emc data protection vision ... realized

White Paper

EMC’s Data Protection Vision … Realized

By Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst

July 2012

This ESG White Paper was commissioned by EMC and is distributed under license from ESG. © 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

White Paper: EMC Data Protection Vision … Realized 2

© 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Where Customers Find Themselves Today .............................................................................................................. 3 Deduplication Is Here ............................................................................................................................................... 4 “Smarter” Backups ................................................................................................................................................... 4

EMC’s Latest Innovations.............................................................................................................................. 5 Announced at EMC World 2012 ............................................................................................................................... 5 What’s New in Avamar in 2012 ................................................................................................................................ 6 What’s New in Data Domain in 2012 ....................................................................................................................... 7 What’s New in NetWorker in 2012 .......................................................................................................................... 8

Putting EMC Backup and Recovery into Context.......................................................................................... 9 EMC’s BRS Portfolio .................................................................................................................................................. 9 EMC’s BRS Vision .................................................................................................................................................... 10 Looking Back at Recent EMC BRS Enhancements .................................................................................................. 10

The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 12 All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of the Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.



Introduction

In the afterglow of EMC World 2012, ESG examines what has changed and what has remained the same in EMC’s stated vision regarding backup and recovery. In particular, this is a glance back over the last few years to see how the EMC Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) product line is coalescing into a coherent series of solutions and offerings. With each iteration of its BRS product line, EMC marches closer to its goals of:

1. Ensuring recoverability—Safeguard data while keeping it accessible

2. Improving efficiency—Spend less time and money

3. Increasing agility—Respond quickly to changing requirements

Where Customers Find Themselves Today

The latest ESG research shows that “improving data backup and recovery” tied as the number-one IT spending priority in 2012 due to several key factors (almost all of which also show up in the top-ten priorities), including:

Increased use of virtualization (tied at #1)

Managing data growth (#3)

New workloads or line-of-business applications (#4)

Business continuity/disaster recovery (#6)

Implementing “private cloud” (#10)

All of these other IT priorities are business enablers. And they all create new challenges for data protection—even more so for business continuity. In some ways, they can be distilled down to a single technology circumstance and a single business directive.

From a technical perspective, the amount of data has made many legacy data protection mechanisms obsolete. In short, there is:

Too much (and growing) unstructured file data

Too many new VMs sprawled across hypervisors

Too much data in endpoint devices that is not safely stored in the data center

Too many new applications whose data is unprotected by legacy methods

Too much storage consumed by disk-based data protection products

Meanwhile, there is:

Too little time in backup windows

Too little free I/O capacity on fully populated hypervisors

Too little bandwidth to adequately protect the amount of data being created

Interestingly, all of these technology deficiencies point to a single business motivation: reducing cost. One key technical innovation that helps reduce cost in data protection is deduplication. And as deduplication has evolved from simply “optimized storage appliances” to something more, many of the challenges listed above have begun to be mitigated.

http://www.emc.com/



Deduplication Is Here

Deduplication adoption is no longer an “if,” but a “when.” The overwhelming explosion of data and the pressure to meet backup windows and restore targets all but guarantee that IT operations of any size will need to implement it in some form in the coming months or years. As Figure 1 shows, more than 76% of ESG survey respondents expressed either active usage or intent to utilize deduplication as part of their data protection strategies.1

Figure 1. Is Your Organization Currently Using Any Data Deduplication Solutions?

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2012.

The good news is that across the industry, deduplication is improving and becoming a feature in more solutions. Over time, it will become a commodity feature, differentiated by effectiveness, integration, management, and, of course, cost.

Unfortunately, that also brings confusion; purchasers must sort out the options available to them, navigating the sales-hype of some vendors.

“Smarter” Backups

Early implementations of deduplication were entirely post-process and ran within the storage hardware component that ultimately stored backup data without any awareness on the part of the backup application or methodology. This type of deduplication reduced the amount of data stored, but did not save time or reduce network bandwidth. In this case, the backup server treats the deduplicated storage like any other kind of storage, sending all of the backed up data to it, even if most of it might be redundant and discarded by the appliance.

