Data losses can occur for any reason. They could be the work of a well-disciplined, external network attack or simply stumbling corporate negligence. In either case, it is unfortunately customers who suffer most as their personal information is compromised. Even though many companies invest heavily in protecting their networks with firewalls, intrusion detection systems, etc., often when a data loss occurs, it amounts to nothing more than failing to identify a fundamental security risk and taking prompt action.
An area once frequently overlooked when identifying potential risks for data loss is backup tapes. Although there are countless, high-profile examples of customer information being compromised through a lost or stolen backup tape, with BNY Mellon Bank being a more recent example, failure to take appropriate actions early on, such as encrypting data stored to backup tapes, continues to occur.
Unfortunately when a backup tape is lost, it becomes much more than an issue of trying to recover the lost tape; it becomes a question of quantifying a company's liability. Backup tapes most often are lost or misplaced while in transit and outside the control of your company (such as when being stored with a records management provider), but that doesn't relieve any of the associated liability of protecting against data loss. Currently, tape encryption provides companies with their best defense in guarding against data breaches from lost or stolen backup tapes, and often provides them with a "safe harbor" when faced with having to notify customers of the breach.
Deploying encryption for any type of storage medium requires careful planning and consideration but more so for tape. Deciding how that solution best fits your environment long-term is of particular importance. Although encryption solutions for backup tapes have been limited in the past, innovation in this area has and continues to occur, providing more options than ever to help in your decision. Currently, the best options for tape encryption are:
One aspect to keep in mind when using a tape drive-based encryption solution is that individual LTO-4 tape drive vendors may encrypt data in different manners. So even if all your tape drives are LTO-4, if they are from different vendors, an LTO tape encrypted by one tape drive may not work in another. This makes it important to standardize on a specific vendor's LTO-4 tape drives to ensure encrypted tapes can be read across all tape drives in your environment whether they are standalone, autoloaders or tape libraries. In these cases, it is advisable to work with providers like Overland Storage to take the risk out of this part of the equation.
A larger concern when encrypting data, however, is the choice of the encryption key management solution. Without proper key management, data on the backup tapes may be rendered unrecoverable. Key management, and some of its pros and cons, will be the focus of an upcoming blog entry.
]]>This robust market continues to spur innovation from companies such as Overland Storage, whose customer base still heavily relies upon NEO SERIES tape libraries and the ARCvault family of autoloaders and libraries as part of their data protection strategies. According to Peri Grover, Overland Storage's Director of Product Management, innovation remains important to the company's customers because their data storage requirements continue to grow. "It may seem obvious, but companies still need technologies - including tape technologies - that can keep up with this growth," she says.
The introduction of disk into the backup process is, however, impacting how Overland is innovating its tape libraries and autoloaders. For example, the increasing popularity of disk as the initial target for backup and recovery is taking the pressure off tape drive manufacturers to continually double tape drive performance every 18 to 24 months. While tape drive capacities are still doubling every generation, the ability to get back data faster is, according to Grover, solved somewhat by the use of disk, so market forces are no longer driving the push for faster tape speeds. "LTO-4 is already at 120 MB/sec and few companies can drive their backup jobs at those speeds," she adds.
What is emerging as a premium among Overland's customers is the availability and reliability of their data. For example, tape drives are the most common failure point in a tape autoloader or library. Unfortunately, this can put companies out of commission, since it often means either backup jobs cannot be completed (if backing up directly to tape) or data cannot be moved offsite for disaster recovery. This scenario has prompted Overland to introduce half-height LTO tape drives in its ARCvault autoloaders and libraries. ARCvault's compact form factor is reliant on small form factor tape drives that can optimize the efficiency and affordability of the solution. Resulting benefits include:
While the role of disk in data protection strategies may have affected the direction of tape innovation, tape is not dead and innovation is still occurring. Even as the demand for higher tape capacities continues, the push for faster tape speeds is slackening off. As it does, Overland Storage is using this as an opportunity to introduce new half-height LTO tape drives as an option for their NEO tape libraries and ARCvault autoloaders that address end-user concerns about tape drive availability and reliability without requiring dramatic changes to corporate backup infrastructures.
]]>But is the Snap Server NAS line of products the right acquisition for Overland Storage to make? It's no secret that Adaptec has had this line of products on the market for at least a couple of years. TechWorld reported as far back as July 2006 that Adaptec was allegedly seeking to "offload" this entire division so it could focus on its core ASIC and HBA disk controller products. Even prior to that in 2003, Quantum apparently had the same mindset before it sold it to Snap Appliances which was in turn acquired by Adaptec. Further, with Microsoft Windows Storage Server having a reputation as a solid performer in the SMB NAS market, why not just partner with Microsoft and go down that path?
