to sap’s life beyond stuffy erp >>...

Next >>

SAP’s life beyond stuffy ERP >>

One year later: Java under Oracle >>

What’s in Google’s new Android >>

Virtual machines need backup >>

CIO profile: Healthways’ Blanchette >>

Table of contents >>

FEB. 7, 2011

PLUS

Doing more with fewer systems is the only way to manage

ever-expanding data volumes >>

By Kurt Marko

informationweek.com

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Consolidation

State Of Storage

CONTENTSTHE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY Feb. 4, 2011 Issue 1,290

This all-digital issue of InformationWeek is part of our 10-year strategy to reduce the publication’s carbon footprint

COVER STORY10 Bold FusionYou can deliver a storage network that’sgreater than the sum of its parts—in fact, you’d better, given how fast data is growing

QUICKTAKES6 Java Under Oracle IBM and Apple are on board,but unity has a price

8 Amazon To Offer 11gEC2 users will get the optionto use Oracle database

BI On The GoMicroStrategy lets BI usersmodify data on mobile devices

9 Microsoft-SAP, Act IITheir first Duet flopped; thisone looks more promising

2 Research And ConnectReports, events, video, and more

3 Global CIO2011 could be SAP’s breakthrough year as it moves beyondstaid ERP into growth areas such as analytics

4 Full NelsonIs anyone else tired of hearing about gee-whiz tablet technol-ogy that’s not available, like Google’s upcoming Android OS?

5 CIO ProfilesConfidence is what counts when it comes to measuring ITeffectiveness, says Healthways’ CIO

CONTACTS22 Editorial Contacts 23 Business Contacts

IN DEPTH18 Virtual Machine BackupsNo backup strategy is complete without a planto protect VMs

6

Feb. 7, 2011 1informationweek.com

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5

Resources to Research, Connect, CommentLinks

First Look: RIM’s PlayBook Tablet RIM has been quite secretive aboutits tablet computer, but Fritz Nelsongot a look at the recent CES show. informationweek.com/video/playbook

WATCH IT NOW

Pitfalls Of Branch Office Consolidation Just releasedElectronic Health Record System Guide Just releasedState Of Cloud Computing Just releasedCalculating TCO In 10 Steps Just releasedVirtualization Security Coming Feb. 11Data Protection Trends Coming Feb. 14

NEVER MISS A REPORT

Health Information Exchanges Today’s HIEs are succeeding where previ-ous ones failed. Here’s how four of themare getting doctors to share patient data. informationweek.com/analytics/exchange

Hardening Next-Gen Web Apps Interactive apps have opened oppor -tunities for bus inesses—and for attack-ers who want to make off with data.informationweek.com/analytics/hardenapps

Path To Unified Communications UC can be very useful for smaller compa-nies looking to streamline operations.informationweek.com/analytics/ucpath

Beat Cloud Lock-InWhether the issue isSaaS or storing datain the cloud, com -pa nies must con -sider how they’llunwind rela tion -ships—cus tom iza -

tions, metadata, contracts, and depth ofintegration are all factors.informationweek.com/analytics/cloudlock

State Of Enterprise StorageThe recession didn’t put a damper onthe growth of enterprise data and related storage requirements. informationweek.com/analytics/storagereport2010

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Virtual machine backups >>

SAP’s real-time approach >>

Java under Oracle >>



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In any context, SAP’s fourth quarter was amemorable one: revenue up 25%, with strongcontributions from all product lines, geogra-phies, industry verticals, and customer sizes.

That aggressive close capped off a tumul-tuous year for the world’s largest enterprisesoftware company, one that began with theouster of one CEO and the appointment oftwo new ones, who have overhauled how SAPdevelops products, engages with customers,presents itself to the world, and defines thevalue it delivers to more than 100,000 cus-tomers worldwide.

It has been one year since the ouster of LéoApotheker and the appointment of co-CEOsBill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.Here are five reasons SAP is ready for a break-through year in 2011:

1. Balanced growth. McDermott, in aphone conversation, noted that 25% of SAP’sfourth-quarter revenue came from dealsgreater than $6.8 million. “Our largest dealwas in Brazil, we had lots of big transactionsin Asia-Pacific, Europe rebounded strongly inthe quarter, and the U.S. continues to be

strong, notably with a lot of buy-in for inno-vation,” he said.

2. On-demand software is starting to con-tribute. SAP’s goal is to have 1,000 BusinessByDesign customers in 2011, McDermott says.“Some are doing on-demand CRM as a starterkit, others want to run their entire business onByDesign, and others want to run it as a com-ponent for special on-demand applicationswithin the enterprise,” he says.

3. SAP’s mobile position. “Every CEO I talkto wants to connect via mobility to increasethe clock speed of their organizations and in-crease the pace and effectiveness of commu-nications, so that’s a very easy conversation forus to have about the value of what we canbring with our software on these mobile de-vices,” McDermott says. “This is the year whenenterprises are really going to get seriousabout getting unwired.”

4. HANA and real-time analytics. SAP’s so-phisticated new High-Performance AnalyticAppliance could become one of the indus-try’s most visible success stories for in-mem-ory technology, as more than 50 customers

are now “co-innovating” with SAP in usingHANA to extract insight and value from stu-pendous volumes of data. SAP says one largecustomer is now running extensive queriesagainst HANA involving 460 billion customerrecords, and delivering answers in less than aminute.

5. Power of real-time business. Says McDer-mott: “When you can truly work in real timewith the types of analytical tools we can de-liver, then you can democratize informationand make sure that everyone in the organiza-tion can get the information they need whenthey need it. And then you can have everyonefocused on moving the productivity needleand exceeding customer expectations andgetting things done and adding value, insteadof trying to figure out where to find the infor-mation that will help them decide what theyshould be doing.”

Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek’sGlobal CIO unit. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out informationweek.com/global-cio, or write to Bob at [email protected].

SAP: From Stuffy ERP To Real-Time Analytics

IN THIS ISSUE

State of storage >>




BOB EVANS

globalCIOPrevious Next


More of Google’s Android 3.0—aka Honey-comb—the mobile operating system opti-mized for tablet devices, has crawled out intothe light of day: more developer tools, morecontext around its new features, more nativeapplications, and more information aboutGoogle’s Android Market. But the recent ex-citement was largely manufactured.

Carefully orchestrated announcements areancient practice. After all, wasn’t Steve Jobs’famous “one more thing” originally uttered byCicero during the reign of Julius Caesar? Butyou’d have to go to Punxsutawney, PA, to findan event as meaninglessly ceremonial asGoogle’s Honeycomb “rollout” last week.

Honeycomb does have some interesting newfeatures, which suggest some of the waystablets might be put to use. It has a holo-graphic, 3-D user experience that makes mewant to consume so much content that I lickmy tablet like a dog lapping up a bowl’s re-maining morsels.

Google showed Google Body, which takesadvantage of the enhanced 3-D performanceto provide what it calls the Google Maps of

the human anatomy. It’s an apt description,and a fantastic example of what developerscan do, like providing detailed views of howsomething works, or isolating a problem onany system (human or not).

There are new menu items on the screen’ssystem bar along the bottom to provide all ofthe tablet interaction, and its multitaskingbutton is a superbly intuitive way to get aquick glance at running apps and a view ofthe state you left them in. The browser istabbed, provides auto-fill on forms, offers pri-vate browsing, and syncs with GoogleChrome bookmarks. It includes Google Maps5 (3-D interaction, vector graphics so you canload an entire route) and Google Talk (forvideo chats).

Application partners, including CNN and Dis-ney, took the stage to showcase some of theinstrumentation. The apps will fit snugly intothe new Android Market, including a Web-based version of the market called MarketWebstore. The cool part is that it then gets au-tomatically pushed to your Android device.

It all looks, in a word, better. Better than Ap-

ple’s iOS. Better than QNX on RIM’s PlayBook.But that’s a shallow judgment based on stageddemonstrations. Talk to me when it’s done,when it’s shipped, deployed, and abused.

What We Really Want To KnowJust give us the tablet already. Honeycomb

isn’t ready, and we don’t know when it will be.So far, only the preview SDK is available for de-velopers—not the real thing. The operating sys-tem isn’t even being given to OEMs.

Google was very clear on this: Honeycomb isoptimized for tablets. Regular Android apps willrun on tablets, but Honeycomb apps aren’t in-tended for regular Android devices, like phones.

Void of any firm shipment dates, why theshow from Google? Because Apple is about totoss out its next lovely tablet, and HP-Palm willsoon announce tablets, and RIM is starting toshow apps for its tablets. Google’s interim planis to leave little bread crumbs, watch us gob-ble them up, and hope for the best.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for InformationWeek.Write to Fritz at [email protected].

Google Shows More Honeycomb, But Not Enough FRITZ NELSON

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C. SCOTT BLANCHETTEVP and CIO, Healthways

Colleges/degrees: BA, MS,and MBA from James Madison,North Texas, and Maryland, respectively

Business leader I’d like tohave lunch with: Mark Cuban(Broadcast.com, HDNet, andDallas Mavericks).

If I weren’t a CIO, I’d be ...I spent the first third of myworking life in the military. Be-yond being a CIO, my passionfor the middle third, I still fullyintend to spend the back thirdof my working life teaching,writing, and coaching.

CAREER TRACKHow long at current company:Five years at this health-servicessoftware company

Most important career influ-encer: Dr. Adrian Lewis, professor ofmilitary history at the University ofKansas and graduate program di-rector at the Army Command andGeneral Staff College at Fort Leav-enworth, Kan. He provided a life-time of advice on how to take one’sskills and passions and direct thosetoward some meaningful good.

ON THE JOBSize of IT team: 750

How I measure IT effectiveness:Confidence is the only metric thatis of consequence. I’d gauge confi-dence across three domains:

>> Board, senior management,and peer confidence that you’re

an astute and trusted businesspartner who understands andsupports the mission, vision, andgoals of the company.

>> Customer confidence in yourstrategy and ability to execute.

>> IT organizational confidencethat your leadership and commit-ment will provide a directionalbeacon in good times and bad.

VISIONNext big thing for my industry:Healthcare reform will changemany aspects of healthcare. Risks, fi-nancial burdens, accountability, andbusiness models will be in flux for afew years. I also look forward to ad-vancements on the Web, in the 2.0or social space, and in mobile com-puting impacting healthcare. Wemay be developing a generation ofAmericans who will see technologyas a cornerstone to their well-being,

the way past generations vieweddoctors, nurses, and hospitals.

Advice for future CIOs: Lead,don’t manage. In the early days ofthe job it will be necessary to useyour management acumen. Overtime, those instincts must be dis-placed by a higher calling toorganiza tional leadership, andman age ment must be left tothose whom you trust.

The government’s top tech priority should be ... The federalgovernment has the richest com-puting capabilities on the planet.Pointing that portfolio toward one,two, or three specific opportunitieswould do great good for our na-tion. It would be a powerful state-ment to say, “in the next four years,we will ensure taxpayers receivethe maximum potential value ofthe money already invested in ourtechnology portfolio.”

