We’re not done with backup and recovery yet though. This article from Ben Liebowitz on setting up immutable backups for Vembu using S3 was comprehensive.
Tom Hollingsworth wrote a great article on clearing out the cruft in your home – specifically the electronic kind. I have a cupboard full of cables I tell myself I’ll need at some point, but I really need to just get rid of them. In my defence, I did unplug my LaserDisc player last weekend. Baby steps and all that.
Speaking of streaming, this article covered some of the best mechanisms to purchase digital content with. I still prefer buying discs, but I’m a bit weird too.
Finally, I’ve been a fan of John Birmingham’s writing since I was a misspending my youth at university in the 90s, so it makes sense that I’d enjoy his food reviews too (mainly because it’s not just about food). It should come as no surprise that I, too, love pork rillette.
Welcome to Random Short Take #56. Only three players have worn 56 in the NBA. I may need to come up with a new bit of trivia. Let’s get random.
Are we nearing the end of blade servers? I’d hoped the answer was yes, but it’s not that simple, sadly. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. I bought blade servers from Dell when they first sold them. But they can present challenges.
22dot6 emerged from stealth mode recently. I had the opportunity to talk to them and I’ll post something soon about that. In the meantime, this post from Mellor covers it pretty well.
It may be a Northern Hemisphere reference that I don’t quite understand, but Retrospect is running a “Dads and Grads” promotion offering 90 days of free backup subscriptions. Worth checking out if you don’t have something in place to protect your desktop.
Running VMware Cloud Foundation and want to stretch your vSAN cluster across two sites? Tony has you covered.
Pure//Accelerate happened recently / is still happening, and there was a bit of news from the event, including the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. As a former Pure1 user I can say this was a big part of the reason why I liked using Pure Storage.
Speaking of press releases, this one from PDI and its investment intentions caught my eye. It’s always good to see companies willing to spend a bit of cash to make progress.
I stumbled across Oxide on Twitter and fell for the aesthetic and design principles. Then I read some of the articles on the blog and got even more interested. Worth checking out. And I’ll be keen to see just how it goes for the company.
*Bonus Round*
I was recently on the Restore it All podcast with W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi. It was a lot of fun as always, despite the fact that we talked about something that’s a pretty scary subject (data (centre) loss). No, I’m not a DC manager in real life, but I do have responsibility for what goes into our DC so I sort of am. Don’t forget there’s a discount code for the book in the podcast too.
More data protection press releases? I’ve got you covered. Zerto released one recently about cloud data protection. Turns out folks like cloud when it comes to data protection. But I don’t know that everyone has realised that there’s some work still to do in that space.
This article on some of the peculiarities associated with mainframe deployments in the old days by Anthony Vanderwerdt was the most entertaining thing I’ve read in a while.
Alastair has been pumping out a series of articles around AWS principles, and this one on understanding your single points of failure is spot on.
Get excited! VMware Cloud Director 10.2.2 is out now. Read more about that here.
A lot of people seem to think it’s no big thing to stretch Layer 2 networks. I don’t like it, and this article from Ethan Banks covers a good number of reasons why you should think again if you’re that way inclined.
I caught up with my friend W. Curtis Preston from Druva a little while ago to talk about what the company has been up to. It seems like quite a bit, so I thought I’d share some notes here.
DXP and Company Update
Firstly, Druva’s first conference, DXP, is coming up shortly. There’s an interesting range of topics and speakers, and it looks to be jam packed with useful info. You can find out more and register for that here. The company seems to be going from strength to strength, enjoying 50% year-on-year growth, and 70% for Phoenix in particular (its DC product).
If you’re into Gartner Peer Insights – Druva has taken out the top award in 3 categories – file analysis, DRaaS, and data centre backup. Preston also tells me Druva is handling around 5 million backups a day, for what it’s worth. Finally, if you’re into super fluffy customer satisfaction metrics, Druva is reporting an “industry-leading NPS score of 88” that has been third-party verified.
Product News
It’s Fun To Read The CCPA
If you’re unfamiliar, California has released its version of the GDPR, know as the California Consumer Privacy Act. Druva has created a template for data types that shouldn’t be stored in plain text and can flag them as they’re backed up. It can also do the same thing in email, and you can now do a federated search against both of these things. If anything turns up that shouldn’t be there, you can go and remove problematic files.
ServiceNow Automation
Druva now has support for automated SNOW ticket creation. It’s based on some advanced logic, too. For example, if a backup fails 3 times, a ticket will be created and can be routed to the people who should be caring about such things.
