Bill Bowerman's Most Recent Posts

It's that time of the year again :)

Although I typically attend the SNW Orlando conference, thanks to Wilma, this will be my first year to test the waters on the Pacific venue.

Lineup looks great as usual...but this year I am most eager to see how things have evolved from the Interop and Solutions Demo into the Solutions Center and Hands-On labs.

I look forward to seeing all the familiar faces and I will make all attempts to blog here as much as possible.

Here's to another great year in STORAGE!

I recently had to dig in deep and put myself in the shoes of the “Backup Administrator”.

As many of you know, your backup admin guy is likely the most unacknowledged individual that you will cross paths with in the entire IT vertical. I have had the pleasure of knowing many champions in this area over my lengthy career and from Mainframe to desktop, they all face the same challenges on a daily basis.

With the recent adoption of many to the VTL (Virtual Tape Library) world, life seems to finally be getting good for these folks … evenings out with the guys not interrupted by the on-call pager? Not Yet!

Although I'm sure many large capacity backup shops around the globe will unite in cheer over the release of SUN/STK's announcement for the T10000 drive supporting tapes at the capacity of 500GB, I'm raising my glass with them for my own reasons.

Don't get me wrong...with 500GB's of uncompressed data moving through at a whopping 120MBps, there is plenty to get excited about on the physical front, but let me throw some other light on the subject.

Even though many are moving to, or at least considering a move to virtual tape, the expense of licensing has not been left behind.  Many of the products available, either software or appliance still have some control on you for the number of "virtual tapes" you purchase.  Yes, that's right...even though you might be considering leaving behind those physical media, you are still going to pay based on the number of their new virtual counterparts that you require.

So, now you can see the alternative cheer to the 500GB Tape hitting the market for folks interested in VTL.  Also, not many of the polled shops are going completely tapeless when moving or considering VTL.  Most will still do a V2P(virtual to physical) export from virtual tape which resides on harddisk, to physical tape which resides again on physical tape media.

You can see the benefits from both sides with larger capacity media hitting the market.

Don't hold your breath for too long...licensing schemes seem to change as fast as the capacity on today’s media!

Cheers, Bill

I've heard enough about CDP to last me a lifetime and it’s just getting started!
The next time someone pitches you on CDP or N-CDP, ask them for a demo in action.
Somehow Snapshots have become N-CDP or "Near Continuous Data Protection" and CDP is where?  If I have a mirror of a volume running then I guess I would agree with some that I have continuous data protection in place...but from a hardware perspective only and I've been doing this for a long time...but this is NOT CDP, its acronym is called RAID!
Lets look at RTO and RPO, which in my opinion is where ALL analysis should begin, as it will decide your solution from starting with it and including one other critical factor ~ DOLLAR$.
With this neat little triangle of information you can figure out what type of solutions you should be looking at:
-RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How long can you afford to be without your data?
-RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data can you afford to lose?
-BUDGET: How much can you spend to satisfy the above two?
Now, of course if you ask most people how long they can be without their data or how much they can afford to lose, the answer will be NONE!  Once you say "no problem" and show them the cost to accomplish this, they will always tend to consider the options.  In summary, if you throw enough money at a problem you can almost always fix it...but we all have budgets and the trick is getting the RIGHT solution and spending our budget on the RIGHT components to address our RTO and RPO.  So we try to come as close to the RTO and RPO as we can afford to.

If you look at some of the Large Capacity SATA players today, you can likely plan for a deployment of almost 500TB in a single frame or rack....WOW ~  1/2 a PB in a single rack!

This is in part thanks to Hitachi bringing the king to the ring, with its monster 500GB SATA disk.  Now without getting into disk vendor roadmaps and walking around with our jaws hanging open, we must also consider the validity of the "perpendicular capacity promise".  IF this comes to fruition with 10x the existing capacity...I will be able to throw together a 4.5PB solution in one rack right of  the top off my head...WOW, say that again~ 4.5 PB in a single rack!