Ranked No. 8 in the 2010

CIOprofilesIN THIS ISSUE

State of storage >>





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A year after buying Sun, Oracle must sustainthe long-term development and independ-ence of Java, as its next-generation Fusionapps will be written in Java. That said, Oraclealso is capable of foreshortening Java’s futurein ways that even it may not understand.

Oracle supports open source procedures andgoals as long as they’re aligned with its own in-terests. It has done many things right with Java,having inherited a divided and stalematedJava Community Process. Some Java advocatesthought the language had become unwieldy.And there was a long-festering dispute withthe Apache Software Foundation over its Harmony implementation of the Java spec andwhether it could be certified as 100% Java.

Sun didn’t want that. Allowing Apache’s workto be certified would have generated a newround of Java competitors that Sun wouldhave no way of licensing or controlling. Underthe Apache license, their work would neverthe-less still bear Java’s seal of approval.

Oracle sided with Apache before buying Sun,

knowing that a second, independent Javaguaranteed Sun’s good behavior. IBM took asimilar position. But once Oracle gained own-ership of Java, it reversed course and coaxedIBM to do the same. The two are now co-guardians of the one true Java, embodied inthe OpenJDK, firmly under Oracle’s control.

That might seem like a logical outcome, butit was by no means assured. For IBM, there had

been constant tension with Sun over a tech-nology both companies relied on. But if Sunhad been a difficult Java partner, Oracle was anunpredictable 800-pound gorilla with whom afight might break out at any time.

IBM, as a licensed Java user, knew that atsome point it would have to negotiate a li-cense renewal with Oracle. If IBM crowded Or-

acle too hard in a favorite market—say, in Javamiddleware, where the two companies com-pete head to head—Oracle could refuse to re-new. With no license, IBM’s products could belabeled “unproven” or even “incompatible.”

After the years of tension with Sun, IBM prob-ably welcomed the chance to secure a sem-blance of long-term certainty with its Java li-cense, as well as a leadership role in managingthe community process. And Oracle got some-thing it wanted badly: IBM abandoned the Har-mony project and encouraged other contribu-tors to do likewise.

Equally surprising, Oracle CEO Larry Ellisonelicited a pledge of support from his friendSteve Jobs, after Jobs had dissed Java in Octo-ber. With both IBM and Apple firmly behind Or-acle, no fork in Java occurred. Instead, there wasa major realignment of forces.

Balance Of PowerOracle needed Apple’s and IBM’s support for

Java. It already had one powerful critic and


JAVA UNDER ORACLE

IBM And Apple Stand Behind Java, But Unity Has A Price

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Quicktakes

Oracle is capable of foreshortening

Java’s future in ways that even

Oracle may not understand.

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competitor within the Java Community Pro -cess: Google, which Oracle is suing for its use ofa Java virtual machine variation in its Androidmobile operating system. Just think how uncer-tain a vote might be if Google, IBM, and Ap-ple—as well as Apache developers—werealigned against Oracle’s leadership of Java.

With considerable political skill, Oracle hasneutralized that threat and has a powerful al-liance behind OpenJDK. It needed Apache, butit needed IBM and Apple even more. TheOpenJDK alliance strengthens Oracle’s hand inthe Google lawsuit and helps with two otherlawsuits that challenge Android users on theirJava VM implementations—Apple’s suitagainst Nexus One manufacturer HTC and Mi-crosoft’s suit against Motorola. What these law-suits have in common is a desire to halt thespread of Android in favor of each plaintiff’sown mobile operating system.

It’s possible these suits will stifle Android de-velopment, but I doubt it. The Harmony Projectestablished clear lines of origin for its Dalvik vir-tual machine. In addition, Google claims it didits own clean-room implementation of the JVM;its virtual machine doesn’t run Java bytecode.Nonetheless, Oracle’s hand against Google isprobably strengthened by the fact that it has

pulled IBM, with its JVM expertise, away fromHarmony. This shift leaves Oracle in a better po-sition to negotiate a settlement with Google.

If Oracle can prevail either in negotiations orin court, the die will be cast for it to monetizeJava in the rapidly expanding mobile market.Harmony was a direct threat to that effort, anda vote in the JCP in support of Apache was achallenge to both Oracle’s leadership and Javamonetization. A favorable outcome with theGoogle suit would mean Android imple-menters will owe Oracle a royalty for eachhandset shipped.

Aren’t these sorts of issues to be expected ina competitive market? How could they possi-bly hurt Java?

It seems unthinkable that skilled open sourcedevelopers would join in the Java develop-ment process, or even use Java, while it’sspurning Apache talent—not to mention thepatent claims flying around the use of suppos-edly open source Java. Java was intended to bean open-ended opportunity, headed for inter-national standardization and worldwide usefor everyone to invent new products. Now Oracle is sending a clear signal that it controlsJava’s future in the enterprise and, if it can, willcontrol it in the mobile market. It has IBM as its

co-governor and regulator, making for a moreunified Java. But unity has come at a price.

The toll here is in the loss of new developerswho might otherwise be attracted to Java. In re-cent years, legions of open source developershave turned instead to PHP, Python, and Ruby,the clear open source alternatives. More enter-prise developers have been adopting Microsoft’sC#, where the degree of proprietary control isclear. Java falling behind in its continuing com-petition with Microsoft C# would be a bitter pillfor Java advocates to swallow.

IBM may yet regret turning away from theopen source guarantees it once sought to pro-vide through Harmony. If Java loses ground toa resurgent Microsoft and its Azure cloud en-vironment, IBM, like Google, may chafe at Ora-cle’s vision of how open source serves itsowner. —Charles Babcock ([email protected])


QuicktakesIN THIS ISSUE

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Ellison: Javais mine! [

Amazon Web Services plans to add an Oracle 11g option to its Elastic Cloud Com-pute Relational Database Service next quar-ter, in addition to its open source MySQL offering.