More APIs
There’s been a lot of done work to deliver more APIs, and a more robust RBAC implementation.
DRaaS
DRaaS is currently only for VMware, VMC, and AWS-based workloads. Preston tells me that users are getting an RTO of 15-20 minutes, and an RPO of 1 hour. Druva added failback support a little while ago (one VM at a time). That feature has now been enhanced, and you can failback as many workloads as you want. You can also add a prefix or suffix to a VM name, and Druva has added a failover prerequisite check as well.
Other Notes
In other news, Druva is now certified on VMC on Dell. It’s added support for Microsoft Teams and support for Slack. Both useful if you’ve stopped storing your critical data in email and started storing it in collaboration apps instead.
Storage Insights and Recommendations
There’s also a storage insights feature that is particularly good for unstructured data. Say, for example, that 30% of your backups are media files, you might not want to back them up (unless you’re in the media streaming business, I guess). You can delete bad files from backups, and automatically create an exclusion for those file types.
Support for K8s
Support for everyone’s favourite container orchestration system has been announced, not yet released. Read about that here. You can now do a full backup of an entire K8s environment (AWS only in v1). This includes Docker containers, mounted volumes, and DBs referenced in those containers.
NAS Backup
Druva has enhanced its NAS backup in two ways, the first of which is performance. Preston tells me the current product is at least 10X faster than one year ago. Also, for customers already using a native recovery mechanism like snapshots, Druva has also added the option to backup directly to Glacier, which cuts your cost in half.
Oracle Support
For Oracle, Druva has what Preston describes as “two solid options”. Right now there’s an OVA that provides a ready to go, appliance-like experience, uses the image copy format (supporting block-level incremental, and incremental merge). The other option will be announced next week at DxP.
Thoughts and Further Reading
Some of these features seem like incremental improvements, but when you put it all together, it makes for some impressive reading. Druva has done a really impressive job, in my opinion, of sticking with the built in the cloud, for the cloud mantra that dominates much of its product design. The big news is the support for K8s, but things like multi-VM failback with the DRaaS solution is nothing to sneeze at. There’s more news coming shortly, and I look forward to covering that. In the meantime, if you have the time, be sure to check out DXP – I think it will be quite an informative event.
Speaking of data protection software releases and enhancements, we’ve barely recovered from the excitement of Veeam v10 being released and Anthony is already talking about v11. More on that here.
Speaking of Veeam, Rhys posted a very detailed article on setting up a Veeam backup repository on NFS using a Pure Storage FlashBlade environment.
Sticking with the data protection theme, I penned a piece over at Gestalt IT for Druva talking about OneDrive protection and why it’s important.
OpenDrives has some new gear available – you can read more about that here.
The nice folks at Spectro Cloud recently announced that its first product is generally available. You can read the press release here.
Wiliam Lam put out a great article on passing through the integrated GPU on Apple Mac minis with ESXi 7.
Welcome to Random Short Take #33. Some terrific players have worn 33 in the NBA, including Keith Closs and Stephon Marbury. This one, though, goes out to the “hick from French Lick” Larry Joe Bird. You might see the frequency of these posts ramp up a bit over the next little while. Because everything feels a little random at the moment.
I recently wrote about what Scale Computing has been up to with Leostream. It’s also done a bit with Acronis in the past, and it recently announced it’s now offering Acronis Cloud Storage. You can read more on that here.
The good folks at Druva are offering 6 months of free subscription for Office 365 and Endpoint protection (up to 300 seats) to help businesses adjust to these modern ways of working. You can find out more about that here.
I’ve been wanting to write about Panzura for a while, and I’ve been terribly slack. It’s enjoying some amount of momentum at the moment though, and is reporting revenue growth that looks the goods. Speaking of Panzura, if you haven’t heard of its Vizion.AI offshoot – it’s well worth checking out.
There’s a metric shedload of “how best to work from home” posts doing the rounds at the moment. I found this one from Russ White to be both comprehensive and readable. That’s not as frequent a combination as you might expect.
World Backup Day was yesterday. I’ll be writing more on that this week, but in the meantime this article from Anthony Spiteri on data displacement was pretty interesting.
Speaking of backup and Veeam things, this article on installing Veeam PN from Andre Atkinson was very useful.
