« October 2008 | Main | December 2008 »
I was flipping through TV channels earlier when I ran across a segment about Barack Obama trying to negotiate with White House lawyers and the Secret Service to keep his Blackberry.
I can understand his need to be connected but one has to imagine that the presidential email account represents a juicy a target for foreign intelligence services since they already raided records from computers during his campaign.
A guy in a crowd lifted Bush's watch right off his wrist while he was covered by snipers and got away with it, you just know that some foreign intelligence service is going to come up with a way to pull Obama's email right out of the air.
On the topic of protecting data, internally we use Documentum Information Rights Management Services and RSA Data Loss Prevention for the most important stuff. Now stuff leaks, usually when someone external gets their hands on a document or two just before a launch or some super genius EMCer hands out a copy of something they shouldn't have to someone who instead of respecting their NDA decides to hit the forward button on their mail client.
After some previous leaks I was all for wrapping everything in IRM and putting it all under the unblinking eyes of RSA DLP but it's apparent to me now that that would be the quickest way to undo everything a lot of us have been doing to open up the lines of communication across the company. There's a reasonable amount of leakage to be expected if we are to move away from the EMC Command & Control mentality.
You want things to leak across the internal orgs, but as a result a few things might make it outside the company.
That doesn't mean that sensitive material shouldn't be rights managed with IRM or watched with DLP. If I get an email or a document which I can't copy, forward or print without my username being automatically watermarked on every page (Which are just some of the rights features of IRM) then there should be a very good reason for that.
The same goes with copying files, if it's EMC IP or High Business Impact or under a policy then Data Loss Prevention should drop the hammer immediately. You're not copying that/emailing it without encryption/saving it to removeable media/whatever.
If it's not IP or High Business Impact or under a policy, well don't get in my way.
And it doesn't.
A happy Thanksgiving to all of you in the US.
But what I'm thankful for is that Tony P. lives in some weird IBM/Get Smart cone of silence where either shoving SVC in front of it or XIV/tape behind it (Both products are about as interesting as each other and I say that knowing that the tape market is violently contracting right now) makes his crew the leader.
Quick heads up. IBM is so irrelevant in this space that the EMC Atmos Competitive team didn't even mention them to the sales force. This is after analysing the market and identifying all potential threats.
Tony might call it underestimation, I call it accurate description.
IBM have one storage product worth anything and it isn't a VTL or an archiving excuse trying to protect declining tape revenues or a "bulk" storage array with terrible useable capacity which will keel over dead if the wind changes after you've already lost a module.
It's SVC.
Credit where credit is due, IBM Storage is a one product division.
Virtualization, the visualization of virtualization environments, ease of use as well as de-duplication of backup data from applications are a big deal in this release. We'll talk about those in a second but first a little background.
Today's data protection blast has a lot of good stuff in it but I want to focus on NetWorker in specific as the EMC NetWorker team do twenty (20) releases a year, the product does millions upon millions in revenue and yet sometimes I think I have a larger marketing budget than they do.
But that's the way now isn't it?
Cash cow products which consistently earn but aren't seen as that sexy don't get talked about as much and that's a shame as were I to think of a product which has flourished in recent years it would be NetWorker.
So what's in 7.5? This is something I should know as I beta tested it from the comfort of my hotel room a while back.
Well NetWorker now has a connection back to Virtual Center which means it'll auto-discover existing virtual machines as well as VMs you might create after you establish the connection. It can also connect to multiple Virtual Centers so you can monitor and protect multiple VMs spread across whatever number of ESX systems.
Locating those which aren't protected is one thing, visualizing the environment when you have VMs popping up all over the place is entirely another which is why NetWorker will now graphically map your virtual environment and show the various relationships and interdependencies so you can see what's what, what's clustered and what might have been VMotioned to another system.
It's not all VMware in this release as Hyper-V backup in now supported through the NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications. NMM uses VSS for backup and recovery so not only can you backup and recover Hyper-V Guest operating systems but you get access to DR and granular restore of SharePoint farms as well Exchange backup with restore to the Exchange Recovery Storage Group so you can have a granular restore without the pain of a brick level backup.
I keep the NetWorker Command Reference printed out on my desk and in dead tree format it comes in at more than 470 pages of small text. This is important as NetWorker long had a pig of a user interface so if you wanted to get any real work done you opened up a terminal. The fact that the NetWorker Management Console and it's integrated configuration wizards makes NetWorker one of the best looking and easiest to use backup applications on the market shouldn't escape your notice.
The UI experience is clean and always evolving but maybe I'm a bit too attached to that as I've UI tested parts of it and always look forward to doing so as ease of use is something I'm always interested in.
De-duplication, that layer of magic dust which will cure all our capacity ills. Well, not really but it can help reign in sprawling growth of backup data. A few years ago EMC acquired Avamar only to watch it take off like a rocket and grow in the triple digits it's proven to be the right product with the right feature set at the right time, but one of the benefits Avamar also brought was that it was capable of adding de-duplication to NetWorker quite quickly.
Initially using NetWorker's plugin architecture de-duplication was implemented as an Application Specific Module (ASM) to the NetWorker save command. Sounds good, immediate de-dup but without have to do anything crazy like merge a hell of a lot of new code into the NetWorker code base but the drawback here of course was while you now had de-dup for unstructured file system data you didn't have de-dup for application backup data.
Well now there's a de-duplication framework for application modules which adds source based de-dup capability to the next release of application modules. This will be added to the application modules as they're updated.
There's more and even more of course and it's something I should swing back to in subsequent posts as there's always more than enough to talk about with NetWorker.
Yes that image in the previous post was an echo wave so El Reg's Chris Mellor wins first prize as he got that it had something to do with sound.
Right, so that's Atmos then.
Next? Well, this..