EC2 users are outgrowing MySQL, which canhandle large quantities of read-only data and,when combined with the InnoDB or anotherstorage engine, can store and retrieve largeamounts of data. But many business manage-ment features, including using a SQL event totrigger a stored business procedure, require alarger commercial system.

By turning to a cloud-based database sys-tem, a midsize company or any business witha small IT staff effectively outsources infra-structure functions, such as scaling and back-ing up the database, to the cloud provider.

Existing Oracle customers will be able to runan Oracle 11g instance in Amazon’s EC2 cloudwith no additional charge for licensing or tech-

nical support. Potential 11g users that aren’tOracle customers will be able to pay for theon-demand version on an hourly basis.Charges are based on the size of the server in-stance and the edition of 11g used (it comesin Express, Standard, and Enterprise editions),as well as number of hours run.

A third option will be to adopt a reserved in-stance, where the customer makes an up-frontpayment to Amazon for the right to use adatabase instance for a certain number of

hours a month at a reduced hourly rate. Data-base instances may be reserved for one orthree years. Amazon hasn’t provided pricingfor this option.

Amazon already offered Oracle 11g in itsEC2 catalog of applications and databases,but it’s making provisioning and activationmore automated through the Relational Data-base Service console that an RDS customergets to manage its database instance.

—Charles Babcock ([email protected])

MicroStrategy has new transaction servicesthat let business intelligence users approveand modify data from a mobile device or theWeb. Administrators can map transactionprocesses and data to MicroStrategy’s businessmetadata. A supply chain manager, for in-stance, can view inventory on an iPad and clicka reorder button that writes back to the trans-action system.

MicroStrategy also demonstrated Visual Ex-plorer for data visualization, and though it may

not be on par with other advanced visualiza-tion products, I was surprised at how little at-tention it received. Its positioning was weak—described as an interface between ad hocqueries and OLAP. This makes me think Micro -Strategy doesn’t quite get the impact of visualdiscovery tools.

MicroStrategy is also adding new computingoptions to its BI portfolio, using its own datacenter and Amazon.com’s cloud.

—Cindi Howson ([email protected])


CLOUD DATABASES

Amazon To ExtendEC2 With 11g Option

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

MicroStrategy Revs Mobile, Visualization Tools


State of storage >>





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The first version of Duet, unfortunately, wasmore like a rehearsal—a very public practicerun at letting people access SAP from Microsoftsoftware. More than five years later, Duet Enter-prise finally looks like the polished perform-ance companies needed. The original Duet, introduced in 2005, was

meant to let SAP customers expose enterpriseapplications such as financials and HR throughfamiliar Microsoft front-end interfaces, such asOutlook. But making it work took too muchcustomization of the behind-the-scenes archi-tecture, according to Matt Towers, SAP practicedirector at Avanade, which specializes in Mi-crosoft work.“That tended to derail a lot of clients because

everybody’s enterprise architecture is different,”Towers said at a recent event launching DuetEnterprise. This time, Duet Enterprise provides areference architecture.Where Duet relied on Microsoft Exchange as

a messaging server, Duet Enterprise also usesSAP Gateway standards-based interfaces toprovide a deeper level of integration with

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010applications. That lets Duet Enterprise exposemore SAP functionality while requiring lessdevelopment work. For example, SharePoint“MySite” employee profiles can pull data suchas titles, responsibilities, and reporting struc-ture from SAP HR applications. Other key ca-pabilities include system management, singlesign-on, user authorization and identity man-agement, information life-cycle management,and data model mapping. Beta customer Sandvik Tooling is using Duet

Enterprise to expose SAP-based invoice ap-proval workflows through SharePoint. The ad-vantage, said Nevzat Ertan, Sandvik’s chieftechnology officer, is that finance departmentemployees who aren’t trained on SAP cannow handle problem invoices. They can ac-cess the invoices through a SharePoint dash-board without having to go directly into SAP,Ertan said. Sandvik’s implementation took sixweeks, he noted. SAP and Microsoft say they’ll provide tem-

plates and process components—such as

customizable workflows, interfaces, reports,and dashboards—to help independent soft-ware developers build custom applicationsmore quickly. Those apps could be tailored tospecific industries, and to financial, HR, supplychain, and other common processes. The twocompanies will run a program, called UnitePartner Connection, to coordinate supportfor the tens of thousands of Microsoft andSAP channel partners.SAP has 109,000 companies as customers.

Most of them have standardized on MicrosoftOffice for desktop productivity, and many useMicrosoft’s SharePoint collaboration plat-form, which has more than 100 million li-censed users. The vendors see a huge de-mand for an easy way to integrate the twoenvironments.Duet Enterprise is available now, though

SAP and Microsoft won’t disclose the price.The companies will support the original Duetfor users of Microsoft Office 2003 and Office2007, but they won’t enhance it.

—Doug Henschen ([email protected])


INTEGRATION

Microsoft And SAP Try Again To Get Duet Right


State of storage >>





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109,000 SAP customers

QUICKFACT

You can deliver a storage network that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Here’s how.

andling double-digit data growthrates with single-digit budget in-creases is the lot of most CIOs, accord-

ing to our third annual InformationWeek Analytics State ofEnterprise Storage Survey. The amount of data we’re ac-tively managing continues to expand at around 20% peryear, and we see a long tail of besieged IT staffs dealing withgrowth rates exceeding 50%. At these levels, most data cen-ters will double storage capacity every two to three years.While nearly every company’s data is growing, their IT budg-

By Kurt Marko

[COVER STORY]

H

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Feb. 7, 2011 11

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ets aren’t always: 55% expect their IT spendingto rise this year, 18% are cutting, and 26% ex-pect it to be flat, our InformationWeek AnalyticsOutlook 2011 Survey finds.

