Tony's blog

The Changing Landscape of Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) means different things to different people.  For many IT professionals DR is associated with tape recovery and/or remote replication.    Recovery data from tape is fraught with challenges including rapid recovery and reliability.  Remote replication within primary storage is often complicated, expensive and inefficient requiring volumes to be restored versus specific files or data sets.

The combination of disk-to-disk (D2D) backup, data dedupe and replication offers a valuable approach to DR combining the granularity of recovering from a backup repository and the ability to leverage remote replication to store copies of data at an offsite location in the event of of site disasters and for offsite vaulting for long term retention.  For the vast majority of data this is a smart approach that serves the widest range of requirements for customers.  There will always be the need for primary remote replication but only for the corner cases in terms of who uses it and what it is used for.  However, I contend that D2D backup + data dedupe + remote replication has a much broader audience. 

Data Domain just announced an update to it's Replicator software.  I remember when Data Domain first came out with Replicator and speaking with customers that literally felt liberated by leveraging dedupe over wide area networks.  Dedupe enabled them to implement a DR strategy above and beyond what they had prior and still fit within their budgets. Five years later the solution is more mature, advanced and field proven.  Additionally, the use cases and value proposition have advanced and are proven.  Data Domain providing a combination of D2D backup + data dedupe + remote replication has impacted the data center in a number of important ways:

• Offers a cost effective and efficient DR solution that is otherwise impractical for many customers.

• Results in cost reductions include bandwidth, primary storage investment, power, cooling and floor space.
• This approach is "easy" versus perceived complications with using other DR methods (e.g. primary storage replication).
• Offers a more granular and rapid method of data recovery improving SLAs. 
• Makes it possible for customers to actually eliminate or greatly diminish the use of tape and tape libraries.  This is an important point and we are seeing momentum for tape obsolescence with a growing number of customers. 
• Multi-site replication provides a powerful and valuable solution for Enterprises with a large number of remote sites - this is enabling a new constituency to reap the rewards of this solution. Data Domain's recent expansion of 90 remote sites to a single DD690 is significant and makes it even more useful to large Enterprises. I will add, regardless of whether you have two or 90 remote sites fan into a single DD appliance at the central site is powerful especially when coupled with global dedupe. 

I have spoken to companies that did not implement remote replication because of cost - even though it was considered every year for five, eight and ten years.  And there are other companies that only replicate 10% to 20% of their data and use backup to protect the rest - they just could not rationalize the expense.  However, D2D backup + dedupe vastly changes the economics of remote replication and DR.  The landscape of DR is changing - enabled by D2D backup with dedupe - making it practical and valuable for the mainstream market.  Remote replication will drive the adoption of D2D backup with dedupe and D2D backup with dedupe will drive the adoption or remote replication.  This is a killer app on top of a killer app. 

Frank Talk: Data Domain CEO Discussing 2009

I had a discussion with Frank Slootman, CEO of Data Domain. We talked about Data Domain’s outlook for 2009, what is working for them and the trend of more and more customers moving away from tape. 

Tony:  Frank, tell us about Data Domain’s business outlook in 2009.

Frank: We gave guidance to the capital markets – a lot of people refuse to give guidance to the capital markets. For us – it was important to give an indication of what our operating assumptions both for Q1 as well as for all of 2009. Take a look at that guidance. 

Obviously we are getting into the laws of big numbers. Its heavier lifting growing from zero to one million than it is from 100 million to 200 and 200 to 500. On the other hand we are guiding to significant growth even in 2009 – where the overall storage market is going to compress probably by 5-10%. 

We are planning on growth and we are hiring. We have the advantage of running on a secular trend – as opposed to a macro trend – that’s a generational shift from legacy tape infrastructure to one that is disk and network based. We think we are in the first or second inning of this ball game – very low penetration. We will have head winds like everybody else but we think we are in a good category and still considered by customers even in this economy. 

Tony: That is an important point – you believe there will be growth with Data Domain while the rest of the storage market is planning for the opposite. And keep in mind that 2007 and 2008 weren’t great economies either. Nothing compared to 2009 but the last few years haven’t been anything to write home about and you still have seen amazing growth. 

