PRSRT STD U.S. POSTAGE PAID Tulsa, OK Permit No. 2146
UPTIME
Sigma
Uptime
Vol. 10 No. 5
SIGMA Solutions’ portfolio of cloud servicesand
managed serviceshelps you free up valuable
resources so you can focus on strategic initiatives that are core to your business and customers.
SIGMA cloud servicesprovide a complete technology stack to host your application without the burden of hardware acquisition, provisioning, system administration, or maintenance. SIGMA owns the assets with responsibility for guaranteed uptime. You only pay for what you need and when you need it with elastic capacity on demand.
SIGMA managed servicestransfer the lifecycle support of your infrastructure to our team of highly skilled engineers, who are orchestrated with a comprehensive methodology. We can provide blended support with your staff to manage systems in your building or in co-location facilities. All critical components of your data center can be protected and maintained including backup, administration, monitoring, change management and recovery.
SIGMA’s local presence and flexibility provide the custom solutions your organization needs for large-scale project implementations, short-term initiatives or one-time engagements. Whatever your needs, SIGMA is the best technology partner to solve your data center problems.
800.567.5964 www.sigmasolinc.com
San Antonio, TX | Austin, TX | Dallas, TX | Houston, TX | New Orleans, LA | Tulsa, OK | Oklahoma City, OK
Focus on your business
3 volume 10 number 5
Contents
4
Real Data Protection
for Virtual Machines
Symantec NetBackup 7 can help organizations protect and recover information with greater efficiency and reliability through a single, unified platform that encompasses both physical and virtual machines. NetBackup delivers complete virtual machine protection, with increased data backup and recovery speeds and backup replication for fast, cost-effective disaster recovery. It also reduces data stores and network traffic by integrating de-duplication everywhere, thus reducing overall costs.
Analyzing ‘Big Data’
Massive datasets put a strain on data storage infrastructures, but they also create big opportunities. Next-generation business analytics tools help
organizatins examine historical data and detect patterns that will improve decisions and provide better outcomes. Companies that can analyze precisely what they know about their customers and business partners, their supply chains and their operations can then make decisions that cut costs, speed time-to-market and increase revenue.
Putting the Squeeze
on Data Storage Growth
Real-time compression can enable organizations to reclaim existing storage capacity, achieve faster
throughput, support high availability configurations and improve forecast storage resource requirements. It is redefining the economics of storage, enabling customers to significantly reduce their storage footprint while improving the performance of their storage infrastructure.
8
10
4
Sigma
UPTIME
Copyright © 2011 CMS Special Interest Publications. All rights reserved. Editorial Correspondence:
4941 S. 78th E. Ave., Tulsa, OK 74145 Phone (800) 726-7667 • Fax (918) 270-7134 Change of Address: Send corrected address label to the above address.
Some parts of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced in nonprofit or internal-use publications with advance written permission.
Sigma UPTIME is published monthly by CMS Special Interest Publications. Printed in the U.S.A. Product names may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Real Data Protection
5 volume 10 number 5
O
rganizations adopting server virtualization have realized a host of benefits, including server consolidation, faster provisioning, higher utilization and lower energy costs. Virtualization brings new challenges to the data center, however — particularly in the area of backup and recovery. Traditional backup platforms are inadequate for virtual machine backup, leading many organizations to add backup solutions specific to the virtualized environment. However, maintaining separate backup strategies for physical and virtual machines further complicates the backup infrastructure, and fails to address over-arching issues of recovery speed and rapidly growing data volumes.“Organizations are looking for a solution designed for the virtual environment yet integrated into their overall backup and recovery strategy,” said Tom Prentice, Regional Manager, Houston/New Orleans, Sigma Solutions. “They are looking for ways to deal with the exploding data growth that has been further fueled by virtualization. They are also looking for lightning-fast recovery speeds for
their virtual servers. Symantec NetBackup 7 delivers on all three counts.”