Deduplicated storage on its own was good, but as initial offerings evolved, new better alternatives became available whereby the backup server became aware of what already exists on the deduplicated storage. It only sends the storage device the bits or blocks it knows aren’t already stored.

While deduplication-savvy backup software solutions are better, deduplication is best when the awareness and intelligence are contained within the production server where the data originates. In this model, the backup software simply manages and catalogs the elements of data protection, sending only new data and changes.

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2012 Data Protection Trends, to be published July 2012.

Yes, 37%

No, but we plan to within 12 months,

23%

No, but we plan to within 24 months,

16%

No, and we have no plans to, 20%

Don't know, 4%

Is your organization currently using any data deduplication solutions? (Percent of respondents, N=323)



Of course, this type of architecture requires synergy among its elements. Most likely, building it will be more successful using a single-vendor solution within which all of the pieces already integrate.

By moving deduplication to the source server, more control can be given directly to the owners of the production workload, enabling them to choose which data protection optimizations should apply to their specific menus. IT can offer some choices about the service levels for RPOs and RTOs, and charge back as appropriate. IT can focus on ensuring the capability of recovery, along with any required enforcement of policies or legal obligation.

EMC’s Latest Innovations

Just when one might presume that data protection is “solved,” workloads evolve, end-users demand new capabilities, and IT considers new methods of delivering services. That will certainly be the case in 2012 and beyond as data growth continues unchecked. Demands to back up much more data in the same or less time will continue to hound IT professionals. In addition to those “givens,” a few other things play into consideration.

The commoditization of server virtualization will continue, especially as “private cloud” architectures become more established. This, in turn, adds complexity as new data sources are dynamically provisioned or elastically expanded. In addition, service owners such as database administrators are demanding more ownership and control of the data protection strategies and methods within their own workloads.

Announced at EMC World 2012

Among the 42 technology updates highlighted at its annual technology conference, EMC World 2012, EMC announced further improvements to two backup offerings: Avamar and Data Domain. Each of these announcements stands on its own, but taken together, they help EMC meet its stated customer objectives:

Ensure the recoverability of data

Improve efficiency, spending less time and money on backup

Increase agility and the ability to respond quickly to the changing IT environment

Specifically, the new feature releases provide faster performance, tighter integration between the product families and components, and simplified management.

Other ESG coverage of technologies announced at EMC World 2012:

Video: ESG on EMC DataBridge

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/video-on-emc-databridge-from-emc-world-2012

Video: EMC Announces DataBridge

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/introducing-emc-databridge/

Video: The Future of Backup—from EMC World 2012’s “The Cube”

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/the-future-of-backup-from-emc-world-2012

ESG White Paper: EMC DataBridge

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-16796

ESG White Paper: EMC Continues to Grow Data Domain Ecosystem

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/esg-wp-emc-data-domain.pdf

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/video-on-emc-databridge-from-emc-world-2012

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/introducing-emc-databridge/

http://www.esg-global.com/blogs/the-future-of-backup-from-emc-world-2012

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-16796

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/esg-wp-emc-data-domain.pdf



What’s New in Avamar in 2012

The Avamar 6.1 release centers on support for more business-critical applications, expanding to include virtualized environments, increased performance and scalability, and extended retention.

In continuing to broaden its application support, EMC is releasing new support for SAP and Sybase along with updates for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server (most notably support for SQL Server 2012). These new and updated applications join Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus, and IBM DB2.

In the virtualization space, Avamar now supports thin-provisioned restore, whereby virtual hard disks (VMDKs) that were consuming less space than their defined maximum will be restored in the same way. In addition, Avamar users now can selectively back up only user data within virtual machines, not the swap files or OS for vSphere/VMware. Avamar 6.1 also adds full server protection for Microsoft Hyper-V, including support for guest- and image-level backups, federated Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), and recovering VMs to alternate Hyper-V hosts.

