Data Domain and ExaGrid Are Backup Appliances, the Check Is in the Mail, and Other Lies. 7 Technology Circle Suite 100 Columbia, SC 29203

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1 7 Technology Circle Suite 100 Columbia, SC Data Domain and ExaGrid Are Backup Appliances, the Check Is in the Mail, and Other Lies Phone: URL:

2 1 Introduction Recently I ve run into some marketing material stressing from Data Domain, ExaGrid, and other deduplication device vendors that what they are selling are backup appliances. This reminds me of the story of the car salesman selling a car and then later admitting that the engine and steering wheel and seats are options that will cost more. By this logic Seagate could sell their disk drives as laptop computers to school children to use in class. I don t know what offends me worse the blatant lie or the assumption some marketing person made that their intended buyer is either too stupid or too bored to be able to tell the difference. I don t believe that the mistake is accidental. The high technology business has a history of being more focused on the delivering ever-decreasing incremental benefit to customers under the guise of pushing the technological envelope rather than being focused on delivering broad-based value to customers. There s often a push to develop the next set of intellectual property while pushing the tasks of integration, monitoring, and management to the paying customer. It s up to the lonely marketing department of many of these companies to force fit the needs and desires of the customer to the technology-at-all-costs fanaticism of the R&D group. And often, it s the truth that suffers first - followed quickly by the customers. The intent of this white paper is to describe the fundamental characteristics of an appliance in general, a backup appliance in particular, and a better backup appliance specifically. This is followed by a description of what is not a backup appliance. What Is an Appliance? Wiktionary defined appliance as An implement, an instrument, or apparatus designed (or at least used) as a means to a specific end (often specified.) In other words, it s something designed to do one specific thing, and do it well. With that simple definition, let s examine two common items - one which is an appliance and one which isn t. A Toaster Is an Appliance It s important to understand that appliance isn t a high-technology word or a conceptual word it s rooted in the same idea as your toaster. A toaster is an appliance that does one thing toasts your bread. It does it well. You don t typically worry about the inside of the toaster; it has a simple user interface and just plain works. You don t wake up in the morning worried about the Nichrome heating element within the toaster in terms of its nickel/chromium alloy percentage, the coil winding required to create the appropriate electrical resistance, or the number of amps that are produced by the rheostat at various settings - heck, you re not thinking about Nichrome, rheostats, or anything else. You just want to make some toast.

3 2 That s the fundamental characteristic of an appliance: integrated, all-in-one, functionality that performs a task and does it well. The key to the definition of an appliance is focused upon the user of the appliance and the task that user wishes to perform. A PC Is Not an Appliance Let s contrast that with a PC - a personal computer. A personal computer is an incredible generalpurpose tool, but it s absolutely not an appliance. Why? Fundamentally because unlike a toaster, which is a device that specializes in one function, a personal computer is a general device that offers multiple capabilities. The price of those multiple capabilities is that a PC is more difficult to use. So Is a Toaster Better than a PC? As in so many things in life, the answer is it depends. A toaster is certainly better than a PC when it comes to making toast - even though a PC with a modern microprocessor seems to generate enough heat to toast bread. Then again, if you need to create a spreadsheet, I d rather use a PC. The question of which is better thus depends entirely upon what the user wishes to do with the device. What Is a Backup Appliance? Now that we ve explored what an appliance is - and is not - let s move more specifically to a backup appliance. We ve already noted that the most important thing about an appliance is centered upon the user of the appliance and the task that user wishes to perform. In the case of a backup appliance, the obvious task is to perform a backup. So what s a backup? Again, it s pretty simple - Mirriam-Webster defines it as a copy of computer data (as a file or the contents of a hard drive.) So a backup appliance is an entity that performs backup. Of course, backup isn t quite as simple as toast - so let s discuss a few of the most important characteristics of a backup appliance. Integrated (All-in-One) Platform At the most basic level, a backup appliance consists of a set of hardware, firmware, and software that is integrated into a device with a single purpose: to perform the functionality associated with backup. This means minimally the following components must be integrated: The backup software. This may or may not include some type of archiving and replication software that can work with that backup software. The operating system upon which the backup software will operate. This may or may not include some type of virus protection (particularly important if the operating system is Windows based.) The server upon which the operating system and backup software will operate. The storage that the server will use. This would include drives, RAID, NAS, SAN or whatever form

4 3 of storage will be used. The networking that the server will use. This may be as simple as a networking adapter and commodity protocols or may be as complicated as highly-tuned integrated networking stacks for higher backup ingest rates. Integrated (All-in-One) Functionality Modern backup actually consists of three major functions: Backup: Bare metal, operating system, and application backup with deep online retention and rapid recovery not only of granular application data and files but of entire systems and IT infrastructure as well. Archive: Near-line point-in-time rotational archiving of backup data on a complete or selective basis. D2D2D (disk-to-disk-to-disk) must be supported as well as D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape.) Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery uses replication as its core technology but builds on top of simple replication mechanisms additional functionality. Examples of this additional functionality include the rapid seeding of data to the off-premise device or service and being able to rapidly recover not only files but entire premises quickly and reliably. Disaster recovery should optimally be offered both on a single-tenant private cloud basis as well as a multiple-tenant public cloud basis. All-in-One Licensing A backup appliance should not only have all-in-one functionality but it should also have all-in-one licensing. In other words, the integrated functionality of an appliance works best when combined with the simpler and more integrated all-in-one licensing approach that limits the number of times that the user must pay for additionally licensed features. Ease of Installation A backup appliance must have an installation time measured in minutes - not hours, days, or even weeks. Network connectivity, physical server, virtual server, operating system, application, and storage connectivity are all important in this process. Ease of Use A backup appliance must be able to be monitored and managed in an average of seconds to minutes a day. The user must be able to monitor the status in multiple ways - web browsers, , an SNMPbased management system - from different locations. The user interface must be integrated, simple, and elegant.