Welcome to Random Short Take #30. You’d think 30 would be an easy choice, given how much I like Wardell Curry II, but for this one I’m giving a shout out to Rasheed Wallace instead. I’m a big fan of ‘Sheed. I hope you all enjoy these little trips down NBA memory lane. Here we go.
Veeam 10’s release is imminent. Anthony has been doing a bang up job covering some of the enhancements in the product. This article was particularly interesting because I work in a company selling Veeam and using vCloud Director.
Sticking with data protection, Curtis wrote an insightful article on backups and frequency.
If you’re in Europe or parts of the US (or can get there easily), like writing about technology, and you’re into cars and stuff, this offer from Cohesity could be right up your alley.
Welcome to my semi-regular, random news post in a short format. This is #27. You’d think it would be hard to keep naming them after basketball players, and it is. None of my favourite players ever wore 27, but Marvin Barnes did surface as a really interesting story, particularly when it comes to effective communication with colleagues. Happy holidays too, as I’m pretty sure this will be the last one of these posts I do this year. I’ll try and keep it short, as you’ve probably got stuff to do.
This story of serious failure on El Reg had me in stitches.
I really enjoyed this article by Raj Dutt (over at Cohesity’s blog) on recovery predictability. As an industry we talk an awful lot about speeds and feeds and supportability, but sometimes I think we forget about keeping it simple and making sure we can get our stuff back as we expect.
Speaking of data protection, I wrote some articles for Druva about, well, data protection and things of that nature. You can read them here.
There have been some pretty important CBT-related patches released by VMware recently. Anthony has provided a handy summary here.
Everything’s an opinion until people actually do it, but I thought this research on cloud adoption from Leaseweb USA was interesting. I didn’t expect to see everyone putting their hands up and saying they’re all in on public cloud, but I was also hopeful that we, as an industry, hadn’t made things as unclear as they seem to be. Yay, hybrid!
Backblaze has done a nice job of talking about data protection and cloud storage through the lens of Star Wars.
This tip on removing particular formatting in Microsoft Word documents really helped me out recently. Yes I know Word is awful.
Someone was nice enough to give me an acknowledgement for helping review a non-fiction book once. Now I’ve managed to get a character named after me in one of John Birmingham’s epics. You can read it out of context here. And if you’re into supporting good authors on Patreon – then check out JB’s page here. He’s a good egg, and his literary contributions to the world have been fantastic over the years. I don’t say this just because we live in the same city either.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post and you’ll probably see the content elsewhere on the Internet. Druva provided no editorial input and the words and opinions in this post are my own.
Druva was among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in their latest Data Resiliency Solutions Wave, for Q3 2019. In its debut for this report, Druva was cited as a Strong Performer in Data Resilience. I recently had an opportunity to speak to W. Curtis Preston, Druva’s Chief Technologist, about the report, and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.
Let’s Get SaaS-y
Druva was the only company listed in the Forrester Wave™ Data Resiliency Solutions whose products are only offered as a service. One of the great things about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is that the vendor takes care of everything for you. Other models of solution delivery require hardware, software (or both) to be installed on-premises or close to the workload you want to protect. The beauty of a SaaS delivery model is that Druva can provide you with a data protection solution that they manage from end to end. If you’re hoping that there’ll be some new feature delivered as part of the solution, you don’t have to worry about planning the upgrade to the latest version; Druva takes care of that for you. There’s no need for you to submit change management documentation or negotiate infrastructure outages with key stakeholders. And if something goes wrong with the platform upgrade, the vendor will take care of it. All you need to worry about is ensuring that your network access is maintained and you’re paying the bills. If your capacity is growing out of line with your expectations, it’s a problem for Druva, not you. And, as I alluded to earlier, you get access to features in a timely fashion. Druva can push those out when they’ve tested them, and everyone gets access to them without having to wait. Their time to market is great, and there aren’t a lot of really long release cycles involved.
Management
The report also called out how easy it was to manage Druva, as Forrester gave them their highest score 5 (out of 5) in this category. All of their services are available via a single management interface. I don’t recall at what point in my career I started to pay attention to vendors talking to me about managing everything from a single pane of glass. I think that the nature of enterprise infrastructure operations dictates that we look for unified management solutions wherever we can. Enterprise infrastructure is invariably complicated, and we want simplicity wherever we can get it. Having everything on one screen doesn’t always mean that things will be simple, but Druva has focused on ensuring that the management experience delivers on the promise of simplified operations. The simplified operations are also comprehensive, and there’s support for cloud-native / AWS resources (with CloudRanger), data centre workloads (with Druva Phoenix) and SaaS workloads (with Druva inSync) via a single pane of glass. Although not included in the report, Druva also supports backing up endpoints, such as laptops and mobile devices.
