CFA: File System Archiving with Centera

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1 CFA: File System Archiving with Centera May, 2005 EMC has announced Centera File Archiver (CFA), an archiving solution that enables end to end archiving of EMC Celerra File Systems. The combination of these two technologies working together now means that customers can reap a range of efficiencies inherent in the CAS-based architecture of Centera without lifting a finger. A range of policy controls and detailed integration work between Celerra and Centera means that CFA can offload data more efficiently, with zero-data loss, and without interruption to the mission critical environment. Taneja Group believes that CFA strongly demonstrates EMC s willingness to keep pushing Centera into new functionality within the data center. Given the massive data growth in file environments today, this is an end to end solution that enterprise customers will find very attractive and economical. We believe that CFA serves as a strong example of the power of advantages inherent in object-model software approaches to solving the challenges of file system archiving. File Archiving: A New Era If an enterprise customer has ever faced the prospect of building and managing a filebased archive, they know the challenges are not trivial. In fact, Taneja Group routinely discovers that many enterprise IT managers have actively avoided deploying larger scale file-based archival solutions because of the potential complexity, management, and risk issues they might face. Things have finally changed. A transition has been underway over the past 24 months as object-based technologies like EMC s CAS-based Centera have moved deeper into the enterprise. As a result, we believe that we have officially entered a new era in archiving, and EMC is doing its part with their new Centera File Archiver (CFA) solution. CFA leverages the full range of CAS features from Centera to provide a powerful diskbased archiving solution for unstructured file content - the highest growth data segment within enterprise data centers today. As Taneja Group has discussed at length over the past two years, we believe that the power of a CAS-based solution working in concert with a file serving environment is unbeatable. The advantages over traditional file system based approaches to file archiving are significant and far ranging. A quick tour of the world as it was will set the stage to understand the implications of CFA for enterprise customers. FS Archive Challenges The world of file system (FS) archiving is well defined by a range of challenges. We see commonalities across virtually all enterprises that have gone down the path of 1 of 7

2 deploying one or more additional file systems in order to create disk-based archiving solutions for their production file serving environments. After speaking with dozens of end users about these challenges, we have identified a range of common issues that occur across industry verticals and customer deployment sizes. We can group these file system challenges into four descriptive categories. File System Complexity. Issues of everyday complexity abound with all file systems in a disk-based archiving environment: High growth rates, expanding backup windows, file system migrations and the need for capacity balancing. Faced with each of these challenges, the very act of adding a second, third or fourth file system for archiving exponentially compounds the range of complexity issues. However, enterprises have not had any other option than this. As unstructured content grows at exponential rates, the only means of creating a secondary disk-based archive has been incremental file system deployment. In small numbers or low capacities, the complexity of managing such an arrangement may be tolerable, but we find that most IT managers will admit this schema becomes untenable over time. With respect to file system based archiving, it is not uncommon to discover an IT shop that has unintentionally created more complexity and less coherent management in the process of deploying their archival solution! File System Unreliability. Traditional file system-based approaches to archiving lack suitable reliability for most enterprises. IT users face reliability issues because the incremental file system dedicated to the disk-based archive typically has no guarantee of zero data loss in transfer from the production environment, or in the form of retention policies. This simple fact means that any enterprise using a file system based archive exposes itself to potential data loss with every archiving transaction; a fact that rules out traditional file system based approaches for regulatory compliance, not to mention many companies standards for best practices. Second, traditional file system based approaches lack data integrity checking functions which means that disk-based corruption events can occur without administrator knowledge or immediate recourse. Particularly in compliance sensitive environments, these reliability issues have been an impediment to traditional file system archives. File System Visibility. IT teams that have deployed file system based approaches for archiving do not typically have a great amount of built-in visibility, efficiency or flexibility available to them. The absence of easy-to-use policies and control tools has historically meant that IT administrators must manually determine which groups of files and directories to move into the archive, at what times, and for how long. Policy-based intelligence is typically missing from the deployment equation. File System Backup. We have found that data protection schema for high growth file systems are the source of significant management headaches in the enterprise data center. Because of these growth rates, 2 of 7

