Outsourcing backups is likely just the first step for most companies in a larger journey that companies are embarking are towards outsourcing more of their storage management requirements. So it behooves companies to regularly analyze their MSP to determine what steps it is taking to improve the management of its backup data stores and keep its data storage costs down long term.

MSPs face the same challenges that their clients face - managing massively growing backup data stores. Job 1 for an MSP is backing up their clients' data. But managing the data after the backup is complete? That's a totally separate discipline and one that companies should not assume that their preferred MSP is appropriately managing.

Most MSPs (probably all) store and keep their clients' backup data on disk, at least initially. However the storage management problem that MSPs face is very similar to the one their clients face: Placing backup data on the right tier of storage and pricing it accordingly. This may sound trivial but as their clients' backup data stores grow, the data stores at the MSPs also grow. These growing backup data stores force MSPs to make a hard decision - keep buying more of the same type of disk; or create a tiered storage infrastructure and place the client data on the appropriate tier of disk and then extend that to pricing strategies to lower customers' costs.

What does that look like in backup data stores? In the case of backup, MSPs will want to keep the data from the most recent backups on SATA-based storage systems (or Fibre Channel or SAS disk drives). Most client recovery requests (over 80%) occur within a week of the backup and keeping it on disk expedites those client recovery requests. The problem that emerges is that companies typically create weekly and monthly backups that they may keep for months, or even years, and MSPs have to cost-effectively satisfy these client requirements which they can not always do by placing data initially on disk.

Keeping all data on disk can quickly become cost-prohibitive - both for the MSP and its clients - not because of the cost of the disk but because of the growing power costs associated with keeping these disk drives constantly spinning. While MSPs will want to keep the recently backed up data online and accessible, backup data over a month old likely belongs on most cost-effective media. Failure to mange data in this way means increased backup storage costs for the clients that use this MSP's services since the MSP is keeping all data on one tier of disk and not putting infrequently or never accessed backup data on lower cost, backend storage - such as MAID storage systems.

Companies looking to outsource their backups need to hold their MSPs to a higher storage management standard least companies find their backup storage costs steadily creeping up over time. Backup stores are constantly growing and companies should verify that their MSP is taking appropriate steps on the back-end to manage their backup data to meet their availability and accessibility requirements while controlling costs and aligning the price of the service with the value of the backup-data as it ages over time . Those MSPs that use Asigra Televaulting as part of their service offering and use its Backup Lifecycle Management (BLM) feature already have a means to answer this question. We'll get into more details of how BLM works and how it keeps end-user costs down in forthcoming blog entries.

There are a ton of new features in the 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting 8.0 - so many so that here at DCIG, we are trying to digest all of the new features in bite-size portions. The one I want to focus on in this entry is Televaulting's new replication functionality. Replication is a key function in any facet of the storage landscape and, with Asigra adding this feature into its latest release of Televaulting, it becomes an even more robust player in the enterprise space.

Let's assume a customer or service provider decides to deploy a full disk-to-disk backup solution for their enterprise. In these situations, it becomes important that the backup and restoration process is fast and error free. However with all data now stored to disk, it's imperative that if one location becomes disabled for some reason, an alternate location(s) can simply and quickly take over the backup and recovery reigns.

Most enterprise shops that have or will have this solution deployed will need to service multiple locations in order to meet the backup and recovery SLA's that they have agreed upon with their customer base. In a typical scenario customers will deploy the backup and recovery processes as close as they can to the end users to ensure the most effective use of the local and remote bandwidth capabilities. Secondary and tertiary sites are then generally configured based upon their geographic proximity and/or the availability of network connections to the primary site.

While Televaulting has delivered global deduplication for awhile, enterprise companies need more than just data reduction and capacity savings, they need assurances of data availability and resiliency. Using Televaulting 8.0's new Multi-Directional replication feature, either location can hum along as a source or target location while, in the background and transparent to the customer and/or end-user, all the backup & recovery data across the various locations stays in-sync.

Multi-Directional replication ensures that when there is a failure of one or more locations for whatever reason your clients can continue to restore and backup their data while you can continue to meet your agreed upon SLAs. Then, once the failed location returns to service, Televaulting automatically transitions management control and any new data back to the original location in such a manner that is transparent to the customers and/or end users that you support.

The addition of Multi-Directional replication into Televaulting 8.0 should contribute to making Asigra's disk-to-disk backup and keeping all backup data on disk a more palatable option to enterprise customers. Enterprise customers are looking for ways to break free from the chains of traditional backup and recovery environment but they also recognize that they need a product that meets their high standards of availability, recoverability and resiliency. The inclusion of Multi-Directional replication as a core feature in Asigra Televaulting should help to take enterprises closer towards their ideal of keeping all data readily accessible and easily manageable.

