NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP
on STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
11/20/01 - Today's focus: A snapshot of change

Dear Wincenty Kaminski,

In this issue:

* Storage in bite-sized chunks
* Links related to storage
* Featured reader resource

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Today's focus: A snapshot of change

By Mike Karp

My friend Roberto, who has been working in IT shops since
computers ran on coal, brought me a beer and began to vent.
"It's the tapes," he said. "They're taking over the place!"

Now I know this guy pretty well, and I know he is a chronic
complainer. But I also know he's got more experience than
almost anyone, and he's very much a "go-to guy" when the bit
hits the fan. Ultimately, two things caught my interest. First,
Roberto was taking a shot at tape backups, and I'm always
interested in hearing about the shortcomings of tape. And
second, this guy almost never buys the beer, so he must have
felt this was pretty serious.

"We make backups of everything. And then what happens? We
label the tapes, and stuff them away in metal file cabinets. We
must have a mile of file cabinets, each drawer filled with bar-
coded digital linear tapes. Don't ask what happens when we have
to do a recovery." One look at my friend and I knew not to do
the obvious. At this point Roberto shook his head and went over
to get two more.

"The real problem," he said on his return, "is that we back
up just about everything. Useful data and junk data. Database
tables and MPEGs. If it's on a disk, we save it. And the e-mail
is the worst. Do you have any idea how much it costs us just to
backup e-mail?" At this point, I think he actually groaned.

Well, Roberto works for a huge manufacturing company, and I
admit I haven't a clue as to what it costs his company to back
up its e-mail. On the other hand, I've been using e-mail for 20
years or so, so I at least have some context in which to think
about it. Which I did.

My first step was to do a reality check, which showed me that I
am part of the problem. My own inbox currently contains 504
items, including 192 that are unread, and when I sort on the
"created" field, I find some of my mail goes back to July. By
almost anyone's standards, as far as e-mail is concerned I am
not a very good citizen. Fortunately my IT manager, a good guy
if there ever was one, provides me with all the data protection
I need.

My thinking is this. A sound backup rotation, with tapes
regularly moving to offsite storage, plus an up-to-date logbook
in a fireproof safe, will make locating the correct tape fairly
easy. The trick, of course, is to keep the log current. All
this is pretty obvious, but I wonder how many of you actually
document the content and movement of each tape?

But what if you need to do more than just document the problem
of tape glut? If you want to cure the disease rather than just
treat the symptoms, there are several vendors out there
offering useful solutions.

The main issue, as far as e-mail is concerned, is that the
information store holding all the data is treated by the
application as a monolithic block. Because of this, you can't
do an efficient incremental backup, and even if only a single
message has been changed or corrupted, you still have to back
up the entire file. Potentially, you might have to back up a
5G-byte file to account for a 500K-byte change in the data.

Now, new application-savvy software can help out by providing
snapshotting capabilities for the Exchange (or Notes) Server.
For example, FalconStor (http://www.falconstor.com ) is about to
announce a product that will allow you to set a regimen of timed
snapshots that would provide the functional equivalent of
incremental backups of the e-mail information store.

With snapshots, data is addressed in block rather than file
mode. Thus, you can look for (and save) only those sectors of
the file that show a change. Because your tapes capture only
the blocks containing changed data, less data is transferred
and fewer tapes are needed. The result of hourly snapshots
might be 24 files of 2M-bytes each, rather than a single daily
backup of the whole multigigabyte file. And to make my friend
Roberto happy, it could all be captured on a single tape.

Unless you are media manufacturers, you should like that.

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To contact Mike Karp:

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates (http://www.enterprisemanagement.com) in Boulder,
Colo., an analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively
on enterprise management. He works out of Portsmouth, N.H., and
Westboro, Mass., and can be reached via e-mail at
mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com
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RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

Archive of the Storage newsletter:
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