Just-in-time Data Protection

There is more activity in the data protection arena now than I've seen in years. We are reaping the fruits of years of new innovation to finally begin to achieve something special in data protection. Looking back over the past few years we have seen the emergence of:

• Disk-based backup including VTL
• Data reduction techniques
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and real-time replication
• WAFS or Wide Area File Systems
• Tiered Storage
• Data Lifecycle Management

All of these combined provide a whole host of choices in how one architectures data protection systems. It would seem that soon we will have the ability to protection all of our data all the time. But does that make the most sense?

Constant and complete data protection will always be very expensive. Bandwidth costs money, disk capacity costs money, and software costs money. To strive to backup everything all the time is to strive to waste money. Why? Because there is rarely a good reason to backup all the data, all the time? We may want to backup all of it sometimes. That the realm of tradition backup. We may want to backup some of it all the time. That's were CDP comes in.

Where we send it to be protected is also part of the equation. Do we keep it on-site? Copy it to tape to be stored off-site? Send it over a WAn link to another locations. All of these location options provide different levels of protecton at different costs.

What we really want is "just-in-time" data protection. Akin to JIT manufacturing, the goal is to protection data when it needs to be protected. Some data will need constant backup, perhaps because it is mission critical and needs to be available 24x7x365. Other data will only be backed up occasionally because it doesn't change much. Image files are an example of something that rarely if ever changes and only needs to be backed of once in awhile. Some data will be copied off-site to a DR facility immediately because it must be made available the second a disaster occurs. Other data will be archived and left in a vault on site. It all depends on how important the data is, how fast it needs to be accessed after a disaster or failure, and how much you are willing to pay for the priviledge of having the other two.

New data protection technology allows us to fine tune our systems to deliver data to backup exactly when it is needed. If we follow a philosophy of JIT data protection then we will soon find an equilibrium between protection, cost, and time. And that is a perfect combination. Start with the JIT goal and you have a fighting chance of achieving that balance. Do too much or pay too much and you will waste resources. Do too little or pay too little and your important data is always in danger.

Treet - Part II

When I wrote my column on treet (like spam only in blogs) I would have though that the morons who distribute this stuff would have got the message. Hello! I'm hostile to your business model. Lo and behold! They are at it again. This time it's a doozy.

The latest unwanted garbage in the comments section of my blog promises to help you earn a degree in two weeks. The "degrees" that you can "earn" run the gamet from a simple BA to a PHD. Take note, not a B.A. or Ph.D. Now, my bachelors took 4 years to accomplish and my wife's Ph.D. took something like an additional 6 years. Since I know we are not slow learners (most people with doctorates aren't) I can only assume that Ph.D. and PHD are not the same thing.

If you have the wherewithal to get an Internet connection going and bother to read through blogs, are you really that below average in intelligence? I doubt it. Who then is actually calling this number? So, I said to myself,"How about me?". I called.

The message only identified them as "The University". No other name. Like "The Village" in the old TV show "The Prisoner". I was expecting to hear "For Number 2, press 2. For Number 6, press 6. For number 1... that would be telling". If you haven't seen the show then that's too bad. Go find it. Watch it. Love it.

Anyway, all I was able to get was an answering machine. Always a bad sign. The messaged asked for two phone numbers and an e-mail. That's much more information than most answering machines ask for. Hmmm... I tried again. The message said that you could dial your party's extension at anytime and it would connect you. Liars! I tried an old voice mail trick. Usually if you dial a "0", "*" or "#" you get an operator. Nope. 0 repeats the opening message, # doesn't register, and the number 1 just cuts to the answering machine. Hmmm again... Any other number is ignored (despite the fact that some of them had to be extensions) and * asks for a PIN code. That indicates that it's a cheap answering machine not a professional PBX. In any event, you can't do anything but leave a voice mail and there's no way I'm doing that. Especially with a "university" that doesn't have a name. I don't need the guys in black boots coming for me in the night.


All the while I kept wondering, who could possible think this is for real? That got me thinking. Who actually responds to these things? Do the marketers of these phony degrees actually think that my gentle readers are this stupid and gullible? Is anyone this gullible? Phishing I get. Some of those phishing e-mails look very real. I can see how even a smart person could get caught by a phisher. But this? It simply doesn't make sense.

A quick google of the number shows that this same message has been planted like a kudzu in many other blogs, mostly technology-oriented ones. That makes it even more puzzling. Technology people tend to be educated and intelligent. Even if they needed additional degrees, they couldn't possibly be scammed by this. Once again, treet is a waste of time in ways that spam and phishing aren't. That makes it seem just that much more stupid. A traditional con man or grifter has to pick their mark carefully. If the mark is suspicious, too smart, or even too experienced, then the scam won't work. I can't imagine anyone capable of operating a computer being that inexperienced, gullible, or just plain dumb.

This simply confirms my initial hypothesis. The people that treeters are trying to scam are not the stupid ones here. It's the treeters themselves that are dumb. So, if any of you treeters are out there, contact me. I'm dying to know how you make money at this. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to make money at almost anything, probably would be interested. Oh, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in. Real cheap. Trust me.

iSCSI at Home

After the last couple of posts, I guess I need to play this one straight. So let's talk about a way out there idea - iSCSI at Home. Okay, not really at home but for the SOHO market.

That probably sounds crazy to some people. Most SOHO applications don't need SCSI or SANs, right? Wrong! Sharing resources is as important to a small office environment as a big one. Most of the time that means files, and files mean NAS. However, there are a lot of applications where that is not the case. Let's name a few:

• Graphics and video - These folks have used SCSI-based systems for ever. These type of applications are now even common in homes thanks to Apple.
• Music - making, not listening. Many amateur musicians have small home studios.
• Data Protection - small and remote offices have data protection needs too, even if it's only tape backup
• Shared disk resources - sure you can do it with NAS but having a private disk volume all your own on a shared device is cool too.
• Multimedia - whether it's your home theatre or a company presentation system, the file stack is a real hinderance to performance .
  

Okay, so the best application here is data protection but that's important. Even home systems full of MP3's and kid's homework need to be backed up. Sadly, most are not. You can use simple freeware programs but that's not for a commercial venture. The better solution is to have something more industrial grade. That's where iSCSI comes in.

iSCSI is cheap and has the horsepower to perform most major data protection functions. The perfect data protection system for the SOHO market is block level CDP to an external drive or small array, priced at under $1000. Fire and forget. You can do this with direct attached storage such as a USB drive but that gets expensive in an office with more than one computer. And what office doesn't have more than one computer. Heck, I've got five in my home! Most offices have as many. A single iSCSI-based disk backup device with CDP running under the hood (a Windows service) would provide heavy duty (by SOHO standards) protection. Again, this can be done with NAS devices but not as efficiently. Fibre Channel is too difficult and expensive. A small iSCSI device running over conventional Ethernet (not GigE. Please! Even though it's getting cheap it's overkill for most SOHO customers) that does plug and play would be attractive. More attractive than have five separate backup devices to mess around with anyway.

Price is the problem of course. Individual single disk backup devices are under $200. Even a more sophisticated system would have to be well under $1000, more like $500, to be attractive to the SOHO market. Remote offices would pay more since they come out of big corporate budgets. This is why USB disk drive devices are so attractive. iSCSI runs over existing infrastructure and if SATA drives were used, could be made cost effective.

Think about it. And then send me one to test out/user/keep forever. I have these five machines you see....