Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA P.508.872.8200 F.508.935.4015 www.idc.com W H I T E P A P E R T a k i n g a S i n g l e - S y s t e m A p p r o a c h t o E n a b l e F a s t e r B a c k u p a n d M o r e E f f e c t i v e L o n g - T e r m A r c h i v i n g Sponsored by: EMC Richard L. Villars August 2012 Marshall Amaldas E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y Organizations around the world require more robust backup and archive-optimized storage solutions as they look to improve the availability of applications and deal with an explosion in the creation and use of unstructured data, including handling multiple retention periods on different types of archive data. They need storage systems that are optimized for usability in backup and archival environments. Today, organizations use backup applications as a means to meet long-term information retention needs driven by legal mandates or retention requirements from individual departments. At the same time, even though the archive market is still highly specialized and fragmented, many customers are willing to invest the time and effort required to implement a robust archiving strategy so much so that the disk-based archiving market continues to grow at a double-digit rate. However, to meet long-term retention requirements, IT administrators often simply select backup files or tapes and extend the retention period. This approach enables them to continue to leverage incremental backups and deduplication within existing backup processes; however, many of today's disk-based backup solutions are optimized for backup data, not archive data. Concurrent use of existing systems (tapes, customized solutions, optical media, primary storage, etc.) for backup and archive can jeopardize operational efficiency, boost costs, and reduce the manageability of long-term data assets. Backup and archive are complementary workloads, and IDC believes that many organizations can benefit from the use of solutions that not only leverage a common data management foundation (including replication management and data deduplication for backup and archive) but also provide flexibility in the placement of data on hardware platforms optimized for the distinct needs of each use case. Solutions such as EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems address many of the challenges organizations are struggling with as they balance requirements for disk-based backup and cost-effective archiving.
C H A N G I N G B U S I N E S S P R I O R I T I E S I N A S H I F T I N G W O R L D Companies rely on an expanding set of applications to compete in today's rapidly evolving business environment. For example: They rely on email, collaboration tools, and Web sites to communicate and conduct business with customers and business partners. They are collecting, storing, and analyzing more information about products, customers, and transactions. They are digitizing records, design documents, and other types of unstructured data to boost efficiency, offer new services, and comply with evolving government regulations. This expansion in the range of information that companies are creating, accessing, and retaining has a significant effect on how they organize their datacenters and store information. CIOs must place a laserlike investment focus on IT products and solutions that address three business requirements: Reduce and control increases in the cost of doing business by boosting IT asset utilization through use of technologies such as data deduplication (Deduplication has a larger role to play outside traditional backup.) Enable more effective use of all types of information by a wider range of users by making it available in well-organized, long-term archives Ensure the integrity of the business and its information assets in the face of natural disaster, systems failures, or outside regulatory oversight I n f o r m a t i o n G r o w t h a n d D i s a s t e r R e c o v e r y R e s h a p i n g S t o r a g e a n d D a t a P r o t e c t i o n R e q u i r e m e n t s Over the past five years, many of the biggest drivers of storage spending by organizations were a direct result of the need to more quickly recover applications and to retain larger amounts of information over longer periods of time. Based on IDC's Storage Consumption Model, the capacity (petabytes) deployed in 2011 to store backup copies (replicated data) and archival data (unstructured and database archive content) will be 2.4 times greater than that deployed to store original sets of structured data. The growing reliance on IT for everyday business operations in many industries amplifies the need for IT systems with higher resiliency but not higher costs. Today's disaster recovery (DR) requirements are becoming more stringent with shorter recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives as DR is increasingly more important to business risk management than ever before. 2 #227934R1 2012 IDC
