Great interview of Enrique Salem, CEO of Symantec, at SearchDataBackup, with regard to Symantec’s backup appliances and proactive monitoring of hardware:

SearchDataBackup.com: Do you have to convince customers you can get hardware right?

Salem: When you think of the appliance business, there are a lot of things around it to allow customers to use it reliably. One of the capabilities we’re focused on is how to do reliable remote diagnostics of what’s happening to an appliance. When they put an appliance in, a lot of customers are saying, ‘Great, but when there’s something wrong with the device I want to know about it.’ And they’d like that to be a proactive notification from Symantec. There’s a lot of work we’re doing around the hardware product.

This is an absolutely brilliant idea.  We love it.  Our customers love it.  When we released it two years ago, our customers were thrilled.

I do think Symantec is right.  One thing that I always thought when they and CommVault were slapping their software on Dell hardware and pushing it out the door (last I looked, both Symantec and CommVault were still doing this – although the AppAssure acquisition seems to have taken the shine off that) was that the kind of “vertically integrated” all-in-one backup appliance motion they were trying to attach to had legs if only they understood that they had to be responsible for the whole enchilada.

But I’d note the following.  In order to really nail this, you have to engineer your support organization from the top-down and bottom-up to not only support proactive monitoring of the underlying hardware, but you have to have a customer-first perspective in your support.

[In honor of Backup Exec dropping its Unix support across the board with its Backup Exec 2012 product, I'm going to do a few posts on the Unix market overall.  This is part 3, part 1 is here and part 2 is here.  The basis for the data discussed here is Gartner's [Market Share Analysis: Operating System Software, Worldwide, 2011 - published on April 25, 2012]]

A lot of AIX’s rise can arguably be attributed to HP-UX’s fall – HP-UX declined at a 9.6% rate primarily due to Oracle stopping support for the HP-UX Itanium platform.

Oracle Solaris revenue was an anemic 1.5% – at the same time, OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) grew at 47.5% (admittedly from a small revenue base.)  OEL is an RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) compatible distribution with additional features.

Speaking of Red Hat, they grew RHEL at 22.8%.  Mac OS  revenue accelerated by 19.8%.

Of course, SUSE is now an independent business and grew at a 20% rate.

All in all, this is a pretty dynamic market – some big winners, some big losers.  Of course, providing backup, archiving, disaster recovery, and in some cases instant recovery (Unitrends does that for Windows and VMware)  is a tall order for all of them – but I believe that the rewards are there for vendors willing to stick by not just Windows and Mac OS but Linux and Unix as well.

I believe that the ability to perform ever-increasing degrees of heterogeneous backup, with a single recovery engine (this has been termed “Recovery Nirvana” by Dave Russell at Gartner) is where we as an industry need to be focused.

(Note: Of these, Unitrends handles backup of Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and iSeries – as well as Netware.)

[More in the next post on this subject]

[In honor of Backup Exec dropping its Unix support across the board with its Backup Exec 2012 product, I'm going to do a few posts on the Unix market overall.  This is part 2, part 1 is here.  The basis for the data discussed here is Gartner's [Market Share Analysis: Operating System Software, Worldwide, 2011 - published on April 25, 2012]]

Before we dive into Unix, a few words about Microsoft and Windows.  After we entered the proclaimed “post-PC” era (proclaimed by Apple and all of the VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – players), you’d have expected overall Microsoft Windows shipments to – in a word – suck.  And sure enough, the Microsoft Windows client business grew at only 3.4%.  Windows 7 in particular had relatively sluggish uptake.  However, Windows Server grew 13.9%.  Gartner reported that cloud and virtualization were the drivers for this growth.

IBM was the second largest market share operating system vendor in the world and grew 8.6%.  System z, AIX, and System i (iSeries or what used to be called AS/400) contributed – although only System z and AIX actually grew.  AIX is doing well and is now the #1 Unix operating system in terms of revenue (displacing HP-UX.)  Gartner has a lot more data on this.

I’ve always wondered why more backup vendors don’t support AIX – and in particular, AIX bare metal.  AIX is a good operating system and IBM has invested a lot in it – seems short-sighted for all backup vendors to crowd into Windows and VMware and ignore AIX.