What’s standing between us and the vortexof doom? In a word, consolidation. We’re talk-ing the continued evolution of high-densitymagnetic media. Bigger, faster, and less ex-pensive solid-state drives. Virtualization toease management of aggregated storagepools that use available capacity more effi-ciently. Optimization technologies like datareduction, thin provisioning, and automatictiering. Moving to a consolidated data/stor-age network won’t hurt, either.

Say What?It seems paradoxical to say consolidation is

the key to taming storage, an ever- expandingresource. But there’s a clear trend toward pack-ing more data onto fewer systems and stream-ing more information over unified networks,as well as merged vendors consolidating moreproducts under one corporate umbrella.

Consider hardware. New 200-GB and 400-GBSSDs are on the horizon. They’re not inexpen-sive, but for the right use case, they can makesense. Nearly a quarter of our survey respon-dents have deployed SSDs, an increase of 37%

in the past year, with more than half planningto increase or initiate SSD use this year. Mean-while, capabilities that were once features re-quiring special-purpose hardware appliancesare being integrated within array controllers.Data center consolidation, which started withservers, has spread to storage, as IT architectsleverage larger arrays, faster networks, andmore sophisticated management software toapply economies of scale to storage provi-

sioning. Storage virtualization is a growtharea, according to our survey.

In 2010, we also saw a wave of industry con-solidation, with large storage vendors contin-uing a trend established in other IT marketsof ceding innovation, R&D, and product proto -typing to nimble startups, then gobbling upthose that demonstrate superior technologyand customer acceptance. In fact, many of theblockbuster tech acquisitions in the past year

[COVER STORY]STATE OF STORAGEPrevious Next

5%

Data: InformationWeek Analytics State of Enterprise Storage Survey of 377 business technology professionals in November 2010 and 331 in November 2009

5%

31%26%

12%14%

29%32%

15%18%

8%5%

2010 2009

Yes, all of our disk storage is in a single virtual pool of storage

Yes, some of our storage systems are in a virtual pool

No, but we’re planning to implement it in the next 12 months

No, but we’re looking into it

No, we’re not interested

Don’t know

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were driven by holes in buyers’ storage portfo-lios. No deal topped the intrigue of Hewlett-Packard’s successful bidding war with Dell over3Par, and the year wrapped up with EMC acquir-ing scale-out network-attached storage leaderIsilon and Dell grabbing storage area networkspecialist Compellent.

But don’t worry that innovation will stall. Whilethe big are getting bigger, the overall storagemarket continues to expand, leaving more thanenough space for another round of advances.

One worrisome area is security. Consolidatemore data onto one system and fail to protect it,and you’ll see the dark side of doing more withless. “Stored data is one of the most vulnerableparts of an organization,” says Doug Davis, IS co-ordinator for Monical’s Pizza, a Midwest restau-rant chain with about 65 corporate and fran-chise locations. “Data at rest being captured insmall bytes is one of the hardest things to con-trol. As the head of IT, it is my job to be sure no-body is removing needles from any of thehaystacks in my whole field.”

Out With The Old ...IT prognosticators have been predicting the de-

cline of Fibre Channel for years, and given the costand complexity of deploying FC SANs, it’s a dreamundoubtedly shared by many CIOs. Now, finally,


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the maturation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Ethernet-based storage protocols like iSCSI and Fibre Channelover Ethernet means these systems have the raw per-formance of even the latest-generation 8-Gb FC. Andwith improvements in iSCSI software stacks, new Eth-ernet-FCoE switching systems like HP’s Virtual Con-nect, and multiprotocol LAN/SAN switches like Cisco’sNexus 5000, migrating to a converged LAN and SANarchitecture is easier than ever. Our survey indicateswe’re in the early days of this changeover, but we ex-pect momentum to build.

While FC remains the dominant SAN access tech-nology for iSCSI, improved storage gear interoperabil-ity and years of iSCSI standards development andvendor wrangling to perfect the technology are pay-ing off. Our survey shows a small but noticeable in-crease in usage, with nearly two-thirds of enterprisesemploying iSCSI for some applications and 16% usingit for more than half their storage needs.

This is significant because iSCSI is a pillar of the con-verged data center. As the number of virtual serversin use increases, with their reliance on shared storagefor server images and application data, convergingthe SAN and LAN promises to lower costs, increasescalability and flexibility, and make network manage-ment easier. You’re basically designing and operatinga single network instead of two networks.

Lisa Moorehead, network manager for the Massa-chusetts Department of Public Utilities, says tighten-


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ing budgets are forcing many governmententities toward IT centralization and consoli-dation. “Systems such as e-mail, HR/personnel,and many databases have been consolidated,and that storage is largely centralized on anFCoE or iSCSI SAN,” she says.

Virtualization V2Server virtualization has been a driving force

behind many recent data center upgrades,whether for new equipment, a redesigned sys-tem architecture, or new applications. And thismigration of IT infrastructure provisioningfrom the physical world to the logical, virtualdomain is affecting networks and storage.

Parceling out disk space is a big headache formost virtual server administrators. The simplestapproach carves shared storage pools intofixed chunks, much like partitioning a PC harddrive. These logical volumes are reserved forsingle virtual machines, regardless of whetherthe space is used. Since the volume size must

accommodate an application’s maximum ex-pected data consumption, VM administratorstend to “supersize,” planning for the worst.