Symantec NetBackup 7 can help organizations protect and recover information with greater effi-ciency and reliability through a single, unified plat-form that encompasses both physical and virtual machines. NetBackup delivers complete virtual machine protection, with increased data backup and recovery speeds and backup replication for fast, cost-effective disaster recovery. It also reduces data stores and network traffic by integrating de-duplica-tion everywhere — at the client, media server and on third-party appliances — thus reducing overall costs.
Simple, Complete VM Protection
NetBackup 7 simplifies virtual server data pro-tection by standardizing the backup of both Hyper-V and Hyper-VMware machines. It also increases backup speed within virtual environments through de-dupli-cation and block-level incremental backup technolo-gy.
“By leveraging NetBackup’s de-duplication and incremental backup technology within virtual
envi-continued on page 6
Symantec NetBackup 7 streamlines data backup
and recovery for virtualized environments.
Sigma UPTIME
ronments, organizations can dramati-cally increase the speed of backups while reducing storage for virtual machine backups up to 95 percent,” Prentice said. “NetBackup also enables IT administrators to reduce the impact of backup operations on virtual machines by using off-host for Hyper-V and block-level backup technologies for VMware.”
NetBackup 7 also delivers efficient file restore capabilities. Its patented Granular Recovery Technology sup-ports instant file or folder recovery from virtual machine image backups, allowing customers to reduce compara-ble virtual machine backup times by up to 50 percent and improve the speed of recovery for individual files.
“In a recent survey, organizations cited granular recovery within virtual machine images as the biggest challenge in virtual machine data protection,” said Prentice. “NetBackup 7 delivers instant file recovery from a block-level incremental backup for VMware vSphere environments and easy recov-ery of an individual file or folder from an image-level backup of a Hyper-V vir-tual machine.”
Smart and Automatic
NetBackup 7 features Virtual Machine Intelligent Policy technology for VMware environments to automate the discovery and protection of virtual machines while enforcing existing data protection policies. Unlike other data protection solutions, this technology will accelerate the transition to a virtu-al environment for organizations deploying a large number of virtual machines or building a private cloud infrastructure.
“NetBackup creates a faster path to the virtual data center,” Prentice said. “Virtual Machine Intelligent Policy technology minimizes the administra-tion effort required for high-perfor-mance VMware virtual machine
back-ups through greater awareness of VMware vSphere resource usage.”
Integrated replication technology within the NetBackup platform allows organizations to transfer up to 95 per-cent less data between various loca-tions. This helps ensure quick and easy recovery of applications and backup data anywhere and at any time, reduc-ing costs and management cycles asso-ciated with tape-based disaster recov-ery. NetBackup 7 also adds backup cat-alog replication as a standard feature within the main console, which further simplifies and streamlines disaster recovery.
“Auto image replication technology allows customers who replicate data between multiple sites or NetBackup domains to make the backup data at an alternate site instantly available for faster disaster recovery,” said Prentice.
De-duplication Everywhere
De-duplication everywhere helps organizations reduce overall storage consumption in physical and virtual environments by integrating de-duplica-tion technology into the backup client and at the media server. By bringing de-duplication closer to the data source, NetBackup increases the speed and effi-ciency of backups in remote offices,
data centers and virtual environments, and reduces network traffic by up to 90 percent. It also eliminates the need for additional specialized hardware and configuration — customers simply upgrade to the latest version to realize dramatic storage savings.
To help customers centrally manage their data protection environments and provide a single view of their backup and recovery operation, NetBackup 7 also includes a built-in reporting and management console called OpsCenter. OpsCenter delivers a single manage-ment view of any Symantec data pro-tection environment, and adds improved reports for storage lifecycle policies, audit trails and licensing. Tools such as the workload analyzer allow customers to better tailor operations to maximize hardware usage.
“Virtualization is changing the way organizations manage backup and recovery processes,” Prentice said. “Net-Backup 7 supports this evolution through a single solution that protects both physical and virtual servers. Net-Backup 7 also reduces data volumes at the source, and provides for fast, granu-lar recovery. Symantec is offering orga-nizations a better way to manage grow-ing data stores and reduce complexity as they continue to add virtual servers to their data centers.”
