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30 Minute Interview
“Tape will be relegated to deep, long-term archival”
Mark Sorenson, SVP, Information Management Software
Group talked to Prashant L Rao at EMC World about EMC’s activities
in and plans for India, virtualization and the challenges that it has created,
deduplication and archiving
Mark Sorenson |
About R&D in India
We are building a new campus. Four and a half years back, we picked out a building
and today 3,000 people work in it. We have partnerships with Wipro, TCS, and
HCL. We want to do a better job of building products for India. NetWorker Fast
Start is an SMB version of an enterprise-class backup product. It was done a
100% by the Indian team. We gave them the seed of an idea and in nine months,
it went from concept to product. NetWorker is an enterprise product; it’s
too complicated. [In comparison] you can install the Fast Start product variant
in 12 minutes.
Things to do
We need to do a better job with the channel partners. Our brand is not as well
known as it could be.
Challenges in a virtualized environment
Virtualization has created some new challenges. VMware has many benefits attached
to it but there are also unintended challenges. When you move from using ten
servers to ten VMs on one server backup still involves ten different servers
each with its own CPU, NIC or HBA. Backing up in this environment can bring
the physical infrastructure to its knees. Deduplication helps manage these challenges.
Backup is a problem for VMware. They are working to make their product easier
to backup.
Disk-based backup
We do see this disk-to-disk as a significant trend. It’s
an easier way to restore. Not as much backup as restore. When you really need
the information, disk-to-disk is more effective than tape. I don’t believe
that tape will go away completely. It will be relegated to deep, long-term archival.
The gap between disk and tape has narrowed but tape will continue to be cheaper
for many years.
Archival based on relevance or age of data
We have server archiving technology based on inactivity with DiskXtender. You
can remove inactive data from a Symmetrix and move it to a Celerra, for e.g.
Spin-down drives*
Performance will take a hit the first time you spin up the
drive but it is manageable.
Deduplication success stories
Many of our customers at EMC World are speaking about it. Brown-Forman, the
manufacturer of Jack Daniel’s is leveraging Avamar for data deduplication
across countries. We have seen deduplication ratios of 400:1 or even 500:1.
*This is an algorithm that EMC has built into the software
that can spin down disks when they are not being used
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