Thin provisioning takes a “just-in-time” ap-proach to this static allocation of storage.Much as just-in-time logistics lets Wal-Mart


2010 2009

40%

Data: InformationWeek Analytics State of Enterprise Storage Survey of 377 business technology professionals in November 2010 and 331 in November 2009

44%

40%47%

35%34%

30%26%

27%30%

25%30%

What Are Your Top Storage Concerns?

Data loss and data security

Insufficient storage resources for mission-critical applications

Insufficient budget to meet business demands

Lack of sufficient disaster recovery planning and preparedness

Insufficient tools for storage management

Insufficient storage resources for departmental and individual use

Feb. 7, 2011 15

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keep warehouse inventory to a minimum,thin provisioning lets storage systems dynam-ically allocate capacity in response to de-mand. Instead of setting a fixed size for eachvirtualized application, thin provisioning setsa range of storage capacity, tricking the VMinto thinking it has the maximum allocationwhile the storage system metes out onlywhat’s actually being used.

In a virtualized environment, thin provision-ing can dramatically increase storage utiliza-tion—a benefit not lost on our survey respon-dents. As virtualized servers become thedefault for enterprise applications, we expectthis feature to become common in new stor-age systems and for adoption to becomenearly ubiquitous.

Larger storage pools also have promptedadoption of virtualization technologies to sim-plify data management and access. Two virtu-alization varieties our survey tracks are storage(or block) virtualization and file virtualization.

Both techniques introduce an abstractionlayer to isolate applications—either databasesystems or network file shares. The former vir-tualizes multiple physical disks to create a sin-gle, logical disk, and resembles an evolution-ary extension of RAID software. But unlikeRAID, many block virtualization schemes can

dynamically allocate capacity, growing andshrinking volume size in response to chang-ing needs, and they can also span multiplestorage systems to create extremely large vol-umes. Like thin provisioning, block virtualiza-tion can greatly improve the capacity utiliza-

tion of large storage pools by letting admin-istrators granularly tailor logical volume sizesto application needs, while offering the flexi-bility to add more capacity without disruptingthe application.

“E-mail PST files will kill your network,” says


We asked our poll respondentsabout their use of various ven-dors in four areas. For Tier 1 and

Tier 2 primary storage, deduplication, andbackup and archiving, we trended their re-sponses over 12 months. We also asked re-spondents for the first time to rate 15 stor-age virtualization vendors. Full results areavailable in our 2011 State of Storage report.

For primary storage, Hewlett-Packard cameout on top in our latest poll, followed by EMC,Dell-EqualLogic, IBM, and NetApp, whichposted the biggest gains among the industryleaders, up 9 percentage points from lastyear’s survey. Copan and Sepaton also ad-vanced; both are up 10 points year over year,from 4% to 14%. IBM and Sun each slid 3

points, to 47% and 30% among respondents.The deduplication field is dominated by

EMC-Avamar-DataDomain, which was se-lected by 59% of respondents, up from 50%last year. Runners up Net App, HP, IBM-Dili-gent, and Microsoft lost ground, while fifth-place Symantec-NetBackup gained 8 points.

EMC is also the backup and archivingleader, at 60%, down slightly from 62% lastyear. HP, IBM, NetApp, and Dell-EqualLogicround out the top five. HP and IBM weredown 7 points and 10 points, while Net Appand Dell posted modest gains.

The storage virtualization field is a bit tighter.Of the 15 vendors readers rated, EMC, IBM, HP,Net App, and Dell-EqualLogic are respondents’top five. —Lorna Garey ([email protected])

Storage Movers And ShakersVENDOR RESULTS

Feb. 7, 2011 16

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Massachusetts’ Moorehead. “PST files havecaused network server crashes and connec-tion outages. Virtualized servers have en-abled us to reconnect staff more quickly andget the systems back online. Being able to‘move’ data around to the various locationsites among our domains allows for betterdata management, tighter disaster recoveryrestoration timelines, and faster system up-grades and rebuilds.”

File virtualization introduces a logical layerbetween a file name and its network share lo-cation. Consider file virtualization the DNS ofnetwork file shares—just as Web surfers don’tneed to know the IP address for a particularserver, with file virtualization, users don’t needto know the specific network path for a givenfile. They merely connect to a central sharepoint, letting the virtualization software takecare of the details.

While both virtualization approaches im-prove the efficiency, manageability, and con-venience of large storage pools, they alsowork with another performance-optimizingtechnology, automated tiering.

The trick with automated tiering is to matchstorage requirements with the correct tier. Asthe name implies, automated tiering facilitatesthis task by monitoring, at the storage con-

troller, usage patterns of individual data blocksor files and automatically placing those mostfrequently accessed on Tier 1 devices andshifting less-used data to progressively lower,and less expensive, tiers. Making this migrationtransparent to users and applications requiresvirtualization, either block or file, since the ap-plication itself will have no clue whether a par-ticular data block or file might have movedsince the last time it was accessed.

Our survey shows that these three impor-tant optimization technologies are still in theearly stages of adoption; however, virtualiza-tion is catching on, and will no doubt postbigger gains next year. Storage virtualization

is used by more than a third of our survey re-spondents’ companies, up slightly from 2009,while almost 30% use file virtualization. Fur-thermore, as respondents evaluate storageproducts, a third say they consider storage vir-tualization an important feature.

Lock It Up?Even as IT organizations place security of

stored data at the top of their priority lists, thepercentage of survey respondents who saytheir companies encrypt or plan to encrypttheir data at rest on backup tapes actually declined from last year.

