Next Generation Storage

A new wave of storage solutions is emerging that offer greener, more compliant and less fallible approaches to data archive and access management. Business Management caught up with a number of industry experts – Quantum’s Kevin Honeycutt, EMC’s Jack Norris, FalconStor’s Camberley Bates, and Gabriel Broner of the Storage Solutions Division at Microsoft Corporation – to find out how storage systems have evolved to meet the demands of a 21st century environment.

As VP of Marketing, Kevin Honeycutt oversees all outbound go-to-market, product line management, channel marketing and marketing communications functions across Quantum’s disk, software and tape portfolios. He brings more than 15 years of storage experience to his role.

Jack Norris, Senior Director of Marketing at EMC, leads the marketing and product strategy for file virtualization. Prior to EMC, Norris was VP of Marketing at Rainfinity where he drove the creation of the file virtualization technology and market category.

Camberley Bates is the CMO of FalconStor, the market leader in proven disk-based data protection. Prior to joining FalconStor she held executive marketing positions at companies such as COPAN Systems, VERITAS and GE Access.

Gabriel Broner is General Manager of the Storage Solutions Division at Microsoft Corporation, where he is responsible for delivering storage and data management solutions. Broner has 23 years of experience in the computer industry.

BM. Customer demand for content management and e-mail solutions is continuously growing. What factors are behind this mushrooming need for e-mail and storage management within businesses today?
JN. Very simply, it’s about information growth, especially of unstructured digital content. Most organizations are seeing Uunstructured content is increasing betweegrowthn between 65 to 200 percent annually within most enterprises, depending on the industry sector. This growth is largely uncontrolled and puts pressure on service levels, backup windows, data security, and operational costs. Customers are looking for better approaches. Content management and archiving are best practices designed to protect corporate data assets and and for moreimprove iefficient information management efficiency that affect virtually all parts of an organization.

KH. Rapid access to data is a key differentiator for successful organizations, so we see companies quickly adopting storage management technology that improves their ability to share content quickly among multiple users. Products like Quantum’s StorNext data management software also offer the added ability to migrate data between different storage tiers to help users control storage costs while maintaining high-speed access to the data.

GB. The need for storage management is a direct result of the data explosion including e-mail. E-mail has become a mission critical application and the most used form of communications in a wide range of businesses. Because of the innovations brought forward by recent e-mail packages, end-users want bigger and bigger mailboxes. This in itself creates a large pool of storage in play and requires new storage management tools that will maximize the value of the storage assets, and also simplify compliance and archiving issues. Knowing which assets are available, who is responsible for them and who within an organization is paying for them, for example, creates the need for new storage management tools. Storage management is one of key focus areas for Microsoft’s Storage Solutions Division.

CB. In the last 24 months, IT has hit an inflection point of storage growth where data is growing by more than 60 percent a year. Two factors have caused this inflection point. First, much of it is driven by e-mail and other forms of digital communication such as instant messaging and podcasts that create multiple copies of the same information. The other factor is government regulations, which require faster access to data over longer periods of time. These regulations are causing companies to rethink the use of tape and are driving the move to disk technology. In general, data growth creates more work and overhead for IT. Thus, there is a need to better manage existing storage using the proper tools, rather than simply purchasing additional storage as a knee-jerk reaction to the growth. For instance, there are new, emerging technologies that allow us to eliminate data redundancies (only storing one copy), archive and still rapidly retrieve data.

BM. Recent disasters have underscored the fallibility of the tape-based backup and vaulting strategies commonly used for disaster recovery; virtual tape libraries, disk-based backup systems, replication systems and recovery points are now considered crucial platforms within storage management. But are enough companies taking disaster recovery seriously, and what solutions are proving to be the most effective in addressing this concern?
KH. Most companies of any significant size take disaster recovery protection very seriously, and that has limited their ability to deploy alternative protection solutions like disk-based backup that are not inherently well suited to providing site-loss protection. Data de-duplication technology, the kind of technology Quantum has built into its DXi backup appliances, is really changing that situation dramatically. It’s letting users store 10-50 times more backup data on disk than conventional storage systems, and it is finally making it practical to replicate over standard WANs for DR protection. Now users are able to reduce reliance on removable media in smaller locations and centralize tape operations. That lets them manage the process more securely and add features like encryption where it makes sense.

