In my travels I have discussed the value of storage tiering and it is amazing how few companies have actually implemented this. Part of the challenge is identifying what to move and when. One way to easily address this is to just consider dormant data. Over the last few years I have presented to hundreds of IT professionals and the vast majority believe that more than 70% of their data is dormant 90 days after its creation. If this is the case, then focusing on dormant data after a 90 day period seems like a good place to start - move this data from your primary storage systems to a lower tier.
The next challenge with storage tiering is identifying what solution you are going to use to move the dormant data from primary to archival storage. This process needs to be transparent to the users and applications. And it would be nice if it was easy for IT professionals to implement and there was a high level of performance. In the NAS world you can use file data movers or virtualization solutions. Data Domain partners with F5 and its Acopia solution.
The third and final macro issue is what platform should be used for the active archival storage. Data Domain is typically seen as a disk-to-disk backup solution but it should also be considered as an active archive as well. Remember that the Data Domain solution is a NAS system and therefore a mount point can be easily created and it can be used to store files via NFS and CIFS protocols. One of the main reasons to do this is to take advantage of its dedupe capabilities. Since this is not a backup data - the dedupe rates will not be as high but you should easily get a 2-to-1 and maybe as high as a 5-to-1 ratio. What makes this even more compelling and valuable is using Data Domain for both D2D backup and as an active archive. It is this combination that presents a powerful value proposition. Consolidating these functions into a single Data Domain appliance further reduces cost and complexity. In addition to the direct CAPEX savings there is also the reduction of power, cooling and floor space.
There are companies that have saved significant capital costs by implemented tiered storage environments - even without dedupe. Imagine adding dedupe to the equation. Further, leveraging the same applicance that is being used for D2D backup and giving you 20-to-1 data dedupe. Not many people talk about providing a consolidated D2D backup and active archive solution, but it really does make a ton of sense if that single solution can support both with dedupe.
Tony – we are seeing Data Domain systems used for applications beyond backup more and more frequently. The typical scenario is that customers start with Data Domain for backup, recovery and replication and then seek out other use cases when they find out how well the system works in their environment. Sometimes customers will go straight to the D2D Backup + Active Archive implementation that you described. In fact, that is exactly what Chris Fricke, senior IT administrator at Clackamas County, did recently using a combination of Data Domain and F5. Chris will be speaking about his experience on a live webcast next Wednesday, June 24th at 12p EDT. Any of your readers interested in learning more about this topic can register for the webcast here: http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Data-Storage/DataDomainF5Networks062409/?partnerref=CL062409DataDomain
Posted by: Shane Jackson | 06/19/2009 at 01:24 PM