IT has always struggled with fitting system


Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2011 State of Enterprise Storage Survey of 377 business technology professionals, November 2010

Not importantLimited importanceVery important

Replication

Storage-based snapshots

Disk-to-disk-to-tape backup

Data deduplication

Storage virtualization

How important are these storage technologies and features when making storage purchase decisions?What Really Matters

34% 38% 28%

39% 20%41%

12%

18%

21%

39%

41%

40%

49%

41%

39%

Feb. 7, 2011 17

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backups into a time window, and adding en-cryption typically extends the time requiredto complete the process. As the amount ofdata to be backed up grows, encryption be-comes a harder sell.

“Organizations in this situation need to focuson reducing the amount of data being backedup and increasing the speed in which thebackups are performed,” says Adam Ely, direc-tor of security for TiVo and an InformationWeekAnalytics contributor. The data reduction tech-nologies we’ve discussed can help. Ely also rec-ommends taking a risk-based approach to en-crypting backup tapes. If you can’t protecteverything, focus on high-value targets suchas source code, personally identifiable infor-mation, and card-holder data.

Another area of concern: Tight IT budgetshave kept some IT teams from adding man-aged storage capacity. If you can’t afford thehardware or additional staff to make space fordata, you can’t store the data—at least centrally.But that doesn’t mean the actual amount ofcompany data isn’t growing. Employees arelikely just buying 1-TB drives for less than $100and lashing them to their PCs, leaving much un-structured data outside IT’s control.

Perhaps in response to that challenge, wesaw a nearly 50% increase in the number of

survey respondents planning to implementcloud-based storage services over the nextyear. While IT might prefer to have all datatucked away on its own servers, where that’snot feasible, a central cloud storage locationis preferable to a thousand individual pointsof possible data loss.

Storage 2011 To-Do ListImprove efficiency: Don’t throw more spin-

dles at the problem. Look for hardware withembedded features, such as deduplication andcompression, so you’re not storing the samedata more than once. For all but the most per-formance-sensitive databases, seek productsthat can apply data reduction to Tier 1 storage.

Run the numbers: SSDs are expensive, butfor transactional applications that need highstorage throughput, they can be less expen-sive and more efficient (both in space andpower) than massively parallel disk arrays.

Consider automated tiering: Manuallymoving data between tiers is time consum-ing, requiring disciplined information life- cycle management. Embedded automationsoftware is a much better bet.

Stay out of the pool business: Create asfew storage pools as possible. New arraysshould be able to support multiple access

protocols, both NAS (CIFS and NFS) and SAN(iSCSI and FCoE), as well as different types ofstorage devices (high-performance SAS, low-cost SATA, and SSD). This convergence lets ITorganizations meet diverse application re-quirements by logically carving up capacityon one array instead of physically dedicatingspace on several boxes.

Don’t fear the cloud: Hardware vendorsare spreading FUD to keep customers lockedinto a lucrative (for them) business model.Sure, putting your company’s financial data inthe cloud is imprudent, but for archives, infre-quently accessed data, or when you needhigher capacity temporarily, cloud storage,wrapped with some nice information searchand management software, makes sense.

Accelerate consolidation: If you haven’tmade the jump to an FC SAN, think twice be-fore doing so. Although FCoE equipment in-teroperability isn’t perfect, it’s improving, andiSCSI is now a viable Ethernet SAN alternative.As you plan 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN up-grades, think about using network virtualiza-tion to carve the same large pipe into severallogical LANs and SANs.

Kurt Marko is a former IT engineer and an InformationWeekAnalytics contributor. Write to us at [email protected].


Feb. 7, 2011 18

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informationweek.com

irtual machines are in-creasingly the workhorsesof the enterprise data center, and no backup strat-egy is complete without

a plan to protect them. While VMs are, at heart, simply a collection of

disk files combined with a configuration file,there are some challenges. First, VM disk filestend to be huge. While having an exact copyof every machine on a backup medium is afantastic way to recover from a bare-metalstandpoint, you have to consider the amountof storage required. And, given the 24/7 natureof today’s data centers, we have to back upour VMs while they run and serve clients. Re-gardless of the hypervisor platform in use, this

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Become an InformationWeek Analytics subscriber and get ourfull report on virtual machinebackups. This report includes 14pages of action-oriented analysisand best practices.

What you’ll find:

> Discussion of disk file backupsfor VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V

> Best practices to create a highlyavailable virtual environment

> Insights into the uses and pitfalls of disk file snapshots

DownloadDownload

VMware offers a proxy server, called VCB

Proxy, to streamline backups of virtual

machines. The proxy server makes a

copy of the disk files of each VM on its

own local storage. Then the backup

software talks to the proxy server to

capture the files and copy them to the

appropriate backup media server.

VM 1 VM 2 VM 3 VM 4

Host server 1

VCB Proxy Backup media server

Storage network

Host server 2

Backup By Proxy

Disk files move from the SAN to the proxy server to the media server

VM 1disk files

VM 2disk files

VM 3disk files

VM 4disk files

We highlight best practices for protecting VMs if and when systems fail By Jake McTigue

Feb. 7, 2011 19

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State of storage >>




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is accomplished via the creation of a VM snap-shot. When a snapshot is made of a VM, the hy-pervisor stops writing to its existing disk fileand creates a new disk file to write changes to.If the machine is live, it also saves the contentsof running memory to a separate file. Thebackup software can copy the snapshot whileallowing the VM to continue operating.

In the normal course of a disk-level backupmanaged by a third-party product, the snap-shot will be taken immediately prior to thebackup and deleted immediately thereafter.This process requires that any backup productyou use be able to do three things: communi-cate with the hypervisor before, during, andafter the backup to request the creation anddeletion of snapshots; gain access to the rawVM disk files; and quickly and efficiently movedata from the virtual infrastructure out to astorage medium without disrupting the cur-rent workload.

