Unitrends Recovery-943: The Soul of a New Backup Appliance (Part 2)

Unitrends recently introduced the Unitrends Recovery-943. This appliance is the next generation flagship of the Unitrends Recovery-series of backup appliances. We began this series of blog posts by discussing why backup appliances are experiencing such rapid demand and adoption, and will continue the discussion in the next few posts by addressing the challenges facing enterprise-class data protection backup appliance vendors. We will then discuss the Recovery-943 architecture and the specific responses that the designers of the Recovery-943 had to each of the challenges discussed in this post.

Integration

One reason that you buy an appliance is the convenience – the integration of functionality so that you don’t have to worry about the underlying implementation. Take a common appliance in your kitchen – the toaster. You don’t want to worry about the alloy composition of the nichrome heating element or the spring tension in the tray that holds your bread; you just want toast.

In a backup appliance, integration can refer to either vertical integration or horizontal integration. Vertical integration is a defining characteristic of a backup appliance: the storage, server, operating system, data protection software, and support are vertically integrated in a functional “stack” and delivered by a vendor. As a buyer, what you want to be concerned with are companies that take commodity backup software and put it on a generic hardware platforms and call that a backup appliance. Not only is there a lack of real integration and “balance” – but even more importantly you don’t get a primary advantage of what some call the “OTTC” effect – One Throat To Choke – which means that a single vendor is responsible for everything and there can be no “finger pointing” when it comes to support.

Horizontal integration is also incredibly important in a backup appliance. Functionality for different components of data protection should be available on a single system and heterogeneous protection for a wide variety of servers, storage, hypervisors, operating systems, and applications should be available. And pay particular attention to licensing: complex licensing schemes and a plethora of licensing codes can quickly erode the value of horizontal integration by making the user feel that the backup vendor is constantly “nickel and diming” the customer.

Thus the challenge with respect to integration for the backup appliance vendor is insuring that they can deliver an end-to-end vertically integrated data protection appliance while also enabling their customer to use the functionality of the device across their entire IT infrastructure.

Time to Value

Consumers are increasingly demanding simpler and easier to use devices of all types – from cell phones to portable generators. Business-based IT personnel at businesses are no different; with fewer IT staff responsible for increasing user functionality it’s important that the benefit of a product be realized ever more quickly with a relatively shallow learning cure.

Time to Value (TtV) is a metric that represents the total time it takes to deploy and realize the first value to a buyer. With respect to TtV, more time is bad; less time is good.

For a backup appliance, the definition of TtV is the total time that it takes to set up an appliance and begin performing the first backup. For backup software, on the other hand, the definition of TtV is the time it takes to set up a server, set up the storage, install an operating system on it, install backup software on it, perform set up, and begin performing the first backup.

The challenge with respect to TtV is that most appliance vendors, despite having a natural advantage given the appliance model, have setup software that is difficult to use and/or has a steep learning curve. This causes a lengthening of TtV and an attendant frustration by the user of the appliance.

Storage Performance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced “Glacier” – cloudbased storage at only about one penny per gigabyte per month. It was at the time of the announcement about an order of magnitude less expensive than the typical AWS storage. It has one primary drawback – it typically takes at least a few hours to begin transferring your data. It’s by far more affordable – but if you need your data quickly, all the affordability in the world isn’t going to matter to you.

As we discussed in the prior section, performance balanced with affordability are key design criteria for backup appliance vendors. Of particular importance is the architecture of the storage. Backup appliances have a relatively unique set of I/O characteristics. Most people tend to focus upon the massive amounts of data that must be written to very highly protected and very affordable storage. But in a modern backup appliance, there’s also a tremendous number of smaller reads and writes due to not only the metadata database associated with the backups but also deduplication as well as virtualization failover and other advanced recovery techniques.

Creating a storage architecture that can be trusted not to lose data, that can perform a variety of tasks with excellent performance, and that is affordable is one of the foremost challenges in designing a backup appliance.

What are your thoughts on the challenges that we’ve addressed so far? Do you agree or disagree?