Copyright © 2011 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. SYM-25
800.567.5964 www.sigmasolinc.com
Don’t backup blind — poor visibility will slow you down and
cost you money. NetBackup 7, powered by Symantec V-Ray,
of fers patente d visibilit y into vir tual file systems and
applications as well as transparent backup and recovery across
physical and virtual silos. V-Ray increases IT agility and paves
the way for realizing the true savings potential of virtualization.
Symantec NetBackup gives you confidence in a connected
world. To learn more, contact a product specialist at Sigma
Solutions.
I
n the age of “big data” many orga-nizations are drowning in infor-mation but thirsting for knowl-edge. Organizations today collect enormous amounts of data from numerous sources, but lack the ability to turn that information into insight.“Big data” is a term used to describe the massive amount of data produced by a new generation of sys-tems and applications. These are datasets so large that they have tran-scended the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze. Although the definition is necessarily subjective, most analysts use the term in reference to terabytes, exabytes or even zettabytes of data.
While this clearly puts a strain on data storage infrastructures, big data also creates big opportunities. Forward-thinking companies are looking to next-generation business analytics tools to examine historical data and detect pat-terns that will improve decisions and provide better outcomes. Companies that can analyze precisely what they know about their customers and busi-ness partners, their supply chains and their operations can then make deci-sions that cut costs, speed time-to-mar-ket and increase revenue.
A Game Changer
This is why CIOs say that business analytics will be their top strategic
tech-nology investment over the next five years — even ahead of more headline-grabbing technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization.
“The advent of business analytics is clearly a game-changing opportunity for organizations that want to be more efficient in their business processes and still increase the likelihood of achieving needed levels of bottom-line business performance,” said Robert Kugel, senior VP of research at Ventana Research. “Without a strong business analytics foundation, organizations will not be able to understand where to optimize performance, let alone plan to achieve the goals required for guiding an organization's performance. The organizations that invest in business
Next-generation business analytics tools can deliver
insight, competitive advantage.
ANALYZING
9 volume 10 number 5
analytics and collaborate across line-of-business areas and IT are most likely to be innovating in their use of analytics and to achieve increased operational efficiencies.”
In a recent IBM survey of 3,018 CIOs spanning 71 countries and 18 industries, 83 percent of midmarket CIOs identified analytics as their top-priority investment area. In particular, CIOs are looking to invest in data warehousing (64 percent), visual dash-boards (64 percent), master data man-agement (63 percent) and client analyt-ics (63 percent) that not only help them better utilize structured data, but also unstructured data in the form of videos, blogs and tweets that can be obtained through the social web.
“An increasingly sensor-based, mobile-enabled and instrumented envi-ronment — what IDC calls the Intelli-gent Economy — is driving big data trends, not just in terms of volume but also in type, complexity and rate,” said Dan Vesset, program VP of IDC's busi-ness analytics research. “Capturing, analyzing and managing such dynamic data is increasingly viewed as a compet-itive advantage for organizations to solve a variety of complex problems . . . and influence timely and better deci-sions.”
More than BI
Next-generation business analytics goes beyond traditional business intelli-gence and reporting. Where traditional BI tools are largely focused on answer-ing predefined questions with metrics that are oriented to a consistent style of reporting, these new analytics tools offer a more ad-hoc approach. The focus is on enabling end-users to create on-the-fly searches to uncover new pat-terns and insights. By delivering infor-mation online, rather than in static reports, these new tools allow users to drill down for additional details.
A key difference is the ability to extract information from unstructured data that isn’t recorded in neat rows and columns on a spreadsheet, but is
scattered across the web or stored in text documents. In addition, integration of collaboration and social media tools can make it easier to share and com-ment on data.
In its recent report on the global business intelligence and analytics mar-ket, Gartner says SAS dominates the analytic applications market, with SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft also listed among the key vendors. However, con-solidation in the market is creating other players. EMC, long a dominant figure in the storage market, now is preparing to help clients figure out what to do with all that stored data. EMC last year purchased Greenplum, maker of self-service, cloud-based ana-lytics, and rolled out the first EMC-Greenplum appliance three months later.