Deduplication Is No Joke
One of Forrester’s criteria was whether or not a product offered deduplication. Deduplication has radically transformed the data protection storage market. Prior to the widespread adoption of deduplication and compression technologies in data protection storage, tape provided the best value in terms of price and capacity. This all changed when enterprises were able to store many copies of their data in the space required by one copy. Druva uses deduplication effectively in its solution, and has a patent on its implementation of the technology. They also leverage global deduplication in their solution, providing enterprises with an efficient use of protection data storage. Note that this capability needs to be in a single AWS region, as you wouldn’t want it running across regions. The key to Druva’s success with deduplication has been also due to its use of DynamoDB to support deduplication operations at scale.
Your Security Is Their Concern
Security was a key criterion in Forrester’s evaluation, and Druva received another 5 – the highest score possible – in that category as well. One of the big concerns for enterprises is the security of protection data being stored in cloud platforms. There’s no point spending a lot of money trying to protect your critical information assets if a copy of those same assets has been left exposed on the Internet for all to see. With Druva’s solution, everything stored in S3 is sharded and stored as separate objects. They’re not just taking big chunks of your protection data and storing them in buckets for everyone to see. Even if someone were able to access the storage, and put all of the pieces back together, it would be useless because all of these shards are also encrypted. In addition, the metadata needed to re-assemble the shards is stored separately in DynamoDB and is also encrypted.
Thoughts
I believe being named a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave™ Data Resiliency Solutions validates what Druva’s been telling me when it comes to their ability to protect workloads in the data centre, the cloud, and in SaaS environments. Their strength seems to lie in their ability to leverage native cloud tools effectively to provide their customers with a solution that is simple to operate and consume. If you have petabytes of seismic data you need to protect, Druva (and the laws of physics) may not be a great fit for you. But if you have less esoteric requirements and a desire to reduce your on-premises footprint and protect workloads across a number of environments, then Druva is worthy of further consideration. If you wanted to take a look at the report yourself, you can do so here (registration required).
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from “HBI3487BUS – Rethink Data Protection & Management for VMware”, presented by Curt Hayes (Cloud and Data Center Engineer, Regeneron) and Mike Palmer (Chief Product Officer, Druva). You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.
The World is Changing
Cloud Storage Costs Continue To Decline
67 price decreases in AWS storage with CAGR of (60%) – AWS
68% (110+) of countries have Data protection and privacy legislation – United Nations
40% of IT will be “Versatilists” by 2021 – Gartner
54% of CIOs believe streamlining storage is best opportunity for cost optimisation – ESG
80% of enterprises will migrate away and close their on-premises DCs by 2025 – Gartner
256% of increase in demand for Data scientists in last 5 years – Indeed
Druva’s 4 Pillars of Value
Costs Decrease – storage designed to optimise performance and cost reduces per TB costs, leaving more money for innovation
I think the folks at Druva have been doing some cool stuff lately, and chances are quite high that I’ll be writing more about them in the future. There’s a good story with their cloud-native architecture, and it was nice to hear how a customer leveraged them to do things better than they had been doing previously.
Two things really stood out to me during this session. The first was the statement “[t]he best work you can do is when you don’t have to do it”. I’ve heard it said before that the best storage operation is one you don’t have to do, and I think we sometimes lose site of how this approach can help us get stuff done in a more efficient fashion, ultimately leading to focussing our constrained resources elsewhere.
The second was the idea of looking beyond data protection. The “secondary storage” market is riding something of a gravy train at the moment, with big investment from the VC funds in current and next-generation data protection (management?) solutions. There’s been some debate over how effective these solutions are at actually deriving value from that secondary data, but you’d have to think they’re in a prime position to succeed. I’m curious to see just what shape that value takes when we all start to agree on the basic premise.
Sponsored sessions aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I like hearing from customers about how it’s worked out well for them. And the cool thing about VMworld is that there’s a broader ecosystem supporting VMware across a number of different technology stacks. This makes for a diverse bunch of sessions, and I think it makes for an extremely interesting vendor conference. If you want to learn a bit more about what Druva have been up to, check out my post from Tech Field Day 19 here, and you can also find a useful overview of the product here. Good session. 3.5 stars.
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