Backup – Lest we forget

World Backup Day – March 31st

Last week was World Backup Day. It is on March 31st every year so that you don’t lose your data and become an April’s Fool the next day.

Amidst the growing awareness of the importance of backup, no thanks to the ever growing destructive nature of ransomware, it is important to look into other aspects of data protection – both a data backup/recovery and a data security –  point of view as well.

3-2-1 Rule, A-B-C and Air Gaps

I highlighted the basic 3-2-1 rule before. This must always be paired with a set of practised processes and policies to cultivate all stakeholders (aka the people) in the organization to understand the importance of protecting the data and ensuring data recoverability.

The A-B-C is to look at the production dataset and decide if the data should be stored in the Tier 1 storage. In most cases, the data becomes less active and these datasets may be good candidates to be archived. Once archived, the production dataset is smaller and data backup operations become lighter, faster and have positive causation as well.

Air gaps have returned to prominence since the heightened threats on data in recent years. The threats have pushed organizations to consider doing data offsite and offline with air gaps. Cost considerations and speed of recovery can be of concerns, and logical air gaps are also gaining style as an acceptable extra layer of data. protection.

Backup is not total Data Protection cyberdefence

If we view data protection more holistically and comprehensively, backup (and recovery) is not the total data protection solution. We must ignore the fancy rhetorics of the technology marketers that backup is the solution to ensure data protection because there is much more than that.

The well respected NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Cybersecurity Framework places Recovery (along with backup) as the last pillar of its framework.

NIST Cybersecurity Framework

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What happened to NDMP?

The acronym NDMP shows up once in a while in NAS (Network Attached Storage) upgrade tenders. And for the less informed, NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) was one of the early NAS data management (more like data mover specifications) initiatives to backup NAS devices, especially the NAS appliances that run proprietary operating systems code.

NDMP Logo

Backup software vendors often have agents developed specifically for an operating system or an operating environment. But back in the mid-1990s, 2000s, the internal file structures of these proprietary vendors were less exposed, making it harder for backup vendors to develop agents for them. Furthermore, there was a need to simplify the data movements of NAS files between backup servers and the NAS as a client, to the media servers and eventually to the tape or disk targets. The dominant network at the time ran at 100Mbits/sec.

To overcome this, Network Appliance® and PDC Solutions/Legato® developed the NDMP protocol, allowing proprietary NAS devices to run a standardized client-server architecture with the NDMP server daemon in the NAS and the backup service running as an NDMP client. Here is a simplified look at the NDMP architecture.

NDMP Client-Server Architecture

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The prudence needed for storage technology companies

Blitzscaling has been on my mind a lot. Ever since I discovered that word a while back, it has returned time and time again to fill my thoughts. In the wake of COVID-19, and in the mire of this devastating pandemic, is blitzscaling still the right strategy for this generation of storage technology, hyperconverged, data management and cloud storage startups?

What the heck is Blitzscaling? 

For the uninformed, here’s a video of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked and a member of the Paypal mafia, explaining Blitzscaling.

Blitzscaling is about hyper growing, scaling ultra fast and rocketing to escape velocity, at the expense of things like management efficiency, financial prudence, profits and others. While this blog focuses on storage companies, blitzscaling is probably most recognizable in the massive expansion of Uber (and contraction) a few years ago. In the US, the ride hailing war is between Uber and Lyft, but over here in South East Asia, just a few years back, it was between Uber and Grab. In China it was Uber and Didi.

From the storage angle, 2 segments exemplified the blitzscaling culture between 2015 and 2020.

  • All Flash Startups
  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure Startups

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Resilient Integrated Data Protection against Ransomware

Early in the year, I wrote about NAS systems being a high impact target for ransomware. I called NAS a goldmine for ransomware. This is still very true because NAS systems are the workhorses of many organizations. They serve files and folders and from it, the sharing and collaboration of Work.

Another common function for NAS systems is being a target for backups. In small medium organizations, backup software often direct their backups to a network drive in the network. Even for larger enterprise customers too, NAS is the common destination for backups.

Backup to NAS system

Typical NAS backup for small medium organizations.

