I was out attending the “Backup School Hits the Road” seminar yesterday. It was an all day seminar by the TechTarget people. Two things about this event made me go there:
- Agenda contained topics like “Top Backup Configuration Blunders”, “Engineering Optimal Backups, VTL and Data De-duplication”.
- The speaker was Curtis Preston.
Its amazing how some folks have the flair to take the most boring, non-sought-after subject of Systems Administration and make it interesting. Keeping a room full of suits and Systems Administrators equally interested from start to finish on this subject is a *very* difficult task. Curtis is really good at it. Job well done, my man.
What’s even more impressive is that he was able to keep his composure and not let the events back home superseed the job at hand. I am refering to the California fires and seemingly he lives quite close to the evacuation zone. My heart goes out to all of them.
While the topics are generic in nature, the presentation included tidbits and information for all backup software users, be it Symantec (Veritas Netbackup), Legato Networker, TSM and others. The speaker does come across as a long time user of Netbackup (and on Unix). He’s among friends there :)
The storage world is such a small one. I walk into the exhibit area and we had all the usual culprits in there – COPAN, Data Domain, NetApp, EMC, Quantum etc wedged between our reseller friends. Familiar vendors and even more familiar people. The guy who was with NetApp for 8 years was now manning the booth for Data Domain. The guy who was with ADIC and later Quantum was now showing off the Data Domain warez.. All friends and well respected of course.
/follow this visual/
The streets of Agrabah with the vendors selling fruit. The usual wooing and the best tricks on display…
The useful portions of the day were mixed in with obligatory evils – Exhibit areas and Vendor showcases. I think they ought to do away with the vendor presentations completely at these events. If I want to know more, I will come to your exhibit areas. Leave the conference rooms to the users/customers for ad-hoc group discussions and networking. As it is, these vendor presentations are about 10 min each. In that 10 mins, most vendors try to cram 15 slides and try to tell a customer story in between. Yo – Sales guy. No work. Complete waste of time.
Some big messages that stuck in my head even after the day long seminar:
- Most backup problems are not capacity/hardware/software problems – they are people problems (I remember hearing it from him before)
- Today’s backup environment should and must include some sort of backup-to-disk component
- In the LEAST, consider de-duplication for your backup environment. Not looking at it is not an option
He also made a fourth point, I didn’t quite get it.
- MUST encrypt your backups. Don’t be the next guy that loses tapes and information.
yet, when talking about backup encryption technologies
- Encryption is hard to engineer, implement and maintain. Overall, you are asking for trouble..
er… ???
De-Duplication
Boy, aren’t people on that bandwagon. Me too, to most extent, but it was like a revelation hit the storage world. All the vendors that push de-duplication were there and none of them that do not push were there. So we got a day long coolaid about how it is cool and the “entire” world is moving towards it. All the RAID and MAID people now have de-duplication. All (most) of the VTL and tape people have a de-duplication solution. All the backup software people have some sort of de-duplication. And there are other people that do simply de-duplication. Not once, during the entire day, did I hear a discussion about the current problems with De-duplication and the direction the industry is heading.
I certainly do not want to end the day’s note on a pessimistic note. It was a great educational event. De-duplication is very real. The technology is available today and what’s more, there is a huge market demand for it. I certainly learned a lot. Now let’s here from the OEMs that do not have any de-duplication solutions in place and ask them why…