5 4 Integrated Support Anyone who tells you that a backup appliance - or any other artifact of human ingenuity - will be perfect is either delusional or just lying to you. The question isn t whether something occasionally will go wrong - the question is what will occur when it does. One thing that a backup appliance should have is integrated support. Look for some type of proactive monitoring by which experts can tell you of some types of potential impending problems even before you see them. Most importantly, look for a company that has integrated its support rather than off-shored that support. The concept behind a backup appliance should be the venerable One Throat To Choke when something goes wrong - make sure that your appliance backup vendor can and does live up to taking responsibility when an issue occurs. What Is Not a Backup Appliance? A toaster. In all seriousness, there are an infinite number of things that aren t a backup appliance. Just because something may be associated with the task of protecting data doesn t mean that it s a backup appliance. With that said, let s discuss a few things that are occasionally called backup appliances that simply aren t. Deduplication Devices This is where companies such as Data Domain, ExaGrid, and more recently Symantec with its recently announced NetBackup 5000 have an issue when their devices are referred to as backup appliances. What these vendors are selling are deduplication devices. Different vendors in this space are selling different things. Data Domain sells a deduplication device that can be used for primary or secondary storage and offers very good data deduplication capabilities. ExaGrid sells a deduplication device that is primarily to be used in concert with third-party backup software that operates on a third-party server. Symantec s NetBackup 5000 is an even more particular device - it is designed to work in NetBackup environments specifically. Backup Software Copied Onto Some Hardware There are some backup software vendors who have bundled their backup software with a server and attempted to call this an appliance. We call these Frankenstein backup appliances - as in the

6 5 monster in the novel, there are a lot of parts badly assembled and grafted together in a relatively haphazard way. When you look deeper, you find that a veneer of integration - and only at the integrated, all-inone, platform level. Functional integration, all-in-one licensing, ease of installation, and ease of use in terms of monitoring and management are simply not there. But those issues pale besides the biggest issue - the lack of integrated support. At the most basic level, the fastest way to figure out whether they re really selling an appliance is to ask what occurs when there s a problem - who do you call? Do you call the backup software vendor? What if it s an operating system problem? What if it s a server hardware problem? Who is responsible? The simple truth of the matter is that only one person is responsible - the customer of the backup software coped onto some hardware. What Constitutes a Better Backup Appliance? We ve discussed the bare basics of what a backup appliance is in a previous section: integrated platform, integrated functionality, ease of installation, ease of use, and integrated support. But if these are the bare basics, then what constitutes a better backup appliance? That s what we ll briefly discuss in this section. Scalability A better backup appliance should be scalable. Of course, all vendors note that their products are scalable - it s kind of like saying new and improved. So you need to dig a little deeper and understand what they mean when they say scalable. The primary attributes of backup appliance scalability are that these devices should allow you to scale your backup, both in terms of the amount of data that is protected as well as the retention of that data, and still be managed via a single pane of glass web-based user interface. Make sure that your scalability consist of not only your backup storage, but your complete backup process. Quite often when you dig behind the covers of the quoted ingest rate of an appliance you ll find that they re not talking about the completely backup process but only one aspect of it. For example, deduplication device vendors talk about their ingest rates as if that were the backup ingest rate - but of course the ingest rate of a storage device isn t the same as the ingest rate of the full-stream backup itself since that backup must first go to the backup server before it goes to the storage device.

7 6 Heterogeneity Support of multiple computer platforms (important when using technologies such as bare metal protection), multiple storage platforms, multiple operating systems, multiple applications, and multiple virtualization environments is extremely important in terms of the scalability and flexibility of your backup appliance both now and in the future. A backup appliance that supports only Windows servers doesn t give you much in terms of futureproofing your investment. Even if you have only Windows servers today and have absolutely no interest in protecting laptops or PCs, are you really willing to sign-up to a future in which you ll never protecting anything but a Windows server - that you will never able to protect a NAS, a SAN, other operating systems, other applications, other virtualization environments such as VMware, and the like? Resistance to Attack If your backup appliance uses any version of Windows as its core operating system, you should ask some really tough questions concerning the susceptibility to malicious attack of the backup appliance. Windows, due to its popularity, continues to be the overwhelming favorite of attacks; so if you re going to use a Windows-based backup appliance you should really understand how much time the vendor has spent hardening and virus-protecting that appliance. Otherwise, you should plan on spending a lot of time inside the toaster in terms of protecting your appliance. Obsessive Focus on Total Cost of Ownership Make sure that the vendor of your backup appliance is just as focused on decreasing your capital and operational expenditure as you are. Assuming that the backup appliance is properly designed and licensed, the existence and quality of the vendor s integrated support is the primary factor here.

8 7 About Unitrends Unitrends offers a family of affordable integrated all-in-one on-premise backup appliances that support disaster recovery via disk-based archiving as well as electronic vaulting to private- and public-clouds. Unitrends is customer-obsessed, not technology-obsessed, and is focused on enabling its customers to focus on their business rather than on backup. For more information, please see our web site at 7 Technology Circle, Suite 100 Columbia, SC Phone: sales@unitrends.com URL: Copyright 2010 Unitrends. All Rights Reserved.