Cofio AIMstor

• Originally Posted by Tony Cerqueira on Thu, Jan 14, 2010 @ 03:32 PM

It’s true.  CDP is tremendous technology, offering granular point-in-time restore that backups simply cannot do. But CDP (Continuous Data Protection) has severe retention and data management limitations, so backup is absolutely necessary.

But – why do CDP if you cannot get it FULLY UNIFIED with your backup solution??  I don’t mean “integrated”.  Any moron can “integrate” a CDP product with their legacy backup product (and, many have, mind you). You just tell the people in marketing to make the box look the same, and update the user manual.

THE TRUTH: CDP is ONLY worth doing, if it comes FULLY UNIFIED with a next-generation backup solution (optimally, with inherent deduplication). That way, they share the same data mover, the same repository, the same metadata, the same underlying data structure and supporting infrastructure.

I dont know any other product besides Cofio’s AIMstor that does this. You get granularity of CDP, with smart retention flexibility of AIMstor’s next-gen Backup, and all the great policy driven capabilities that come together with it. You can also empower Bare Metal Restore from your backup and CDP sets, which are fully single-instanced for huge capacity savings.

More importantly, because AIMstor auto-classifies data, you can SELECT what you want to CDP, and what you want to Backup, and what retention you want for very specific types of data, or whole categories of data. Standalone CDP  products are kinda, well, dumb. They like to move . . . everything. Optimal? Uhm, not.

So what happens if you buy CDP that is NOT unified with your backup solution? Triple the data movers, double the repository setup and capacity usage, double the overhead to servers and clients, double the admin time, double the infrastructure. Plus, you probably can’t select what you really want, so you will just end up wasting even more resources.  Why do it?

• Originally Posted by Tony Cerqueira on Tue, Jan 12, 2010 @ 05:14 PM

Legacy Backup is a major market in the data protection space, and is still going strong. Regardless of its inefficiencies, people still buy it, and add onto their existing Legacy Backup environment. However, users are starting to take notice.

Every user backup forum will often point to lack of Legacy Backup products to deliver any upstream value, and their typical failure rates as a result of server-dependent architectures, and their terrible storage inefficiency.

In addition, many environmental factors have crept into the woodwork at user sites (business intelligence, eDiscovery needs, compliance requirements, etc.), and now that the paint is off, people are finally getting a look at what’s underneath the hood of Legacy Backup products. It won’t be long.

Deduplication was a key first mover that really made people question the insanity of Legacy Backup. Why create something so inherently inefficient that it required such a huge level of clean-up? (remember, 20X or greater is the typical deduplication cleanup rate).

Cloud architectures will soon expose even more inadequacies in the Legacy Backup camp. Forcing many vendors to accomodate Cloud storage in strange, non-optimal ways.

Virtual machine sprawl has added more headaches to the Legacy Backup camp because of I/O and overhead issues created by Legacy Backup, and multiplied by VM’s.

Additionally, users are becoming more reliant on other tools within the market to make up for the lack of flexible recovery capability of Legacy Backup. CDP, Replication, Bare Metal Restore, and others, are coming into play in the mid-market.  As are technologies that help manage information; index/search tools, data classification, policy management, and tools that control data for added layers of security or monitoring.

There are many others, but these ones stick out. When things be

• Originally Posted by Tony Cerqueira on Tue, Jan 05, 2010 @ 07:10 PM

The terrible inefficiency of Legacy Backup has created new markets and new companies over the past decade in the storage backup space.  Many are fixes applied to Legacy Backup itself, many others are another form of Legacy Backup, that solve some issues for a key market or vertical. Many have been proven to solve real world problems, caused, of course, by Legacy Backup.

So, what is Legacy Backup?  You are probably using it right now in your data center, your remote office, or your SMB, and most certainly, in your enterprise.  It’s a product that protects your data by doing several things based on a schedule, then sends a copy of some processed data to disk or tape. Unfortunately, it batch copies data, creates massive and unnecessary duplication of data, and has no ability to share its repository, its processes, policies, metadata, data movement, or any of its significant infrastructure with other data protection products (like CDP, Replication, Archive, etc.).

The great thing about inefficiency is that it creates need.  And where there is need, there is opportunity. But the reason for the need, it is now being learned, is that Legacy Backup is the problem.  Like any boom or bubble, Legacy Backup will . . . utlimately . . . pop.