(Note: Of these, Unitrends handles backup of Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and iSeries – as well as Netware.)

[More in the next post on this subject]

Got a tweet the other day about my previous posts (see here and here) about Backup Exec and Unix.  First of all, let me note that I really appreciate the response from Symantec – and to try to be totally fair I decided to write a blog post about it.

Matt Stephenson, a person who seems  to be a well-meaning and  solid guy, tweeted “had time to read the latest half true blog from Unitrends…now I need a beer…”

Katie, who works in our marketing group, contacted me – and I told her that if there was anything at all untruthful that I’d be glad to correct.  After she noted that, the response from Matt was

Disingenuous: Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.To make sure I understood, I looked up the precise definition of the term “disingenuous“:

So that I can be completely candid and sincere, let me state – I honestly don’t know why Backup Exec dropped Unix and Netware.  I haven’t taken guesses because I figured whatever I would guess would be colored by the fact that I ***AM*** biased – I work at Unitrends and like the company.  But my guess was that it was simply financial – that given the growth rates of competitors in the Windows-only space Symantec decided to focus on Windows and put their money to work only in that area.  I’ve worked in big companies before and I completely understand senior executives

And I actually disagree with what some folks on Spiceworks have said – I think that Symantec actually made some nice progress on its user interface – and I commend them for that.  My guess is that the funding that might have gone into Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Netware, and other Unix backup went to that.

But so that there’s no question of sincerity, let me be clear.  I’m hoping that all the former Unix backup customers of Symantec’s Backup Exec come over to Unitrends.  We want them.  Period.  And I’ll make a further commitment – come hell or high water we won’t abandon them.

[In honor of Backup Exec dropping its Unix support across the board with its Backup Exec 2012 product, I'm going to do a few posts on the Unix market overall.]

Okay – I’ll admit it, I’m a bit biased concerning Unix.  Way back in the 1980′s and 1990′s, I was a Unix kernel developer – worked at NCR and then when AT&T took over NCR, I worked there.  Quite a few of the folks at Unitrends worked in that environment.   But shaking off my bittersweet recollections all those years ago, I was still surprised when Symantec’s Backup Exec dropped Unix like a hot potato in Backup Exec 2012.   So I thought I’d publish a few facts about operating systems and Unix.

As per Gartner [Market Share Analysis: Operating System Software, Worldwide, 2011 - published on April 25, 2012] the overall operating system software market grew at 6% last year to $32.2B.  The Unix market, despite the continued rumors of its death, was flat last year.  IBM gained share; HP continued to lose share primarily because they dropped support of Oracle on Itanium.

Why was Unix flat?  Well, Linux had the fastest growth in terms of server operating systems at 16.6% – almost triple the growth of the overall market.  And of course Microsoft kept its’ #1 position with Windows Server by increasing its share slightly from 51.2% tgo 53.3%.  The overall numbers from Gartner for each operating system are given below

Gartner revenue share changes in each operating system are reproduced below:

•  Windows Server: 13.9%
• Linux Server: 16.6%
• IBM AIX: 8.1%
• IBM System z: 10.4%
• HP-UX: -9.6%
• Oracle Solaris: 1.5%
• Other (non-Unix): 0.6%
• IBM System i: 4.7%
• Other (Unix): -0.1%

[More in my next post]

Symantec announced this week that its sales for the last quarter were below expectations with the reason being poor sales for Backup Exec (link here.)   The CEO, Enrique Salem, stated during a call to address the earnings shortfall:

“While we experienced a pause ahead of our Backup Exec product refresh, we continued to see momentum in our backup appliances.”

Backup appliances?  Yep.  Symantec has found religion, and it’s backup appliances!  Once again, the line an advertisement from the Tracy Kidder “Soul of a New Machine” springs to mind – to paraphrase:

They say Symantec’s entry into backup appliances will legitimize the industry.

The bastards say, welcome.

I could go on and on about how Symantec claimed they’ve been shipping a backup appliance for years with Dell – but on this blog we’ve been there and done that.  I could note once again how insanely expensive Symantec’s Backup Exec appliance is compared to ours – but on this blog we’ve discussed that as well.