Open-Source Powerhouse
A once-small, open-source project called Hadoop has emerged as one of the hottest analytics engines for large datasets. Hadoop enables batch pro-cessing of unstructured and structured data at massive scale using commodity hardware. Internet companies such as Facebook, Twitter and eBay use the
engine to crunch data. Given Hadoop’s growing popularity, EMC, NetApp and IBM all have recently jumped on the bandwagon by introducing Hadoop-based analytics platforms.
At a time when rapid technology advances such as cloud computing, mobile applications and social media are driving massive data growth, orga-nizations need the ability to extract meaning from that data to meet shifting market conditions. Next-generation business analytics have transformed big data into big business by providing deeper visibility into structured and unstructured data and improving deci-sion-making processes. That’s why IDC forecasts 7.2 percent compound annual growth of business analytics worldwide for the next five years
“Analytics are more critical than ever to making successful business deci-sions and achieving maximum perfor-mance from business operations,” said Vesset. “We’re seeing increasing evi-dence that organizational performance and competitiveness can benefit from better and more business analytics, which is why the analytics industry is poised to continue its rapid growth in the years to come.”
Many Still Rely on Spreadsheet-based Analytics
M
ore than half of organizations still spend the majority of their time inunproductive data preparation and quality assurance processes rather than in applying business analytics to gain the most value from their data, according to a recent benchmark study by Ventana Research. The study involved input from more than 2,850 organizations.Despite the obvious value of analytics and the ready availability of ana-lytics tools, the study found that the application of anaana-lytics remains a spread-sheet-based activity in 88 percent of organizations. Yet these same organiza-tions report issues with data accuracy and timeliness of analytics, and find themselves at a competitive disadvantage against the most mature organiza-tions that are using predictive analytics to help determine future outcomes and mobile technologies to simplify access to analytics and metrics.
The study found that business and IT organizations use a variety of ana-lytics, but they have not yet automated many of the underlying data integra-tion and analytics operaintegra-tions needed to generate metrics. Moreover, the study found that businesses largely are not acting to improve their processes. The research indicates that that only a third of organizations are planning to change the way they generate and apply analytics in the next 12 to 18 months.
D
ata growth was cited as one of the top three datacenter challenges by 47 percent of respondents in a recent Gartner survey of representatives from 1,004 large enterprises. It’s no surprise, then, that organizations are looking for ways to reduce the hardware, software, administration and maintenance costs associated with storage. Sixty-two percent of survey respon-dents reported that they will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011. Other high-ranking IT pro-jects that will be employed to respond to data growth includ-ed storage consolidation, storage management, and data reduction techniques.In the short term, data growth can be managed by free-ing trapped, underutilized storage through consolidation pro-jects. Long-term, however, organizations need to find ways to reduce the amount of data they store — particularly in high-cost Tier 1 storage.
Data reduction technologies have become commonplace in backup and archival solutions, but have been slower to reach the primary storage tier. However, new real-time com-pression technologies can deliver dramatic reductions in
pri-mary storage utilization without the drawbacks that have plagued older techniques.
Real-time compression can enable organizations to reclaim existing storage capacity, achieve faster throughput, support high availability configurations and improve forecast storage resource requirements. It is redefining the economics of storage, enabling customers to significantly reduce their storage footprint while improving the performance of their storage infrastructure.
Reducing the Load
Data de-duplication has become popular as a means of reducing data storage requirements in backup and archival operations. Also known as global compression, commonality factoring and referential integrity, data de-duplication elimi-nates redundant copies of data to reduce storage costs and shrink backup and recovery times. By focusing on backup and archival, however, data de-duplication technologies fail to apply data reduction techniques where data originates — in Tier 1 or primary storage.
Primary storage is for active data that is frequently accessed by both end-users and key applications. It is the most expensive storage tier, requiring high performance, low latency and high availability. It is also the source of the vast amounts of data that organizations generate and use to run their businesses.
