What does that really mean? When I worked for Veritas, back in 1998 we acquired a company based out of Canada called TeleBackup that backed up desktop / laptops. In 1999 Veritas acquired Seagate and the Backup Exec product which also had a desktop / laptop option. These products were meant to eventually be integrated into the main backup applications but never were. Additionally, a lot of that software was given away (hard to make a business on that) and for the most part, lived on a shelf somewhere and was never installed.
In 2004 I worked for Connected Corporate (acquired by Iron Mountain), who’s sole business was desktop / laptop backup. (In fact, from 2000 to 2004 I worked as an analyst for ESG covering all the vendors in the backup space and used the Connected product to backup my work laptop – and it actually saved my hide once.) While the company executed a successful exit, the business was (and probably still is) only about a $20M to $40M business.
Why do I bring this up? There is a new reality in IT these days. I have said it before, IT is accountable for 100% of the data created in any company, including that stored on desktop/laptops. This means that not only do they have to provide a location to store this data but IT also needs to provide tools to protect this information and ensure that this information is highly recoverable for both business productivity purposes as well as corporate and legal governance. This means that desktop / laptop backup is now gaining a lot more visibility in the enterprise.
However, desktop / laptop data protection is one of those areas in IT that is just a nuisance because it seems like it should be an easy problem to solve, but there are so many moving parts to it that it ends up falling by the wayside.
A successful desktop / laptop backup technology needs three very specific capabilities:
- Integrate seamlessly with the existing backup solution in the enterprise
- Share a common, deduplicated, back end repository
- Have a very SIMPLE and robust end-user interface to allow for end-user restores
The desktop / laptop solutions I discussed above did not, and do not, have these capabilities. Even though these technologies come from reputable companies, not having these three capabilities is what has led to their very low adoption.
These three capabilities are all inter-related. First IT needs an integrated solution because they do not want to have yet another piece of software in their environment that they have to manage, especially data protection software. The fundamentals of backup are pretty simple. Install an agent on the machine you want to protect, go to the management interface of the backup application and set up a few simple rules or policies (backup this system, at this time, to this device, catalog it and finally, keep the data for ‘x’ number of days, weeks, etc..) and start protecting your data.
One challenge is that most backup products don’t have an agent that is lightweight enough to run as a client on a desktop or laptop. This causes incredible performance degradation of the system during backups, and let’s face it, if you have a laptop, 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be working on it when the backup kicks off so you will end up shutting it down which leaves you with unprotected data. Client side data reduction techniques help to reduce this problem. By moving less data, they run for shorter periods of time so there is little to no end user impact.
Next, if you did have an agent that worked well enough to backup all the desktop / laptop systems, then it would impede the backups of the other mission critical systems in the environment by utilizing all of the resources on the devices where the data is being backed up too. (Take a look at Architecting for Recovery for more info.) This means that IT would have to set up additional, separate devices to protect one subset of systems leaving them with more devices to manage and making it a hassle to implement. (This is one reason why ‘cloud’ like solutions have become popular, providing less things to manage, however not every company wants their data outside of their control.)
Also, if you look at the nature of data on desktops and laptops, they share a ton of common data. Why would any IT person want to backup that much data over and over again? Traditional desktop / laptop solutions don’t provide robust capabilities for reducing the amount of redundant data that needs to be protected which also translates into longer backup times and more ‘storage’ utilization (making it more costly). Deduplication allows you to implement a common repository.
Finally, the tools for end user recoverability need to be very robust. The last thing IT has time for is an increased call volume to perform data recovery for end users. This also means that data needs to be stored on disk because end users aren’t going to load tapes to recover data which also means that data needs to be stored on disk in the most efficient manner possible to save on costs.
There are a number of other nice-to-have features, but the lack of the three capabilities outlined above have has limited the adoption of desktop / laptop backups. Until today there hasn’t been a good solution that met these criteria.
This week EMC | Avamar launched a desktop / laptop backup component as part of their enterprise solution. The difference between traditional desktop / laptop solutions and the Avamar solution is that the Avamar solution is 100% integrated as a part of its enterprise backup application, storing data on disk with a high degree of efficiency leveraging single instancing and deduplication. Additionally, clients are free and they all share a common backend repository with the enterprise backup application that is protecting other common data in the enterprise. Finally, end-users are able to perform their own restores. What does all this mean? Simplicity and low cost.
The Avamar backup technology provides enormous economies of scale when extending from the enterprise to the desktop / laptop. By backing up to a single common repository utilizing global single instancing and deduplication you NEVER backup the same data twice, no matter where the data lives.
Think about this scenario – a user creates some document, say a PowerPoint presentation. This presentation ends up being emailed to a number of people in the company and then saved on the desktop as well as in a number of file shares (home directories) on the NAS system. This one 1MB presentation can represent 120MB of backup disk capacity.
Now if you utilize Avamar, the process would be, first the enterprise application would backup the NAS box and may see the file 20 times. Avamar would single instance and deduplicate it such that it only one instance is backed up. Next the desktops start their backup process and see that the Avamar Data Store has already protected this data so again, it doesn’t need to move or store any additional data. A pointer is created to let the data store know that the desktop / laptop also has the ability to recover this same file. This provides tremendous scalability. This essentially means protecting all your desktops / laptops for free.
The technology is easy to manage (same client, same simple management tools), it provides a simple to navigate end user interface for self restores, and provides an integrated, single instance, deduplicated backend.
Seems like a triple play from the Avamar product and is helping to put IT back on the Road to Recovery.