To answer those questions, I briefly caught up with Overland Storage's President and CEO, Vern LoForti, and VP of Marketing, Ravi Pendekanti. LoForti admitted that Snap Server has to a certain degree "floated" ever since Adaptec acquired it as part of its Snap Appliance acquisition back in 2003. At the time, Adaptec envisioned changing its focus from providing components to becoming a solutions company. However by 2005 that strategy had changed again and left the Snap Server product line on the inside of Adaptec looking to get out.
Adaptec made several attempts to sell Snap Server over the last few years but it only gained Overland Storage's attention after Eric Kelly, the former CEO of Snap Appliance, joined Overland Storage's board of directors in November 2007. Shortly after joining the board, Kelly privately informed LoForti that Adaptec was once again (still?) looking to sell its Snap Server product line and that it could help fill the NAS hole that Overland Storage had in its product portfolio.
This information prompted Overland Storage to more fully investigate if Snap Server was an appropriate acquisition target. While doing the research and comparing the products from a technical perspective, Overland Storage came to find that the Snap Server product line and its REO SERIES disk libraries are both based on a Linux 2.6 kernel. Another key feature was that the Snap Server already supports replication which the REO SERIES products currently lack. Because both product lines are based on similar underlying code, this opens up new possibilities for the introduction of new features across Overland Storage's broader product portfolio. At the same time, these facts diminished Overland Storage's interest in reselling Microsoft Storage Server since the same synergies did not exist across product lines.
Pendekanti indicated that it would be logical to conclude that "cross-pollination between boxes" would take place as the assimilation of Snap Server into Overland Storage occurs. While the plan is for the Snap Server and REO SERIES groups to remain as separate product teams, expect the Snap Server appliances to become more focused on data protection going forward. "Overland Storage's focus is first and foremost on data protection and we don't want to try to become all things to all people," says Pendekanti.
Overland Storage admittedly had a hole in its product offering portfolio that it recognized it needed to close. While bringing any NAS product on-board could have theoretically plugged that gap, acquiring the Snap Server product line from Adaptec accomplishes much more. It brings new intellectual property into Overland Storage's product portfolio that is complimentary to existing products and should help to create new synergies and product offerings going forward that its current and future customers can look forward to capitalizing on. The fact that Snap Server brings with it an existing customer base and $18 million a year in revenue doesn't hurt the chances of this acquisition succeeding long term either.
]]>Strengthening these relationships is what Pendekanti sees as the key to satisfying Overland Storage's existing customers' hunger for innovation while attracting new customers. To do this, several strategic areas require keen focus:
Already Pendekanti cites a few key initiatives that Overland Storage has put in place to deliver on these objectives:
Overland Storage's ULTAMUS RAID near-line data protection products and REO SERIES disk-based backup solutions provide a solid starting point for addressing customers' data protection requirements. However, Pendekanti astutely points out that the market is ravenous for innovation and it's obvious from recent management changes that Overland Storage feels the need to pick up the pace to become more competitive in the rapidly changing data protection market.
Creating new lines of communication with its clients and channel partners is a solid first step, but innovative new products are what customers want and need. It will be interesting to see what new technology comes from Overland Storage, and how quickly it can be produced thanks to the new initiatives that Pendekanti is putting in place.
]]>Yet this transition will be far from easy as traditional technologies like tape libraries and drives are now taking secondary roles in organizational backup processes. Because of this, Overland Storage needs to make more than just leadership changes but move disk-based storage and deduplication products to the forefront of its product strategy.
From this perspective, Overland Storage has already responded with its disk-based REO SERIES backup solutions. These systems provide customers with a number of different ways to introduce disk-based backup into their environments. Overland Storage includes its Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) feature - thin provisioning for Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) - across the entire REO product line. Its high-end REO 9500D offers deduplication that meets new enterprise demands for this feature. With these products, Overland Storage appears to understand what the market wants and is offering solutions to meet customers' specific needs.
However to fully complete its makeover, Overland Storage needs to stay focused on the channel. The company's sales are 100% driven through its channel partners and the fact that Overland has acknowledged disappointment in the performance of its sales in its most recent Q3 2008 report indicates that further attention is needed.
Enter Ravi Pendekanti, Overland Storage's new VP of worldwide marketing. A veteran of leadership positions at SGI and Sun Microsystems, he was brought onboard in April 2008 to help articulate Overland Storage's product roadmap to its channel partners while also better aligning the product roadmap with the needs of channel partners.
In Pendekanti's short tenure, he has already driven some key initiatives to do this. However, with all of Overland Storage's sales driven through the channel, he sees his real challenge as putting together a program that channel partners can utilize and participate in. Specifically, he needs their feedback to strengthen the company's current and future product portfolio so it can come to market more quickly with products that customers wants. "The marketplace is ravenous for innovation," he says.