Performance has been enhanced with multi-streaming and improved throughput with Avamar Data Stores and Data Domain systems. This can result in backups that run up to four times faster. DD Boost for Avamar has also been improved, resulting in even faster backups when Avamar technology is combined with a Data Domain system.

Lastly, extended retention capabilities have been added to Avamar, enabling sophisticated retention policies to be implemented using Avamar, or Avamar with Data Domain, solutions (see Figure 2)—all while remaining focused on helping customers manage their overall costs.

Figure 2. New EMC Avamar “Extended Retention” Capability, Including Use of Data Domain

Source: EMC World 2012.



What’s New in Data Domain in 2012

Under the umbrella of Data Domain 5.2, EMC is releasing:

A new, even larger-scale Data Domain system, the DD990

Continued enhancements to DD Boost

A new “Retention Lock” Compliance Edition

DD Extended Retention software

The new top-of-the-line model in the Data Domain family, the DD990 (see Figure 3), is intended for large, enterprise data centers, as demonstrated by its ability to back up 248TB in an eight-hour window, averaging about 31TB/hour when used with DD Boost. It supports up to 570TB of usable capacity and can consolidate up to 270 remote sites.

Figure 3. Lineup of EMC Data Domain Systems, Including New DD990 and Extended Retention Option

Source: EMC World 2012.

DD Boost, a collection of software components that optimize deduplication for various backup servers and production workload servers, has been enhanced by added application clients for Oracle RMAN and Greenplum, and a new backup server client for Quest vRanger. The Data Domain Retention Lock Compliance Edition adds secure data retention options for file and e-mail archive data to meet U.S. and international standards such as HIPAA, SOX, and ISO 15489-1. EMC states that it allows both governance and compliance within one infrastructure, using multiple classes of data and differing retention periods.

Likewise, the Data Domain Extended Retention software option offers new ways to retain data on disk-based storage for longer periods of time. Initially, EMC delivered the DD Archiver as an optimized version of the DD890 that enabled extended retention capabilities. Good news for EMC customers, those Extended Retention capabilities are now available as a software options for the DD860 and DD990—providing additional value and flexibility to a broader range of Data Domain systems. Depending on the platform, this new option enables up to 65PB for long-term retention. It also opens more opportunities in VTL environments with support for Open Systems and IBM iSeries.



What’s New in NetWorker in 2012

Shortly after EMC World, EMC announced the new version 8.0 of NetWorker, which includes:

Increased performance and scalability

Deeper integration with Data Domain systems

Enhanced management and security

Expanded application data protection

Increased Performance and Scalability

EMC has updated the underlying NetWorker architecture to increase efficiency of servers in truly large enterprise environments. To accomplish this, a new database engine has been implemented that also allows NW8 to handle more concurrent backups. Another notable enhancement is “Client Direct,” whereby file servers can transmit their backup data directly to a storage device without going through a NetWorker storage node, reducing the number of storage nodes needed in the environment.

Deeper Integration with Data Domain Systems

EMC has added DD Boost within the NetWorker 8 client. By enabling DD Boost capabilities across the NW8 client, the NW Application Module, and the NW storage nodes, deduplication is distributed, and therefore, more data can be processed concurrently. In fact, by combining the DD Boost capabilities at the client and application server with Client Direct, even more efficiency can be gained through reduced network utilization and shorter backup times.

Enhanced Management

Perhaps most easily noticed will be the refreshed UI experience for NetWorker, including new wizards (see Figure 4) to simplify full protection and administration of Microsoft applications. Multi-tenancy has also been added to allow multiple tenants to share a backup environment while maintaining isolation and separation of end-users and their data. Security functions were added to develop the security administrator’s role, and role-based authorization customizes the permissions for individual users.

Figure 4. New Management UI Within EMC NetWorker 8

Source: EMC 2012.