Backup to Data Domain with NAS Protocols

Backup to Data Domain with NAS (NFS, CIFS) Protocols

Ransomware is obviously targeting the backup as another high impact target, with the potential to disrupt the rescue and the restoration of the work files and folders.

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Veaam to boost Cloud Data Management

Cloud Data Management is a tricky word. Often vague, ambigious, how exactly would you define “Cloud Data Management“?

Fresh off the boat from Commvault GO 2019 in Denver, Colorado last week, I was invited to sample Veeam a few days ago at their Solution Day and soak into their rocketing sales in Asia Pacific, and strong market growth too. They reported their Q3 numbers this week, impressing many including yours truly.

I went to the seminar early in the morning, quite in awe of their vibrant partners and resellers activities and ecosystem compared to the tepid Commvault efforts in Malaysia over the past decade. Veeam’s presence in Malaysia is shorter than Commvault’s but they are able to garner a stronger following with partners and customers alike.

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Commvault big bet

I woke up at 2.59am in the morning of Sept 5th morning, a bit discombobulated and quickly jumped into the Commvault call. The damn alarm rang and I slept through it, but I got up just in time for the 3am call.

As I was going through the motion of getting onto UberConference, organized by GestaltIT, I was already sensing something big. In the call, Commvault was acquiring Hedvig and it hit me. My drowsy self centered to the big news. And I saw a few guys from Veritas and Cohesity on my social media group making gestures about the acquisition.

I spent the rest of the week thinking about the acquisition. What is good? What is bad? How is Commvault going to move forward? This is at pressing against the stark background from the rumour mill here in South Asia, just a week before this acquisition news, where I heard that the entire Commvault teams in Malaysia and Asia Pacific were released. I couldn’t confirm the news in Asia Pacific, but the source of the news coming from Malaysia was strong and a reliable one.

What is good?

It is a big win for Hedvig. Nestled among several scale-out primary storage vendors and little competitive differentiation, this Commvault acquisition is Hedvig’s pay day.

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Whither HPC, HPE?

HPE is acquiring Cray Inc. Almost 3 years ago, HPE acquired SGI. Back in 2017, HPE partnered WekaIO, and invested big in the latest Series C funding of WekaIO just weeks ago.

Cray, SGI and WekaIO are all strong HPC technology companies. Given the strong uptick in the HPC market, especially commercial HPC, we cannot deny HPE’s ambition to become the top SuperComputing and HPC vendor in the industry. Continue reading

Bridges to the clouds and more – NetApp NDAS

[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The NetApp Data Fabric Vision

The NetApp Data Fabric vision has always been clear to me. Maybe it was because of my 2 stints with them, and I got well soaked in their culture. 3 simple points define the vision.

  • The Data Fabric is THE data singularity. Data can be anywhere – on-premises, the clouds, and more.
  • Have bridges, paths and workflows management to the Data, to move the data to wherever the data may be.
  • Work with technology partners to build tools and data systems to elevate the value of the data

That is how I see it. I wrote about the Transcendence of the Data Fabric vision 3+ years ago, and I emphasized the importance of the Data Pipeline in another NetApp blog almost a year ago. The introduction of NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS) in the recently concluded Storage Field Day 18 was no different as NetApp constructs data bridges and paths to the AWS Cloud.

NetApp Data Availability Services

The NDAS feature is only available with ONTAP 9.5. With less than 5 clicks, data from ONTAP primary systems can be backed up to the secondary ONTAP target (running the NDAS proxy and the Copy to Cloud API), and then to AWS S3 buckets in the cloud.

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Clever Cohesity

[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

This is clever. This is very smart.

The moment the Cohesity App Marketplace pitch was shared at the Storage Field Day 18 session, somewhere in my mind, enlightenment came to me.

The hyperconverged platform for secondary data, or is it?

When Cohesity came into the scene, they were branded the latest unicorn alongside Rubrik. Both were gunning for the top hyperconverged platform for secondary data. Crazy money was pouring into that segment – Cohesity got USD250 million in June 2018; Rubrik received USD261 million in Jan 2019 – making the market for hyperconverged platforms for secondary data red-hot. Continue reading