While snapshots are useful, IT teams can

run into problems if they’re not careful aboutmanagement. Time and time again we’veseen administrators use snapshots as aquasi-backup instead of what they’re in-tended to be—a temporary safety net forstoring a copy of the VM disk files during theactual backup process.

Now, there are a few reasons IT might leavecopies of snapshots on the production server.For example, they can be a quick-and-dirtyoption to revert to a known-good state if aproblem arises on a VM. The problem is thatevery snapshot consumes storage space. Ifmultiple snapshots are saved, the VM risks us-ing up its alloted storage and then failing.

In some cases, where a machine has very lit-tle data change over time, it may be OK toleave a snapshot or two in place, but bewarethe consequences if this practice gets out ofcontrol. Our advice: Script your backup pack-age to delete snapshots automatically.

Choose Wisely When selecting a backup and recovery

product to protect your VMs, the most impor-tant factor to evaluate is the system’s abilityto interact with your virtualization vendor’sAPIs. All three major hypervisor vendors pro-vide APIs, but support by backup vendors is

[VM BACKUP]Previous Next

Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2010 Virtualization ManagementSurvey of 316 business technology professionals, August 2010

On average, how many VMs run on each virtualizationhost server in your production environments ?

12%

31%

24%

16%

10%7%

2 to 5

6 to 9

10 to 20

21 to 40 1More than 40

12

31%

24%

6%

0%7%

Virtual Machines, Real Apps

IN THIS ISSUE

State of storage >>




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uneven. Furthermore, variations in how the backupprocess is configured can be significant.

VMware, for example, approaches backups by creat-ing a separate server that is fully meshed with the un-derlying storage to provide access to VM disk files (seediagram on p. 18). This server is called a VMware Con-solidated Backup (VCB) Proxy. To back up a VM’s diskfiles, the backup system in question communicateswith the proxy server—not the virtualization serversor vCenter—to orchestrate snapshots and pull copiesof disk files.

The backup server asks the proxy server for the files.The proxy server executes a script that generates asnapshot of the VM, pulls the disk files to local storageon the proxy server, and deletes the snapshot. Thebackup server grabs the disk files from the proxyserver and backs them up to the designated storagemedium. Generally, this system offers the best per-formance for VM disk backups because the proxyserver has its own connection to the storage and isable to use dedicated I/O to pull disk files to localstorage. Other vendors—including Veeam, Quest,PHD Virtual, and Symantec—also offer software toback up VMware-based VMs without using VCB Proxy.

Despite what vendors say, when a snapshot of aheavily used machine is created, the machine doesbecome unresponsive for a few seconds while it com-mits the remaining I/O. For this reason, it’s best toschedule the operation during off-peak hours unless

[VM BACKUP]Previous Next Does your team have what it takes?

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you have absolutely no other choice.A second option for backing up VM disk

files is to install backup agents directly on thevirtual host servers, enabling the hosts them-selves to become the data transport mecha-nism. For Xen, Symantec NetBackup uses abackup agent that’s installed at the VM guestlevel and makes a call to the Xen APIs to cre-ate a snapshot. An alternate VM with abackup agent in the infrastructure thenmounts the snapshot and backs it up to themedia server. In this scenario, all the VMs onthe infrastructure are mounted and backedup via a single agent installed on a single VM.It’s also possible with Xen and Hyper-V to in-stall software directly on the virtualizationhost, something VMware discourages. CA,PHD Virtual, SEP, and Symantec are all capableof backing up XenServer VMs with an agent.CA, i365, Symantec, and numerous others canback up Hyper-V VMs.

Agents do have a downside. Depending onhow the backup code is designed, they can af-fect performance. For instance, they mightsaturate the host server from which thebackup is being pulled and could potentiallydisrupt I/O.

Agent licensing is also a potential issue. Un-der some configurations, each VM agent must

be licensed separately, which could get ex-pensive very quickly. Other vendors may coverthe whole operation with a single agent.

Finally, agents add another software layerthat IT has to manage and update. IT shouldkeep all these caveats in mind when choosinga vendor. Don’t be afraid to ask questions andget customer references.

Disk Files Vs. Data BackupsHowever you protect your VMs, disk file

backups don’t take the place of conventionalguest-based backup software agents that runat the VM guest operating system level. Guest-based backup agents provide advantagesover disk file backups. Guest-based backupsare selective—you have the option to takeonly the data that’s changed, or that youwant. Backing up the operating system overand over again doesn’t do you any good if allyou care about is the application data on themachine.

With all this in mind, it’s best to use a mixtureof backup types to satisfy your data protectionand recovery objectives. Back up the disk filesof VMs once per week, preferably during off-peak hours. Send these backups to a reposi-tory, such as a deduplicated storage area net-work or tape, that’s also replicated to, or can

be physically moved to, a secondary site. Westrongly recommend the use of deduplication,particularly for VM disk files, which won'tchange as frequently as application data andthus are excellent candidates for the process.Note that deduplication can happen in severalplaces. If your SAN supports deduplication, thededupe software lives at the controller leveland automatically deduplicates the data as itpasses. You can also use a dedicated dedupli-cation appliance. Finally, some backup agentscan provide source deduplication so that onlynew data gets backed up.

Back up guest operating system-level appli-cation files and data daily. Store these dailybackups on a mixture of disk, tape, or repli-cated storage; enterprise-class backup prod-ucts can easily accommodate all three.

In a disaster recovery scenario, you can sim-ply restore the disk files to a freshly provi-sioned virtual host cluster and spin up newVMs, bringing you right back to where youwere. You can also update the data on thebare-metal images with a restore from thedata-only backup. Recovery accomplished.

Jake McTigue is IT manager for Carwild and an Infor -mationWeek Analytics contributor. You can write to us [email protected].

[VM BACKUP]Previous Next


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