This is, however, easier said than done. Overland Storage needs to put in place a program that funnels information from the field (partners and their clients) to its product management group. This would ensure that innovation is not occurring just for its own sake but is the sort of product innovation that customers want and will pay money to obtain.
In part 2 of this series, we'll look at the initiatives Overland Storage's Pendekanti is taking to deliver on these objectives.
]]>Such were my thoughts when I considered Overland Storage's Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) feature on the REO series virtual tape libraries (VTLs). It offers several advantages over the standard method of creating virtual tape cartridges that are only of a fixed size including:
· Ease of management
· Efficient use of storage capacity
· Less overhead associated with replication
DVT is thin provisioning for Virtual Tape Libraries and brings the same advantages that thin provisioning brings to SAN-attached storage as it reserves exactly the amount of storage capacity that you need for your backup jobs. This removes the guesswork from provisioning space on VTLs that one normally encounters using VTLs without DVT. (How large should I make each virtual tape cartridge? How many virtual tape cartridges should I make of that size? Etc.)
Using DVT, each virtual tape cartridge only reserves a 1 GB of initial capacity and then dynamically scales as high as you set your upper threshold. (If you do not set an upper limit, the dynamic virtual tape cartridge has a maximum capacity of 2 TB.) This makes it easier for administrators to introduce a REO VTL into their company's infrastructure without spending an inordinate amount of time configuring and managing the VTL and it saves money since DVT conserves disk space on the REO VTL.
Another advantage DVT has over traditional approaches to VTLs is replicating virtual tape cartridges to a secondary off-site VTL. Using a static virtual tape cartridge, the underlying storage system is ignorant of the blocks of data in use on the virtual tape cartridge. So if you have a 40 GB virtual tape cartridge that you wish to replicate, the VTL may replicate all 40 GB of the virtual tape cartridge since VTLs tend to replicate data at the block level. So whether the virtual tape cartridge is full or only has one byte of data on it, all blocks on the virtual tape cartridge are replicated regardless of how much data is actually stored on the virtual tape cartridge.
Using DVT, the REO is aware of how much data is stored on the virtual tape cartridge. This also comes into play in replicating the blocks of data to a REO at another site. Rather than replicating all of the blocks of data on the cartridge, it only replicates the amount of data that is actually stored on each virtual tape cartridge. This reduces the overhead on the VTLs that they need to send and receive the blocks, the amount of storage capacity needed on each VTL and the amount of network bandwidth needed to transmit the blocks of data.
The cost savings seen by the introduction of thin provisioning in storage systems are well documented and it stands to reason that companies will realizes these same savings by using the DVT found in Overland Storage's REO VTLs. DVT eases the REO's initial configuration, simplifies its ongoing management, more efficiently uses storage capacity and contributes to reducing the amount of data that companies need to replicate when sending data offsite.
REO's DVT value proposition is also felt up front since it makes it easier for you to introduce disk-based backup into your environment by initially making your backup jobs more manageable. All told, DVT should result in tangible efficiencies and cost savings that should make both you, and your boss, pleased with the benefits of introducing REO's DVT into your backup environment.
To address this, thin provisioning has recently emerged as a way for storage systems to only reserve the storage capacity that is actually needed. By monitoring when data is written to a storage system, it eliminates the need to allocate extra, unneeded storage capacity for an application. In so doing, thin provisioning provides a more efficient and cost effective approach to storage capacity management. However to date thin provisioning has been the exclusive domain of a few NAS and SAN based storage systems.
Overland Storage changes this. It represents one of the first, if not the first, virtual tape library (VTL) provider to include thin provisioning as part of its REO series VTL offering. Known as Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT), virtual tape cartridges can now dynamically increase or decrease in capacity as backups demand. Formatted this way, virtual tape cartridges only use as much of the REO's real storage capacity as it needs.
Overland Storage's DVT provides administrators with two configuration options:
Static is the traditional way that VTLs are configured which the REO VTL does support. In a static configuration, each virtual tape cartridge is assigned a specific storage capacity (20 GB, 40 GB, etc.). The REO includes this static option since there may be a requirement by some applications for a fixed virtual tape cartridge size. However the static setting is not an "all-or-nothing" setting across the REO VTL so companies only need to configure some of the virtual tape cartridges in this fashion, if they use it at all.
It is the dynamic setting that should interest more companies anyway. All virtual tape cartridges configured as "dynamic" reserve an initial capacity of 1 GB. Then, as data is written to this virtual tape cartridge by the backup software during backup periods, the virtual tape cartridge dynamically grows in size to house all of the data in the backup job. Equally interesting, as the backup jobs expire or data is copied from the virtual tape cartridge to a physical tape cartridge and the data deleted, the virtual tape cartridge automatically shrinks in size back to its original 1 GB size.