(%) Virtualized server environments are further boosting demands for rapid data recovery. Many companies now rely on virtualized server environments for over half of all their deployed workloads (see Figure 1). They need backup and recovery solutions that enable near-real-time recovery of virtualized applications to meet customers' more exacting service-level agreements (SLAs). These IT teams are turning to disk-based media as their backup and archive tier. F I G U R E 1 V i r t u a l i z a t i o n I s F o u n d a t i o n P l a t f o r m f o r t h e D a t a c e n t e r : W o r l d w i d e I n s t a l l e d W o r k l o a d s V i r t u a l i z e d b y Y e a r 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Source: IDC, 2011 Similarly, organizations are creating, storing, and accessing all classes of information for long periods of time in response to new and stringent regulations and business requirements. They can no longer simply move this data to tape archives. They need to have continuous access to active archive information to exploit new business opportunities and/or reduce the costs of data retrieval for regulatory compliance. Deploying disk-based storage solutions optimized to meet the evolving accessibility SLAs associated with longer-term storage and active archiving of information is now a critical requirement. Key Backup and Archive Storage Solution Requirements Today, driven by legal mandates and retention requirements, companies often leverage backup and archive applications to retain data for the long term. However, there are varying scenarios of how backup and archive applications are being used by customers. In some scenarios, the majority of companies back up their data for long-term retention without having widely or uniformly implemented any formal archiving applications/processes. Instead of implementing formal archiving processes to meet their long-term retention requirements, administrators leverage the fact that all data sets are being backed up and simply extend the retention period of certain backup data sets. For most companies, these backups are stored on tapes and shipped offsite for long-term storage. 2012 IDC #227934R1 3
In other scenarios, companies do not adopt any tape-based processes for long-term retention; rather, they have already formalized practices via the archiving processes to meet the retention requirements. Some companies do both: They retain their backups for the long term per legal mandate requirements, and they also have implemented formal archiving processes to manage data growth. Companies have been using various types of devices to meet their backup and archive requirements including age-old optical media devices and tape. These existing products and solutions do not fit the "transformative" approach that EMC Data Domain is taking to help companies meet their requirements for backup and archive storage. However, the use of tape solely as a backup or archive tier poses numerous challenges despite its low acquisition cost. Challenges include slow and unreliable recovery as well as specific costs and risks associated with tape. Costs include infrastructure upgrades, management overhead, forced migration to newer tape drive technology, as well as offsite shipping and storage. In addition, due to the time required to ship and retrieve tapes to an offsite location and the lack of support for random access, accessing data on tapes can take days or weeks. Likewise, complications in locating and retrieving information in many traditional tape media solutions can impact the ability to reliably recover data. Potential loss or misplacement of physical tape media can also expose an organization to security, legal, and/or reputational risks. Today, a large and growing proportion of firms are using disk-based backup to enhance the availability of their backup data. The standard operating procedure in most datacenters calls for backup copies (whether on tapes or disks) to be kept readily accessible for DR purposes for a 30-day period (some are retained for as long as 90 days). Today, however, most organizations retain these backup copies for a much longer period to meet a wide range of long-term retention needs (e.g., compliance and regulation, information reuse). Compli ance and Regulat ion Many industries are required to hold information over extended periods of time for regulatory and compliance purposes. For example, financial institutions are required to retain data for at least seven years. In many services industries, as the number of communication channels increases, the types of content that must be archived as mandated by government regulation grow. These content types include the recent addition of blogs and social media content that now must be archived in accordance with the FINRA guidelines (Regulatory Notice 10-06). Many industries also have industry-specific guidelines (which are enforced and audited) with regard to information governance and hence are compelled to maintain large amounts of information over extended periods of time. Without the right efficiency technologies integrated into the archival storage solution, such requirements can quickly end up being large IT cost components. 4 #227934R1 2012 IDC
