There has been a lot written about the airline industry and its ongoing challenges. Bankruptcies and mergers have been frequent topics on the business pages of the newspapers. Stranded passengers and jets sitting on runways for hours make are page news.
I travel a lot and have been doing so for 20 years. It's an interesting industry I have observed first hand, often times painfully. I would postulate, the air travel industry is one of the few industries that effectively hasn't improved in any measurable way over the past 20 years. Consider:
- It still takes you six hours to fly from Boston to London, just as it did 30 years ago. Despite the brief, and ultimately failed foray into speed improvements via the Concorde, jets still fly +/- 500 MPH and get you to your location no faster than they did a quarter of a century ago
- Customer satisfaction has been steadily declining - across the board
- Flight delays and lost / mishandled baggage continue to increase
- The food is still awful, if you get any at all
It is, however, worthy to note that air travel continues to have excellent safety records. So if the airlines haven't improved in speed, comfort, or the basics like taking off and landing on time, what the heck have they been focused on? After all, look at another travel related industry, automobiles, over the past 25 years. More features (how many of you still "roll-up" your windows), safer (airbags, traction control), more fuel efficient (introduction of hybrids), and more dependable (Six-sigma, Kaizan!). Airlines? Well, no such luck. They've been focused on "cost." With de-regulation and the entrée of low cost carriers coupled with the price of fuel, cost savings is where all of their focus has been. Let's think about these two facts:
- Fuel efficiency in the airline industry increased 21% over the last five years
- But the price of oil, increased 130% over the last five years
If you've flown recently you probably have noticed all the cost savings efforts. Paying for food, paying for extra bags, less amenities, etc... But here's the real focus - stuff more people in seats to spread that cost of fuel over more tickets. Two more facts:
- In 1980 there were 433 billion available seat miles with a breakeven load factor of 59%
- In 2002 there were 893 billion available seat miles with a breakeven load factor of 84%
Just to state the obvious, in 1980, you needed 59% of the seats filled to break even (less, lose $, more, make $). In 2002 it took 84% of the seats being filled for airlines to make money (notice how this date correlates with the onset of airline chapter 11 filings). In the past few years, by flying more efficient planes and of course serving you fewer peanuts, the airline industry has taken its cost down a bit, but not much. In Q1 of 2006 the breakeven load factor stood at 77.2.
Now let's take another "industry"...one close to my heart - "Data Protection!" Now, I don't want to draw a complete parallel between air-travel and backup because for backup - there has indeed been progress in the technology. The problem with backup is that it hasn't kept pace with demand, e.g. the requirements associated with the explosion of digital data being stored today. Consider the history...
1) We started by backing up individual systems, using backup software provided with the operating system; this was time consuming, decentralized, and you needed tools to backup and restore for each unique OS.
2) Progressed to network based backup (hence the names NetWorker & NetBackup"); one tool for the entire environment, centralized, sharing of resources (e.g. tape drives). Still very time consuming and creates lots of network traffic.
3) Added the ability to perform backup over the SAN; reduced network traffic.
4) Began leveraging storage technologies like Snapshot based backup and increasing disk as a target; still, today, for the most part this is still effectively, "make a copy" and that "copy" usually goes to tape.
5) Introduce VTL and data deduplication; provide users the most efficient means to move data to a disk device (by making it look like tape) and give them the ability to store it, and subsequently move it, more efficiently, driving the costs of disk and tape much closer together and helping to reduce the reliance on tape all together.
Still here's what users think about backup today:
Question: "What are the biggest problems with your current backup and recovery solutions (% of all users, multiple responses accepted) (Forrester Conslting on behalf of HP, December 2008)
1. Need to improve RPO / RTO (64%)
2. Need to improve recovery success rates (63%)
3. Need to better protect virtual servers (58%)
4. Need to manage data proliferation (57%)
5. Need to consolidate remote office backups (47%)
So, backup is indeed a little like the airline industry - it still takes a long time, and no one likes the service. But, is there a light on the horizon? I think so...and it's embodied in EMC's Data Protection Strategy. I think three key tenets of the strategy;
1. Backup as little data as possible
2. Use disk to store the backup data
3. Enable customers to use backup for other purposes
Let's talk a bit about these concepts and the products and technologies that enable them.
How to backup as little data as possible? A) Actively and continuously archive stale data; and B) use deduplication to minimize the bits and bytes that are required to represent information.
Use disk to store the backup data? Using disk is all about cost, since the benefits of disk vs. tape are pretty obvious e.g. random access, speed of recovery, reliability, to name a few. Active archive and deduplication, coupled with the continued march to bigger and cheaper disk drives enables the use of disk today. Cheaper "bulk storage" will only improve this in the future. EMC has a broad portfolio of archiving software for key applications (e.g. email, file servers, SAP), and the leading platform for storing it (Centera). Deduplication techniques are increasing embodied in our backup and archive as appropriate, e.g. at the object level (Centera); file/attachment level (EX); and the sub-file level (Avamar). In the future, you'll see a unified deduplication "service" that will bring some of these techniques together and will be embedded across EMC's product lines (Celerra). Someday, deduplication may be as ubiquitous as RAID
Enable customers to use backup for other purpose? Wouldn't it be great to periodically replicate your backup data to another site to use as a cheap and easy recovery site? How about doing eDiscovery for compliance purposes on your backup data? These are great ways to leverage backup data for additional purposes that we are working towards. We're not there yet, and by-the-way, while this sounds simple, it is not. File this under "the vision thing."
Evolutionary or Revolutionary. We're hearing from customers today who want to re-vamp their entire backup strategy and start from scratch. Others want to attack "hot-spots" and evolve to a new approach. We can do it either way. Our EMC Disk Libraries are a very effective way to get disk based backup benefits while fitting into customers existing backup paradigms. EMC Avamar gives you disk based backup, enabled by state-of-the art de-dupe, which replaces traditional backup software (though Avamar will co-exist and complement traditional backup too). NetWorker has embraced B2D as well as deduplication. It also has EMC Disk Library integration.
Let's not forget data protection management. Today we have the Data Protection Advisor product, which effectively gives us a Dashboard that provides backup monitoring, reporting and analytics across most of our data protection products - NetWorker, EMC Disk Libraries, Avamar, plus popular backup products from Veritas, CommVault and IBM. Look for us to add Centera and other products in the future.
So, we're at an inflection point. Backup is indeed changing and EMC is leading the way. The strategy is solid, the customer need is clear, and we have most of the pieces today. It's ours to win.
For the air travel industry, I'm afraid I am not so optimistic. Here's a story that sums it all up... On a trans-continental flight a passenger was sitting way back in economy. As it was a long flight, the flight attendants came by with the meal carts. The passenger was asked if he would like a meal. Being hungry he said, "Sure, what are my choices?" The flight attendant answered, "Your choices are 'yes' or 'no.'"
Until next time, _Mark