3 much of the file system content being subjected to scheduled backups is static content that has been backed up countless times without change. In the absence of a smart archiving solution that removes unchanging, low-usage fixed content from production backup, static data begins to take up larger and larger percentages of the backup data set. As a result, teams can become consumed with a range of inefficient backup schema creating a suboptimal operating state. Towards Better Archives Given these challenges outlined above, Taneja Group posits the following requirements for new products emerging in the market place, all stemming from the demands of the end user community: Archival Simplicity: In response to the archival complexities outlined above, IT shops demand easy to deploy, easily managed archiving solutions that are guaranteed to interoperate with existing production environment. Vendors must demonstrate their ability to create seamless solutions with existing infrastructure elements. Policy-based Content Controls: The key to getting higher utilization rates and solving backup inefficiencies is getting granular control over file data. This implies that policy-based controls are required to solve longstanding issues in file system archiving. Without such controls, it is impossible to surgically remove static file content from file serving or primary and secondary storage environments. A policy-based philosophy at the heart of smart archiving can alleviate much of this pain for many enterprises. Capacity Optimization. With annual growth rates in secondary storage ranging from 3x to 7x the size of the production environments, it is necessary to leverage capacity optimizing technologies, like those inherent to CAS. Reducing multiple copies in a file serving environment can factor into this in no small way. This should become one of the principal and defining elements of a well architected file system archive. Seamless Migrations. One of the challenges that now requires an answer is file system migration. The answer is not to continue adding new file systems, but to develop seamless and granular controls for determining which content leaves the production environment, at what time, and for how long. Having spent countless man hours managing this process manually, users now demand easy-to-use solutions for intelligent file system content migration. Enter Centera File Archiver EMC has now introduced the Centera File Archiver (CFA), a solution that Taneja Group believes addresses the archiving requirements outlined immediately above. The CFA offering is an end-to-end Centera solution in the form of a lightweight policy engine residing on its own dedicated node within the Centera cluster. Designed to zero data loss specifications, CFA directly integrates with the production file serving 3 of 7

4 environment of an EMC Celerra deployment. In architectural terms, this solution demonstrates that IT managers can easily create a file system archiving solution without need for an incremental traditional file system. CFA in Action CFA is a non-capacity based offering that deploys like a new node within the Centera cluster. The CFA scans the Celerra file system, then queues data for migration into the Centera archive. When the migration write from Celerra to Centera is completed, CFA confirms the write and removes the object from the Celerra, leaving behind a stub file so that Celerra users notice no change to the production environment. The result is a zero data loss disk archive directly linked to the Celerra environment. At the heart of CFA reside a broad range of granular policy controls that enable the IT manager to determine which data enters the Centera archive at what time, and for how long. The policy engine utilizes the common range of logical operators (e.g. and, or, not ) to establish policies based on file metadata characteristics such as file access and modification histories, extensions, size, and directory location. CFA allows IT managers to establish specific retention periods for each policy created, thereby allowing multiple business objectives to be addressed with the same deployment. The policy engine also contains a simulation tool that lets the administrator model what files will be moved, and the associated capacity impact for that policy. Once deployed, the workflow with CFA is straightforward. The IT manager uses a command line interface to define policies based on business objectives, runs a simulation of that policy if desired, sets the policy schedule, and lets it execute. Upon completion of each migration event, CFA generates logs that are stored in a protected fashion within the Centera cluster. Each log tracks the associated policies so that administrators can quickly identify which policies are responsible for which data movement activities. From a management perspective, EMC Celerra users should note that CFA is enabled by seamless integration with Celerra File Mover. Because of that technology s stub file capabilities, end users of CFA will experience complete transparency at all times. Of equal importance, all existing backup schema and anti-virus settings associated with their Celerra environment will unaffected by a CFA deployment. The Centera Difference What precisely does Centera bring to bear that differentiates CFA from a traditional file system based approach? There are several technological elements to consider, all of which have both an immediate and long-term impact on the efficiency of CFA as an archiving solution. Centera Capacity Optimization: Because CFA is part of Centera s core CAS technology, it is capable of identifying redundant data sets and removing them, a process known as single-instancing, or, 4 of 7