Informat ion Reuse In today's information age, a business' ability to leverage its own information is paramount. Those that fail to do so are at serious competitive risk. Firms are mining their historical data to analyze and extract information for market intelligence, product planning, and inventory planning. Healthcare organizations are scanning medical records for epidemiological research programs. In R&D environments, reuse of historical information can yield huge savings in time and effort, which in turn saves money and, in some cases, provides competitive advantage by reducing the time to bring products to market. Doing Disk-Based Backup and Archive Together: Good and Bad Today, most organizations still use traditional backup applications and tape as a means to meet long-term information retention needs, even though they can be less than optimal. Backup applications provide familiar functionality and are well ingrained in business processes and therefore provide the easiest method for IT managers to achieve long-term retention. Many of today's disk-based backup solutions, however, are optimized to meet high ingest performance requirements for backup data stored for short periods (weeks or months). Conversely, most archive systems are built solely for long-term data retention and cannot handle the ingest performance required for backup data. Similarly, for secure data retention, most of these existing archive systems do not allow companies to store archive data with different retention periods on the same system. These solutions typically do not have the functionality to isolate old data from new data. This shortcoming is important because the lack of separation prevents users from more cost effectively storing older data and isolating it for long-term recoverability. Most important, because the existing solutions lack deduplication technology, they do not help companies reduce their storage spend and footprint. S E L E C T I N G A S T O R A G E S Y S T E M T H A T O P T I M I Z E S B A C K U P S A N D A R C H I V I N G In today's information-rich datacenters, IT organizations need to implement solutions that address backup needs as well as long-term archiving requirements. Even though many companies are using backup solutions for long-term retention requirements, the steady growth of the disk-based archiving market suggests that the majority of users are starting to use archiving solutions that provide data classification, index, and search functions to better meet their long-term retention needs. One consequence is that IDC expects worldwide spending on archiving software to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.6% over the next five years. One key question is whether these two requirements (backup and archive) can be addressed by a single hardware and/or software solution. Clearly, using a single solution would reduce management complexity and minimize the potential costs and risks associated with redundant processes. However, commingling these two data management tasks on a single hardware platform could jeopardize performance, reliability, and integrity. 2012 IDC #227934R1 5
IDC believes that organizations can benefit greatly from the adoption of solutions that not only leverage a common data management foundation (including replication management and data deduplication) for backup and archive but also provide the option to place data on different tiers on a system optimized for the distinct needs of short-term and long-term retention. Such solutions should have the following characteristics: Scalability. IT buyers today are keen on making purchases that make better financial sense from an ROI standpoint and a time value of money standpoint. Many traditional storage systems require a large up-front capital investment that may not be fully used for years. Highly scalable systems allow for a lower upfront investment and incremental capacity expansion without requiring expensive and time-consuming data migrations. Performance. A system for backup and archive must provide the throughput required to back up growing data sets within increasingly stringent backup windows and be able to meet the SLAs demanded on data retrievals exercised by the ediscovery applications that operate on archive data sets. Availability and reliability. IT buyers need solutions that meet clearly defined, acceptable recovery or accessibility objectives so they can meet their own SLAs. Efficiency. Unchecked data growth is bound to become a burden over the course of time. IT organizations need to look for solutions that take full advantage of proven efficiency technologies such as deduplication. Compliance ready. Given that regulation and compliance are huge drivers of archival storage, the solution should provide a retention enforcement capability in order to ensure permanency of data that is written to disks. Monitoring and governance. The solution should have sufficient monitoring and reporting capability that will aid IT administrators in making informed infrastructure and policy decisions. Furthermore, the solution must be able to support the coexistence of governance and compliance archive data sets on the same system. The remainder of this white paper examines how well EMC's Data Domain deduplication storage systems address the needs for backup, remote replication, and archival storage solutions. E M C D A T A D O M A I N D E D U P L I C A T I O N S T O R A G E S Y S T E M S EMC is a world leader in information infrastructure solutions, including disk-based backup, recovery, and archiving products. EMC leverages advanced deduplication technology that it claims can reduce backup data sets by 10 to 30 times. Organizations of all sizes use EMC Data Domain Systems to improve the timeliness and cost-effectiveness of their backup, recovery, archiving, and DR processes. EMC emphasizes how use of its solutions for remote backup/recovery also helps reduce network traffic costs between datacenters. The systems eliminate redundant data before it is sent to the remote site. Network bandwidth is also better utilized because only deduplicated data needs to be replicated across networks. 6 #227934R1 2012 IDC
