Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Over on his
Backup Blog, fellow blogger Scott Waterhouse from EMC has a post titled
[
Backup Sucks: Reason #38]. Here is an excerpt:
Unfortunately, we have not been able to successfully leverage economies of scale in the world of backup and recovery. If it costs you $5 to backup a given amount of data, it probably costs you $50 to back up 10 times that amount of data, and $500 to back up 100 times that amount of data.
If anybody can figure out how to get costs down to $40 for 10 times the amount of data, and $300 for 100 times the amount of data, they will have an irrefutable advantage over anybody that has not been able to leverage economies of scale.
I suspect that where Scott mentions we in the above excerpt, he is referring to EMC in general, with products like
Legato. Fortunately, IBM has scalable backup solutions, using either a hardware approach, or one purely with software.
- Hardware Approach
The hardware approach involves using deduplication hardware technology as the storage pool for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). Using this approach, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager would receive data from dozens, hundreds or even thousands
of client nodes, and the backup copies would be sent to an IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER data deduplication appliance, IBM TS7650G gateway, or IBM N series with A-SIS. In most cases, companies have standardized on the operating systems and applications used on these nodes, and multiple copies of data reside across employee laptops. As a result, as you have more nodes backing up, you are able to achieve benefits of scale.
- Software Approach
Perhaps your budget isn't big enough to handle new hardware purchases at this time, in this economy. Have no fear,
IBM also offers deduplication built right into the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager v6 software itself. You can use sequential access disk storage pool for this. TSM scans and identifies duplicate chunks of data in the backup copies, and also archive and HSM data, and reclaims the space when found.
If your company is using a backup software product that doesn't scale well, perhaps now is a good time to switch over to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. TSM is perhaps the most scalable backup software product in the marketplace, giving IBM an "irrefutable advantage" over the competition.
technorati tags: IBM, Scott Waterhouse, EMC, Legato, Tivoli, TSM, deduplication, ProtecTIER, N series, A-SIS