5 capacity optimization. Especially since static file content is one of the principal culprits of data consumption within the data center, this capability becomes a significant element for creating efficiencies across both the file serving environment and the disk archive, as well. Centera Retention: One of the more powerful attributes of CAS is its ability to provide for extremely flexible retention polices based on content attributes. This is not possible with traditional file system hierarchies, and comprises one of the key benefits of CAS for compliance deployments and long-term disk archival. Centera Object Management: The CAS object-model software approach of Centera makes it very adept at cleaning up after itself ( garbage collection ) as content information changes. The solution selfheals, prevents content fragmentation, and enables easy reorganization of content based on changes within the production environment, including deletions, file name changes, and file movements. The Impact of CFA The impact of CFA is clearly evident in the immediate management gains derived from a seamless, intelligent, and integrated file system archival solution. Specifically, CFA s policy-based controls can automate historically complex manual process, adding a new level of management flexibility previously impossible. For example, a user facing very high growth rates may specify a 60 day retention period on primary storage for a given set of files, after which time the data is automatically migrated to the Centera. This kind of policy control is a key enabler for a true enterprise disk archival solution. In fact, for many IT teams, the option to deploy CFA may constitute their only reliable, viable means of establishing a file system archival solution. Viewed in economic terms, we believe CFA will have a very solid positive impact. By freeing up file systems to handle active production data, and leveraging singleinstance storage to establish a capacity optimized archive, customers should be able to justify the CFA investment with very straightforward TCO arithmetic. This argument can be framed in the context of increased utilization in the production environment, improved backup processes, and infrastructure-wide management gains. Additionally, because EMC offers CFA as a non-capacity based license, the incremental investment only serves to increase the ROI of existing Celerra and Centera deployments. For example, let s consider a hypothetical EMC Celerra customer with an 8 TB file environment. Let s assume for simplicity that this customer also possesses an existing Centera deployment. Their IT team knows that some of that Celerra content should be archived and moved out of the Celerra production environment. If, by using CFA, that customer were able to free up a very conservative 25% production capacity on their Celerra, the CFA investment would have a nearly immediate payback in capacity utilization gains, alone. This would not even take into consideration 5 of 7

6 ongoing gains in management efficiency and shortened backup windows. The simplicity of CFA s economic impact is compelling. Taneja Group believes that when customers know they can build a file system archive, and do so with an easily calculated positive economic impact that based on concrete variables, they pay attention. utility of your existing investment. We believe that Centera File Archiver merits serious evaluation from EMC s enterprise customers. When compared against alternative options, we feel confident users will agree with us that advantages of file system archiving with Centera are both clear and measurable. Taneja Group Opinion Based on many conversations, we know the pain associated with file system archiving. Historically, there have not been good options, but the situation is getting brighter. The change for the better is directly proportional to the market maturity of new technologies like CAS that alleviate traditional file system shortcomings. CFA is precisely such an offering. EMC has continued to demonstrate market leadership by extending and enhancing Centera functionality in a range of areas over the past year, and we are very pleased to see this level of integration now available for solving the significant challenges of file system archiving. We know that customers want this kind of solution, as it speaks directly to one of the more pronounced and ongoing pains in the data center: file data growth. EMC has made this a very easy proposition for its customers: If you are a Celerra or Centera customer today, there is no reason not to evaluate this very direct and costeffective means of increasing the value and 6 of 7

7 NOTICE: The information and product recommendations made by the TANEJA GROUP are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of the TANEJA GROUP and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. However, as market conditions change and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. The TANEJA GROUP, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors which may appear in this document.. 7 of 7