In addition, these systems were built as the "storage of last resort," and the architecture reflects this philosophy. Fault tolerance and self-healing are built in to ensure data integrity for the life of the systems. All data stored on Data Domain Systems not only is verified as it is written as well as before it is recovered from the system but also is continually checked to ensure that data remains available for fast, reliable access and recovery. D a t a D o m a i n S y s t e m s Data Domain Systems leverage proven capabilities for backup and archiving needs: Inline deduplication enables up to 31TB per hour throughput for high performance to ingest backups. Single controller scalability supports up to 65PB of logical storage under a single controller and provides a highly scalable architecture that allows customers to scale their storage in increments without having to purchase a net-new storage system. Storage space can be efficiently separated into distinct logical namespaces (via MTrees) so that administrators can separate these different data sets at a logical level and apply data management policies based on data set type. Data Domain Replicator software option enables network-efficient replication that reduces the risk of losing information to primary site failure by supporting network-efficient replication to DR locations. It provides flexible deployment options with numerous replication topologies, including full system mirroring, selective, bidirectional, many to one, one to many, and cascaded. Cross-site deduplication provides network efficiency across up to 90 remote sites. Data Domain Retention Lock software option enables administrators to easily implement deduplication with secure data retention to meet U.S. and international compliance standards such as SEC 17a-4, HIPAA, ISO Standard 15489-1, and more. This makes it an ideal target for archiving applications that are deployed to conform to the strictest compliance and IT governance practices. Most important, Data Domain Retention Lock software allows customers to deploy different retention policies on governance and compliance archive data sets (having different data types). Data Domain Boost software option extends the backup optimization benefits of Data Domain Systems by distributing parts of the deduplication process to the backup server. Data Domain Boost increases throughput speeds, minimizes backup LAN load, and improves backup server utilization. Data Domain Extended Retention software extends the scalability of a Data Domain System to enable cost-effective long-term backup retention on deduplicated disk to minimize reliance on tape. Flexibility for future upgrades provides the ability to leverage a data-in-place upgrade from the existing Data Domain controller to a next-generation controller, without migrating data off of the installed disk shelves. 2012 IDC #227934R1 7
C H A L L E N G E S Given ever-decreasing recovery time requirements and rapid data growth, the challenges posed by EMC's customers will only increase in the coming years. EMC needs to address a number of requirements as it expands its role in organizations' archive environments: Seek to improve power management efficiencies that, in combination with use of low-cost SATA disks, greatly reduce the energy costs of archiving data on disks in the datacenter. Establish close technical and business ties with leading content and archival software suppliers (like it has with many backup software suppliers) that will make it easier for customers to fully exploit the capabilities within Data Domain System. Extend the reach of Data Domain System to better address the growing archive needs of medium-sized and small businesses as well as large enterprises. This effort should include enabling support for use of cloud-based storage services as the back-end storage behind a Data Domain controller. C O N C L U S I O N The virtualization of servers (which need to be protected) and an explosion in the creation and use of unstructured data are increasing the need for robust backup and recovery-optimized storage solutions. At the same time, organizations are struggling to deal with an explosion in retained data for compliance or business reuse. Providing IT teams with storage systems that are optimized for usability in backup and archival environments is a critical requirement. EMC Data Domain Systems respond to many of the challenges organizations are struggling with as they balance requirements for disk-based backup, long-term backup retention, and cost-effective archiving. The systems support the most common method of long-term retention used today (long-term backup retention) and provide a foundation for supporting new archiving workloads. EMC is well positioned to help organizations that want to consider alternatives to tape for long-term backup retention and archiving needs. C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2012 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden. 8 #227934R1 2012 IDC