Expanded Application Data Protection

EMC has combined protection for all of NetWorker’s application modules for Microsoft servers into a single product option. The unified NetWorker Module for Microsoft (NMM) also adds support for SQL Server 2012, leveraging the SQL Virtual Device Interface (VDI) API, as well as Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). NMM also adds a Granular Level Recovery (GLR) feature to enable customers to quickly restore individual items from Exchange databases, SharePoint farms, and virtual machines running on Hyper-V. As an aside, EMC has partnered with Kroll OnTrack PowerControls for its SharePoint granular capabilities, whereas Exchange and Hyper-V support are delivered through the NW8 experience itself.

Putting EMC Backup and Recovery into Context

Perhaps no company understands the complexities of storing and moving data as well EMC because of its longstanding history of providing enterprise storage offerings. Aside from EMC’s primary storage capabilities, its BRS offerings provide a range of data protection technologies, often leading innovation with technologies such as deduplication.

EMC’s BRS Portfolio

EMC began a major evolution within its Backup Recovery Systems Division product lines with the acquisition of Data Domain in 2009. In the less than three years since, EMC has positioned the Data Domain products as cornerstones of its enterprise solutions. But that doesn’t discount the remaining products in the line, including NetWorker, Avamar, disk libraries and virtual tape libraries (VTLs), Data Protection Advisor, and various add-ons mostly presented under the Data Domain label, such as Data Domain Extended Retention and Data Domain Boost. We will examine some of these and the integration between them in more detail.

EMC positions NetWorker2 as an integrated backup and recovery solution that “delivers centralized backup and recovery operations … across diverse computing and storage environments.” It promotes its single graphical user interface (GUI) and its ability to backup diverse sources to diverse backup media. However, NetWorker does not offer its own data deduplication; instead, NetWorker integrates with either Avamar or Data Domain for that. NetWorker is a software offering.

Data Domain brings backup storage hardware solutions and accompanying software and management solutions. It includes solutions of various sizes and capacities, and usually provides the “storage back end” to Avamar, NetWorker, or other backup software. Data Domain’s strengths are its ability to process large amount amounts of data very quickly with advanced deduplication, and optional components such as encryption and archive management.

Avamar is a deduplication backup system, including software and hardware, in which the software provides deduplication at the client source, then backs up the unique data to the purpose-built backup appliance hardware. EMC introduced major improvements with Avamar 6.0, released in mid-2011. On its own, Avamar can offer significant reduction in data stored and, perhaps more importantly, in data sent across LAN and WAN links for centralized storage solutions. Avamar 6.0 also integrates directly with Data Domain Systems through DD Boost.

The EMC production family has a long and rich legacy, but also a history of consistent improvement and innovation. New releases have been fairly frequent, and EMC has described its vision for the product line on several occasions.

2 http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/data-sheet/h2257-networker-ds.pdf

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/data-sheet/h2257-networker-ds.pdf



EMC’s BRS Vision

EMC has consistently demonstrated a commitment to cyclical evolution, sometimes in broad innovation and sometimes by incremental improvement. It has also not shied away from sharing its vision with customers.

Throughout 2011 and into 2012, EMC has emphasized its priority to tackle the problem of immense data growth. EMC sees three methods in play to address the growing amounts of data and shrinking backup windows, discussed earlier (in addition to backing up more data, many industries are under pressure to reduce downtime for “scheduled maintenance” and be available to customers 24/7). EMC’s three strategies are:

Reduce the amount of data to be stored as part of a backup.

Reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred, and improve the efficiency of the remaining transfers.

Improve process, consolidating where possible, to reduce the amount of infrastructure, management, and staff time required to meet data protection goals.

Each improvement to each of the key products has worked toward meeting one or more of these goals.

We have seen data-reduction features take root in multiple products, notably within EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain, as well as options for deduplication at multiple places along the data backup path, allowing, for example, deduplication to occur before data is replicated or even before it is transmitted over the network.

EMC has also been working to fill any remaining gaps in its product line, showing a vision of a fully integrated suite of solutions that can serve all sizes of business and handle vast amounts of data quickly.

Looking Back at Recent EMC BRS Enhancements

To better appreciate EMC’s continued product momentum (alongside its market share), ESG looked back over the last 18 months (2011 and early 2012) to reflect on EMC’s most recent extensions and improvements.