GB. Implementing good, effective disaster recovery solutions can be a daunting task for enterprise-class data centers, let alone small businesses. Small and mid-sized businesses rely on their data just as much as large enterprises, so they in particular are in need of good disaster recovery solutions. Until recently, many of the disaster recovery solutions were too expensive and difficult to implement for a large class of businesses. Advances with host-based asynch and synch replication, simple ‘turnkey’ disk-based backup solutions and innovations in bringing new recovery tools within applications have brought disaster recovery to a much broader level. Microsoft is involved in all these technologies with Windows Unified Data Storage Server, Data Protection Manager and Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) in Exchange Server 2007.

CB. We have seen companies make great strides in addressing DR and yes, they are taking it seriously. The organizations we are working with have taken a systemized view of the business problem, as opposed to just adding another technology to the mix. As you pointed out, there are a lot of emerging strategies, but no one technology can address all of the varied RPO and RTO requirements of businesses today. For example, VTL significantly improves backup and recovery, but does not address the more granular requirements of recovery points and speed. A replication system may handle one type of storage, but its homogenous approach requires a second tool for other devices. As a result, companies are realizing that if they don’t look at the entire process, they will end up with tools that don’t work together, don’t scale and add more complexity to the environment. We believe companies need to first identify the impact of downtime by users and applications, decide on the RPO/RTO requirements, and then determine an integrated approach to the best and most appropriate recovery architectural plan.

JN. Every organization and industry has different needs. Important to all of them, however, is a need to correctly match protection levels to the business value of data—across its entire lifecycle.

Business information needs different levels of protection across its entire lifecycle – some information and transactions need more advanced levels of protection than ever before, andwhile others just need standard protection at more attractive price points.. The success of protection and recovery depends on your ability to access a separate point-in-time copy of the data. These copies can be local or remote – customers can select from various recovery-point objectives (RPOs), recovery-time objectives (RTOs) and distance options. These additional copies can allow the performance of support operations on multiple point-in-time copies of production data, while providing data protection. Tiered protection and recovery allows you to meet required service levels – while containing costs – by matching price, performance and availability requirements with the value of the data. EMC offers a range of solutions to meet any service level requirement for backup, recovery and archive. EMC’s approach includes the software, hardware and services to automated backup, recovery and archive processes across the full spectrum of media: from tape and low-cost high capacity disks, to purpose-built appliances optimized for backup, and specialized disk arrays to manage fixed content.

BM. The benefits of implementing any type of virtualization solution include increased SLAs, increased efficiency and lower TCO. But are there any additional benefits when implementing a storage virtualization solution?
CB. Yes – improved speed of recovery in a disaster. One of the principles of crisis management is to standardize how you will recover as much as possible. Having the same process – the same buttons to push, the same commands, the same procedures – no matter what storage device or interface is used, immensely simplifies and thus speeds recovery. It is why firemen always have their equipment in the same place, doing the same drill. So they spend less time figuring out what to do and more time doing it. By virtualizing storage, you remove the issues of technology differences and only focus on the process of protecting and recovering.

JN. Storage virtualization provides a wide range of tactical benefits that drive the initial adoption of virtualization; improved SLAs, lower costs and increased productivity are all results of storage virtualization. It’s also important to realize t
hat virtualization is a strategic layer in the infrastructure – a layer that simplifies storage administration and makes it possible to define automated policies that govern the placement, protection and availability of data. With storage virtualization, administrators can more easily manage across devices and heterogeneous storage. This is a dramatic change in how storage is managed. Rather than manage at a specific device level, administrators can define required service levels, data protection classes, and recovery objectives for various categories or classes of data. Policies that extend across the environment and leverage intelligent data classification can then govern the placement of data. Administrators maintain the overall infrastructure and monitor the automated movement of data based on the business needs and the lifecycle stage of specific application and end-user data.JACK TO PROVIDE ANSWER

KH. There are several levels of virtualization strategies that are providing benefits in different parts of IT operations. In the backup world, virtualization techniques enabled by data de-duplication and remote replication technology are increasing the effectiveness of data protection strategies, providing automated DR protection, automated management of data across disk and tape, and reducing the overhead associated with the handling of removable media.

GB. Storage virtualization is a much simpler way to manage a heterogeneous storage environment, and enables more efficient use of the disk assets by providing an easier way to implement solutions like thin provisioning. Disk virtualization has been part of the operating System platform from Windows 2003 and will continue to evolve in step with the trends of the storage industry.