Frank: Yes and the reason is we sell pretty hard on ROI and payback. In other words, at the end of the year the customer should be better off with this new infrastructure on a cash basis – you should have more money left at the end of the year for having gone with Data Domain as opposed to just staying the status quo. Net new incremental spend is only justifiable if on a cash basis I am better off. 

Typically where people are making their investment back they are not spending as much money on tape media, they are not spending as much money on record management services – you start adding that up it starts paying you back pretty quick. When people have investments in legacy tape the maintenance is really high and it gets higher every year. You very quickly find a cross over point that people are saying it makes sense to go with Data Domain. 

Tony: IT professionals are telling me – no more investment in tape. 

Frank: I call that drawing a line in the sand. You get a mandate from above that says – it isn’t a little bit here or there – they are going to make this change.

Tony: There are also other benefits - like not putting tapes on trucks. 

Frank: Right – no hands. 

Tony: Yes and there is a security and administrative aspect to this.  But one other thing that is harder to quantify is the recovery issue.  This might be harder for them to sell their management but for the IT guy it is a huge win – recovery is fast and reliable.

Frank: And they can have deeper retention. They can have far more data online than they could have otherwise. Individual file restores and you can do full system restores much faster than they could before.

Tony: Data Domain has been saying this for years but now the customers are saying it.

Frank: That is right. Recovery speed and reliability isn’t what CFOs embrace because they are really looking at the measurable economics. They want to see how Data Domain pays them back within a certain amount of time. The other stuff is all gravy.

Tony: I am surprised at how many people I am seeing moving away from tape. I was skeptical it would ever happen. 

Frank: Look at the numbers. IBM was down on tape by 31%, Sun was down 15% and Quantum was down 25%. The decline is accelerating. For a while they were going sideways but now they are dropping off a cliff. 

Tony: I am also seeing Data Domain becoming the de-facto standard.

Frank: We are not going to get too big for our britches. We always want to feel like we are the underdog with these giants around us. We are not going to get too cocky. 

Tony: Right, healthy paranoia – according to Andy Grove.

Frank: Yes and you need it. I find a lot of products in the market to be inferior and not doing customers any good. People often buy because they have relationships and they trust their vendor to deliver a good product but often this is not the case. It is often that it’s just downright bad. 

Tony: What’s next for Data Domain?

Frank: We are going to keep on trucking. We will continue to build bigger, faster and more broadly capable systems. We will be a very broad class of storage that is highly optimized. That’s our game.  Our dedupe is a bone crushing technology that is enabled in a fully realized solution. 

Tony: My view is that the way VMware has virtualized servers - Data Domain has virtualized data. 

Frank: That is exactly right. 

Data Dedupe In A Down Economy

It is important to be hyper-focused on the economy and the prudent thing for IT professionals is to prioritize on investing in solutions that provide a real impact on reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Sounds like a no-brainer, but too often we are distracted by dealing with the status quo - conducting business as usual - which is fine when there is no crisis to face. However, the entire world is facing an economic crisis - like the falling of dominoes - and we are far from the final domino's descent. 

When making IT decisions for 2009, data dedupe should be at the top of the list because of the no-brainer value proposition - for disk-to-disk backup AND online archives. Data dedupe enables you to effectively put more data on physical disk drives with 10-to-1, 20-to-1 ratios and beyond. Not only do you save on reducing cost per GB but it also leads to lower power and cooling consumption. Data dedupe can have a major impact on operational efficiencies. It significantly lowers WAN bandwidth requirements and less bandwidth consumed means lower recurring communication costs. The cost of recovery goes way down because you don't have to go on a wild tape chase tracking down the files or database records that have been spread across multiple tapes due to interleaving or sitting in a cardboard box at Iron Mountain. 

The challenge we face in this economy is the uncertainty of the future - businesses cannot predict what will happen and often times this paralyzes us from making decisions. However, no action is indeed an action and probably among the worst we can take, especially in a crisis.