NetWorker in 2011

NetWorker 7.6 Service Pack 2 introduced support for the VMware API for Data Protection (VADP), to enable image-level VM backups along with granular file-level recovery from within those protected VMs. By supporting VADP, NetWorker was also able to offer CBT support of for ESXi environments. For Microsoft environments, NW 7.6 introduced new capabilities for managing whole-server recovery for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, as well as support for 2012, SharePoint 2010, and SQL 2008 R2. In addition, EMC also added DD Boost support for the NetWorker Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL application modules (which have been unified in NW8).

Avamar in 2011

The introduction of Avamar 6.0 allowed EMC customers to leverage Data Domain systems to handle large, high-change workloads for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint environments, as well as Oracle and VMware images. Avamar works intelligently with Data Domain to combine the advantages of both platforms for protecting VMware environments, NAS servers, and remote office environments where backups can be consolidated centrally, transmitting only deduplicated data across the WAN.

Other Avamar improvements over the last year or two include introducing what EMC boasts as the industry’s fastest vSphere backups and restores using Changed Block Tracking (CBT) through the VMware vStorage 5 APIs, and an increase in scalability allowing an Avamar system to support up to 124TB on its own or up to 285TB per Data Domain storage unit when Avamar is combined with the DD890 hardware.



Data Domain in 2011

The entire Data Domain platform received a “refresh” in 2011. This refresh coincided with the release of the DD890 and Dual DD890 configurations to ensure that the Data Domain storage systems are never the bottleneck in overall backup flow. The backbone of Data Domain is the Stream-Informed Segment Layout (SISL) architecture, which allows the Data Domain platform to scale linearly. In 2011, EMC announced that the DD860 could handle 9.8TB per hour and the DD890 up to 14.7TB per hour as standalone devices, and up to 26.3TB per hour with DD890s deployed in an array. These arrays could manage a virtual 28.5PB of data.

2011 also saw the introduction of VTL capabilities to the Data Domain product whereby Data Domain systems appear as tape drives, enabling an even broader variety of backup software to take advantage of their deduplication capabilities—including direct support for storing backups from IBM iSeries systems. EMC also introduced the DD Archiver system to provide longer retention periods and “sealed” data without the need to go to tape-based storage.

In short, 2011 was a big year across the EMC BRS portfolio—and 2012 is even bigger.



The Bigger Truth

EMC continues to build and improve on its past successes, and as it makes each step toward a final vision, the company refines and publicly states the next vision phase. While EMC’s vision may never be completely “realized,” it continues to innovate to meet the ever-changing IT demands of its current and prospective customers.

It is estimated that the world produces as much new data in two days as it did from the beginning of time until 2003—a trend that can likely only continue to exceed the capabilities of legacy approaches to data protection.

Virtualization was the most recent workload to add complexity to data protection strategies, but that is mostly mitigated by the maturing (and normalization) of hypervisors through technologies such as VMware VADP or Microsoft VSS.

With those addressed, “private cloud” changes the rules again by enabling—and, in fact, encouraging—new multi-tier applications and services across multiple virtual machines to be dynamically created; and thereby forcing tomorrow’s data protection solutions to discover and protect those new services.

As large data sets including BI analytics, “big data,” and large traditional databases continue to grow not only in size but in criticality to their businesses, the complexity of protecting them grows as well—with the added nuance that application owners are demanding greater control of the processes used in protecting their data.

All of these IT scenarios are compounding the problems of primary storage growth, and are thereby driving even more challenges with the secondary and tertiary copies derived during data protection. With so much complexity in today’s reality and tomorrow’s IT future, a vision that includes “ensuring the recoverability of data, improving efficiency, spending less time and money on backup, and increasing agility and the ability to respond quickly to the changing IT environment” sounds pretty good.

The most recent product line enhancements by EMC demonstrate its focus in addressing customers’ data-protection needs, and they offer evidence that the world of backup continues to require evolutionary thinking, aspirational vision, and innovative technology.

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