No – what I ABSOLUTELY LOVED in this article was a quote from the Symantec CEO:

“We have the ability to sell software, the media server and deduplication in one device, and that’s something none of our competitors do.”

Really?  NONE of your competitors?  Interesting.  No one can do the server, software, and deduplication on one device?  Hmmmm.

Denial in psychology was postulated as a defense mechanism by no other than Freud.  He said that denial occurred when a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects that fact despite what may be overwhelming evidence.

Shifting from psychology to philosophy, Descartes is best known for his principle “I think, therefore I am.”  Speaking for Unitrends, I can clearly state that our philosophy is “I backup, therefore I am.”  Or, to put in slightly more aggressive terms, we had 100% growth last month – how did you folks do?

One of the things that virtual backup purports to do is to make data protection easier for the user.  HOS (Host Operating System)-level backup is inherently simpler (not always better in all cases, but almost always simpler.)

VMware’s VADP (vStorage APIs for Data Protection) are technically superior to Microsoft’s Hyper-V VSS (Volume Copy Shadow Service) for backup.  VADP inherently includes CBT (Changed Block Tracking) and other features; while backup vendors have to implement CBT and other technologies when protecting Hyper-V.

The technologists at VMware are doing a great job.  However, the folks in charge of product definition and pricing are setting themselves up to get killed by Microsoft.  Why?  Price.

If you want HOS-level protection for VMware free (unlicensed) ESXi, you’re out of luck.  VADP only works with the licensed versions of VMware ESXi or ESX.  What does that mean?  It means you’re going to have to buy at least VMware Essentials – which has an MSRP of $495 plus support.

In the meantime, the technically inferior (at least for now) Hyper-V has no such constraints on its VSS interface.  If you want HOS-level protection for Hyper-V, it’s not going to cost you a dime more from your free version of Hyper-V Server.

The technologists I know absolutely HATE this kind of thing.  Good technology undone by poor product, and marketing decisions.

I hope Microsoft’s Hyper-V V3 (also called Hyper-V 2012 or Windows 8 Server and Client Hyper-V) forces VMware to come to its senses.  I’m a fan of the VMware technology every bit as much as I’m a fan of the Windows 8 Hyper-V technology – but to me, when I take into account price, for the small business and even the lower midrange business Windows 8 Hyper-V is going to deliver higher value.

I don’t want to date myself, but I remember getting an upgrade to a 20MB hard drive in my PC. I thought, “Oh boy, I’ll never fill this thing up!” It blows my mind now to think about that now. I’ve got:

• 500GB drive in my laptop
• 180GB on my iPod
• 32GB on my iPhone
• 30TB on my HyperV server
• 6TB on my backup appliance
• On and on…

IDC predicts that over the next decade, data in the digital universe will experience a 50x growth rate, while the number of “files” will experience a 75x growth rate.* So, backing up all this data, and continuing to back it up in a window of time that meets your business requirements is a huge challenge and a moving target.

Lots of IT shops are solving this problem by implementing backup solutions which offer incremental forever backup strategy. Basically, only one full or master backup is required (the first one), and from then on, you run incremental backups which only capture changes since the last backup. The frequency at which you run the incremental backups should be based on the rate of change of your data. Typically you run these incremental backups at least daily, but more often shops run them every few minutes.
If you are considering implementing a new backup solution with an incremental forever strategy, here are some things you want to research:

• Does the solution allow me to meet my organization’s RPOs (recovery point objectives)?
•  Does it allow me to run incremental backups frequently enough?
• Does the solution allow me to meet my organization’s RTOs (recovery time objectives)?
• Does it offer point-in-time recovery and auto-synthesis of the incremental backups such that multiple lengthy restore jobs are not required?
•  Does the solution allow me to manage retention of my data?
• Does it allow me to set minimum and maximum time units to keep data and purge appropriately without ever requiring a full or master “reset” job?
• Does the solution offer incremental forever backups for all my OS’s and data types?

Unitrends offers incremental backups for almost all flavors of Windows as well as Linux. You should include them in your due diligence!