SQUEEZE
on Data Storage Growth
Putting the
Real-time compression reduces
primary storage data volumes
without performance degradation.
11 volume 10 number 5
The overwhelming majority of data begins life in prima-ry storage that is used to host mission-critical software such as databases, email and transaction processing applications. But it’s not just generated once — it is replicated, distributed, warehoused, backed up and ultimately archived.to other storage tiers. If an organization can reduce its primary stor-age footprint, it not only saves capacity in Tier 1 but creates a waterfall of capacity throughout the storage infrastructure and cost savings across the data lifecycle.
Unfortunately, data de-duplication is not suited to pri-mary storage. While de-duplication may result in up to 20:1 reductions in backup and archival data, it yields just 2:1 reductions in primary storage at best. Worse, data de-dupli-cation simply requires too much performance overhead to be used in Tier 1.
Overcoming Challenges
Data compression has not been widely adopted in pri-mary storage either because performance concerns were more critical than capacity savings. Simply put, Tier 1 data reduction must not impact performance.
Real-time, random access compression/decompression technology, however, delivers the compression ratios and per-formance needed for primary storage data reduction. So-called lossless data compression maintains reliable and
con-sistent performance and data integrity through a compressed file format that preserves all the information needed to access or re-create the original data. Unlike data de-duplication, in which files are replaced with pointers that may point to the wrong reference, lossless compression ensures that data integrity is not compromised.
Real-time compression is different from traditional com-pression technologies in that it can drastically reduce the amount of data that must be stored — from 50 percent to 90 percent. It enables IT managers to reduce the Tier 1 storage footprint in the data center and, as a result, reduce associat-ed power and cooling costs and administrative overhead.
Real-time compression does for primary storage what de-duplication has done for backup. It transparently com-presses primary storage without changes in performance, storage, applications, networks or processes. It overcomes the challenges that have inhibited the adoption of data reduction technologies in the primary storage tier, delivering dramatic savings without changing downstream storage processes such as replication, backup and archiving.
Data growth and the storage costs associated with that growth remain major challenges for many organizations. Real-time compression attacks the problem at the source — primary storage — and in so doing delivers real cost savings and performance gains throughout the storage infrastructure.
As the global leader in scale-out storage, Isilon delivers powerful yet simple solutions for enterprises that want to manage their data, not their storage. Isilon’s products are simple to install, manage and scale, at any size. And, unlike traditional enterprise storage, Isilon stays simple no matter how much storage is added, how much performance is required or how business needs change in the future.
We’re challenging enterprises to think differently about their storage, because when they do, they’ll recognize there’s a better, simpler way.
800.567.5964 www.sigmasolinc.com
Copyright © 2011Isilon Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. ISL-02
REASONS CUSTOMERS CHOOSE
SIGMA SOLUTIONS
TRENGTH– Sigma has an unmatched ability to respond to customer needs due to our scale, locale and experience in the data center. We are small enough to deliver local, personalized service yet large enough to handle highly complex project requirements.
NNOVATION– Our goal is to help customers leverage IT solutions to streamline business processes, drive innovation and reduce time to market. To that end, Sigma delivers technologies from industry-leading manufacturers coupled with consulting and engineering services that maximize business value.
UIDANCE– Our customers turn to us for expert solution design and project governance services that accelerate the success of their IT initiatives. Sigma mitigates our customers’ risks through our experience and commitment to excellence in everything we do.
ANAGEMENT– Sigma is uniquely positioned to serve as a single point of contact for full lifecycle management, maintenance and support of converged and integrated technologies. Our expertise across the data center and strong relationships with industry leaders enable us to quickly resolve problems in today’s complex IT environment.
GILITY– Sigma’s comprehensive services enable our customers to partner with one technology provider for solution design, implementation and ongoing service. Sigma serves as the focal point for initiatives incorporating diverse technologies and multiple IT disciplines.
800.567.5964 www.sigmasolinc.com
AUSTIN | DALLAS | HOUSTON | SAN ANTONIO | TULSA | OKLAHOMA CITY | NEW ORLEANS