The REO does include some measures to prevent virtual tape cartridges configured as dynamic from growing to exorbitant capacities. Companies can optionally set an upper threshold (20 GB, 80 GB, 200 GB, etc) so that once the virtual tape cartridge reaches that capacity, backup data is then placed on another virtual tape cartridge. If no maximum capacity for a virtual tape cartridge is defined, the virtual tape cartridge defaults to the maximum size of 2 TB.
Using REO's DVT, companies no longer need to rely on over provisioning, manual intervention or even new technologies like deduplication as their primary means to keep storage capacities on their VTLs under control. Overland Storage's application of the principles of thin provisioning to virtual tape on its REO VTL gives companies a new option for control over their storage infrastructure while maintaining the backup and recovery speeds that backup to disk is expected to provide.
]]>Any time one looks at midrange backup appliances, the appliances are almost always NAS based. When configured this way, the backup appliance is attached to the local LAN, it appears as a filer server to the backup server and files are backed up to a folder on that appliance. Though I initially called to speak to Overland Storage's Senior Product Manager, Jeff Graham, about REO's Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) technology, I first wanted to get some clarification on why Overland Storage's REO-series appliances are configured as Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) rather than as a NAS-based appliance.
Jeff provided a couple of reasons as to why Overland Storage currently configures its REO-series appliances as VTLs:
The first reason has to do with performance. Overland Storage has found that its VTLs consistently outperform NAS-based appliances. On NAS-based appliances you have to introduce a file system on the appliance which consumes some server overhead (processing and memory) that a block-based VTL does not consume. However, the larger benefit of using a REO is that it is optimized for storing the large sequential blocks of reads and writes found in backup traffic. Using a NAS, these blocks will fragment over time as the system distributes these blocks of data across the back end disk drives. Using a REO-series VTL, all of the blocks of data are kept together on a specific virtual tape cartridge that helps prevents this type of fragmenting from occurring.
The other reason is manageability. Using a NAS-based backup appliance, folders are created on the appliance's file system that is then used to store the backup data. The problem that can emerge in this scenario is that as if and when the folder fills up with data, the backup job can fail or hang. To allow the backup job to continue, administrators may need to increase the folder's size, manually direct the backup software to backup the data in another folder or manually give the OK to the backup software to overwrite older data in that folder.
Using a REO-series VTL, administrators have a couple of options within the backup software that minimize the likelihood of backup job failures. They can configure the backup software to migrate data from virtual tapes to physical tapes so as the REO VTL fills up, the backup software recognizes this and automatically moves the data from virtual tape to physical tape and then deletes the data on the virtual tape. Alternatively, companies can add more disk capacity to the REO and create more virtual tape cartridges for additional storage capacity.
Bottom-line, using a REO VTL companies do not need to change their backup structure. The backup software recognizes and treats the REO VTL like a physical tape library which minimizes the number of changes that companies need to make their backup infrastructure.
Now, having said all of this, Graham says that Overland Storage is investigating the possibility of adding a NAS option to their backup appliance. The rationale behind this move is that despite the fact VTLs are better suited for backup, there are still market forces at play. A NAS-based backup appliance is simpler for companies to understand since it does not require Overland Storage or its resellers to explain what a VTL is or how it. However, Graham did not indicate if Overland Storage actually plans to move in this direction or, if they are, when such an appliance might be released.
In a future blog entry, I'll delve more deeply into Overland Storage REO's DVT technology, how it works and what makes it unique in the market place.
]]>In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage's Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website. Though I think most users are well aware that disk is now a viable target for backup, it didn't really hit me until I watched this video by Overland Storage's VP of Worldwide Sales, Bob Farkaly, just how many configuration options are available when using disk as a backup target.
During the presentation, "Professor" Farkaly took the viewer (in this case, me) through the disk-based offerings that Overland Storage has for backup. These include:
It seems that with the incessant noise one hears about deduplication every time you read or hear about something storage related, it's easy to forget about the fact that using disk-as-disk is not necessarily a bad thing. Deduplication may incur a write penalty when backing up data, a read penalty when retrieving data and, more than likely, an up-front financial penalty when purchasing and licensing the deduplication technology. Though Overland Storage offers a deduplicating backup appliance (which I'll get to in a second), these versions of the REO peel away some of the complexity and cost and give users options to present the systems as either disk or virtual tape libraries (VTLs) through iSCSI and FC interfaces.The videos on Overland Storage's TDP website are definitely worth the time to watch for those who are looking to learn more about tiered data protection as well as those who also want a better understanding of what is the best type of disk system to introduce into your backup process. What you read in the press can sometimes leave one with the impression that deduplicating all of your backup data is the only way to go. Longer term it probably is, but for now the journey of introducing disk into the backup process has just begun and Overland Storage's strategy of "Walk, then run" when introducing disk into the backup process is one worth following.
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