BM. Protecting sensitive data across the enterprise is an important issue, with increased business requirements and ever-stricter compliance regulations. How does this effect a heterogeneous storage environment? And do organizations need to implement storage security software?
GB. The main effect of increased business requirements and stricter regulations is extra complexity in the storage environment. Traditionally, in order to minimize the complexity, end-users have been reticent to use solutions from different vendors. With the industry trend toward storage solutions based on industry standard hardware and software, it is becoming easier to ‘mix and use’ different vendors’ solutions, especially with the current push for interoperability between the different OS running on hosts on the storage architecture. Recent work by Microsoft with Novell and other members of the Open Source community is testament to the work done to facilitate interoperability and compatibility in the server and storage environments.

CB. Corporations must provide a mechanism to ensure that sensitive data is protected at all times, particularly any time it leaves a secure facility. Since data is most vulnerable when in transit, technology such as encryption over the network and encryption of physical tape is a must. Data that is at rest (i.e. backed up or archived) should be secured through encryption as well. In a heterogeneous environment, we recommend taking a platform approach, where a single solution can be employed outside of individual vendor environments. This will simplify management and operations.

KH. As a specialist in backup, recovery and archive, Quantum tends to think about these issues in terms of data protection. One of the most positive developments in recent years is the close integration of security features within backup systems that span multiple applications and operating systems. As an example, when we use our DXi appliances to replicate data between sites, we now automatically encrypt the data as it is transmitted – there is no way to intercept the information and compromise its integrity. Likewise, the latest generation of tape storage systems include an integrated encryption option so that data that is moved off site for long-term retention is protected, wherever it is.

JN. Organizations face mounting regulatory pressure and increasing security threats. It’s critical to comply with internal policy and external regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI, and to enhance security operations. EMC offers powerful security information management software integrated into our storage solutions to meet multiple requirements to reduce risk, improve compliance, and more. Built-in information-centric features secure data, secure access and enable full security auditing. A comprehensive product security policy keeps security levels high across our product families – and ensures seamless integration with existing security infrastructures. And because product security capabilities vary by vendor, vulnerabilities are reported, managed and resolved via EMC’s own Product Security Response Center.

BM. It seems everyone is going green. How can an energy reduced storage solution impact on overall business performance?
JN. In one engagement, EMC worked with a major defense contractor to assess their data center infrastructure and recommend new approaches for managing power efficiency through consolidation and virtualization. EMC identified annual energy savings opportunities totaling almost $4.5 million, enabling the customer to consolidate 26 data centers down to one, reduce its server count from 436 to 105, and reduce its central data center footprint from 58,000 square feet to 36,000 square feet. New approaches to storage management can also enable today’s enterprises to achieve optimal utilization of their storage infrastructure, reduce operational costs, minimize the risk of power-related outages and shortages, and reduce their environmental footprint without compromising performance, scalability or availability. Through consolidation, storage tiering, single instance archiving, snapshot and cloning technology and optimized capacity utilization, organizations can help ensure that they achieve measurable cost reductions and enhanced energy efficiency across their storage infrastructures.

CB. Companies can reduce expenses and capital costs by going green. By consolidating and getting better utilization of storage via virtualization, companies not only reduce their energy bills, but also improve productivity. Most of our customers cite avoidance of additional headcount even when storage has doubled in size. They have also delayed capital outlay for more storage and avoided the need to upgrade HVAC and facilities. By virtualizing, they have ultimately improved their return on assets.

GB. A properly configured green solution depends not only on green storage but also on green hosts. Depending on the SLA for business critical applications, it may not be possible in some case to find the right combination of servers and storage that could constitute an advance in energy efficient solutions. More and more Windows features are designed to minimize the power needed during peak loads on the servers. With these new innovations coming in the OS, it will also be possible to lower power requirements for storage by making the provision of storage more integrated with Volume Shrink and Grow capabilities.

KH. This is becoming a major issue for a huge number of businesses, and it will become more important as costs of energy increase in the coming years. Today, in one of the faster growing regions of the US, customers estimate that it costs them over $60,000 a month to keep a Petabyte of data on conventional disk systems. That means that new technologies like data de-duplication – which can increase the amount data stored on disk by 10-50 times – can provide an enormous bottom-line benefit beyond capital costs.