's pretty lacking in the real world. I can run you through any instance where we're required to bring pain to the opposition in some online setting but the moment I walk out the front door of any real world building that isn't my house nine times out of ten I'll walk off in the opposite direction to where I should be going.

It's a skill.

For the Boston trip I've loaded up my N95 with mapping software and a city guide. Yes I've been to Boston before on a number of occasions but chances are I can't find any of the places I've visited before without the help of a satellite lock, a 3D arrow and a stern voice.

Remember no house parties while I'm gone.

And before I sign off I notice that John Wookey has parted company with Oracle. Which greatly increases the chances that Fusion is in trouble and at this exact moment in time Oracle need BEA more than BEA needs Oracle.

Wookey was never in a good spot not with Ellison pretty much stepping away from the CEO-ish type things CEOs tend to do and telling the world he was more interested in getting elbow deep in Fusion than he was in meeting Oracle customers.

Larry went to war to get PeopleSoft and that was a pure customer scooping exercise, imagine what he'll do to get his hands on BEA if they've the technology he needs to deliver Fusion this decade.

If anyone is around Redwood Shores and hears the sound of drums, sees plumes of thick black smoke stretching high into the sky or spots siege towers being built I'd say avoid Oz for a while.

Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

Looking forward to meeting you!