*2011 Digital Universe, “Extracting Value from Chaos”, June 2011, John Gantz and David Reinsel

Symantec announced with a tremendous amount of fanfare their new release of Backup Exec, called Backup Exec 2012.  And there are a lot of really interesting new features.  Unfortunately for Backup Exec users who want heterogeneous environments, there are also some pretty important things eliminated.  This Symantec forums post sums it up:

mari: I was suprised to just read in the BE 2012 SCL that all Unix agents are now discontinued in BE 2012. Only Linux agents are supported. What options do I have now since I have Solaris servers? Will the Linux agent work on Solaris?

VJware (Symantec Employee, Accredited): No, the RALUS support for Solaris has been discontinued with BE 2012.

mari: What alternative does Symantec provide for their customers who use Solaris since they are now left without a method to backup this OS?

(Crickets…)

Look – I understand that there are tough choices to be made by any backup vendor who wants to address the small and midmarket enterprise space (SME.)  It’s a heterogeneous world out there.  But it doesn’t feel like screwing over your existing customers who are using UNIX or Netware or VMware 3.5 is the right answer.  At the very least, one might have expected Symantec to announce plans to eventually stop supporting those releases in the future.

I’m not sure why this was done – whether it was to force customers to spend more money moving up to Netbackup – or whether it was just running out of money – but it doesn’t seem to be focused on customers.  And that’s ironic given that Symantec has spent so much money on the new user interface.

I know developing the new user interface and new functionality was expensive (although as I understand it the company is learning that the Microsoft ribbonized interface paradigm, while pretty, tends to lead to more clicks to perform the same operation – and is hearing a lot about the decision to not allow multiple backups in a schedule.)  But what we’ve found is that it’s a lot smarter to be careful about avoiding forcing your customers to upgrade and/or replace the servers that they have – because customers have a tendency to “vote with their feet” when you in essence put a gun to their head.

Spent a few hours the other evening talking to a someone who in our industry about various backup vendors, products, and issues (Yes – you just got insight into what I do for fun. )  This person works at a backup vendor and is pretty knowledgeable.  Had a great conversation about the load that backup products put on a protected system in terms of the backup agent “footprint” – the CPU, memory, and I/O resource associated with backup.

We laughed about claims from vendors that agentless backup protection (and note, Unitrends does both agentless and agent) has a lower footprint.  When you get really techie about it, and we were a little guilty of that, you start talking about protocols such as backup-specific and SMB/CIFS and how “chatty” the general-purpose protocols tend to be.  But that wasn’t what surprised me.

We began talking about the benefits and disadvantages of doing VMware and Hyper-V backup at the GOS (Guest Operating System, or in the virtual machine itself) versus at the HOS (Host Operating System.)  At one point the person noted two backup vendors (neither was Unitrends), and stated that one backup vendor who did backup in the GOS was superior because they only took “a few percent” of the CPU – and that the vendor who did the backup in the HOS could spike up to in the tens of percentage points.

Now – we’re all prisoners of our own reality – and this wasn’t the first time I had heard this story from a Windows-only backup vendor.  So I asked questions like how many VMs were on the system, what the utilization of the system was, and the like.  Well – those questions were difficult for the person to answer – because of their point of view.

I tell this story to illustrate a point.  Companies like VMware have gone to a lot of trouble to optimize backup at the HOS level (note: Microsoft has gone to less trouble, so that backup vendors have to do a bit more, but Microsoft’s VSS backup architecture is at its heart a pretty innovative mechanism – and with things like primary NTFS deduplication coming in Windows 8 as well as replica handling it’s getting even more interesting.)  So if you imagine you have 10 VMs, and you’re using backup in each virtual machine sucking away 5% of the resources of the system 24x7x52, you just put a pretty big tax on the server.  Conversely, if you’re backing up at the HOS level, you’re using the inherently more efficient algorithms developed by the vendors within the virtual environment – so if you’re backing up once a day for an hour and taking 50% of the CPU (for example), you just gave a whole lot of CPU cycles over a 24-hour day back to the server or virtualization administrator.

Backing up at the HOS level isn’t always automatically better.  In fact, I think that backup of virtualization environments works best when users have a choice as to whether to backup at the HOS or GOS level.  But don’t be fooled by someone explaining “a few percent” to you without understanding the true impact on your physical server utilization.