However that is exactly what is happening. As companies are finding out, data protection possesses many of the same characteristics of the types of problems that grid computing was designed to address. Consider:

• Companies want to minimize their expenditures. The value of data protection is almost impossible to quantify on a day-to-day basis. Most of the time companies can only really document the true cost of not protecting their data only after some type of disaster occurs. This prompts companies to limit how much they spend on data protection since it is viewed as a cost to the business, not increasing revenue.
• It is complicated. Backing up one server is easy. Backing up and recovering hundreds of servers with different applications with varying amounts of data across an enterprise requires data protection software is much more complicated. The data protection software needs to automatically adjust and allocate appropriate resources (capacity, performance, etc.) to ensure that the backup can complete in the application server's backup window. Of course, it needs to do this inexpensively.
• It is performance intensive. During the backup window, the data protection software may need to analyze TBs of data, move it across corporate networks and then store it on disk. To minimize the amount of storage capacity needed, data is deduplicated before it is stored. Every stage in this process - analysis, data movement or deduplication - requires high levels of performance. However, since this all occurs as part of the data protection process, the cost for these compute cycles must be kept to a minimum.

Asigra also recognized this trend towards the adoption of grid computing in data protection and, in its Televaulting 8.0 release, introduced its version of grid computing so it could help companies dynamically and economically adapt to the demands of enterprise backup. Here is an overview of how Asigra's implementation of grid computing works:

• A master, or parent, DS-Client exists at each site with one or more child DS-Clients. (The DS-Clients may exist on physical or virtual machines.)
• Each of these DS-Clients (parent and children) is assigned specific application servers to protect.
• The parent DS-Client monitors the progress of the backup jobs on all of its children DS-Clients and functions something like a job scheduler. As children DS-Clients complete their backup jobs, the parent re-assign jobs from other children DS-Clients that are still busy to the idling child DS-Client. The idling child DS-Client then starts to backup the application.
• This process continues until the backup jobs on all application servers are complete.

The worlds of grid computing and data protection are beginning to merge. The big difference is that as grid computing finds its way into the world of data protection, companies like Asigra are finding ways to take the complexity out of grid computing while keeping its low cost and high performance benefits. This combination means that going forward, companies can expect simpler, easier and faster ways to deliver improved levels of data protection and recovery for their enterprise while maintaining, or even lowering, their data protection costs.

This blog entry is the last in a series of interviews with Asigra's CEO, David Farajun, where David looks at how Asigra Televaulting addresses new corporate concerns around information data protection and recovery.

In this third and final entry, David describes how Televaulting's Data Collectors can share backup jobs across different machines, discover new virtual machines as they are created and how it scales to protect and recover enterprise environments.

Jerome: So how does Televaulting scale to backup and manage the hundreds or even thousands of servers that may be found in corporate production environments?

David: Companies could always run multiple Data Collectors on different physical or virtual machines to do data protection. However what is new in Televaulting v.8.0 is the capability to create a grid of DS-Clients that consists of multiple Data Collectors running on different physical or virtual machines on a single network.

In the Grid DS-Client, all Data Collectors access the same job scheduling database . As backup jobs finish on the Data Collectors on different machines, the machine's resources can be dynamically re-allocated to other data protection jobs so the enterprise can finish its backup jobs more quickly.

Asigra Televaulting scales very well by providing the Grid DS-Client that works to backup all the sources' data during the allotted backup window. It scales on the back-end storage as well by allowing a Grid of Vaults to work together to provide fault tolerance and load balancing. Asigra Televaulting scales its online storage as well by allowing additions of new storage locations on the fly for both primary data and long term storage.

Jerome: VMs are a growing part of more enterprise organizations. How does Asigra Televaulting discover new VMs as they are created and then back them up?

David: The Data Collectors can do an automated discovery of new VMs by connecting to either individual VMware ESX servers, XenSource servers or a Virtual Management Center, which stores and organizes data about physical hosts and VMs. The Data Collector provides a GUI that displays the new VMs that require backup so all an administrator needs to do is select the VM from the Televaulting management interface to initiate backups on those VMs.

Jerome: How do you address concerns about backing up the multiple types of applications and databases found in corporate environments?

David: Asigra provides support for nearly every major database and operating system available. Supported operating systems include different flavors of Linux, Unix, Windows and VMware while supported databases include DB2, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, MySQL , etc. We also support specific applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint and SAP for Oracle.

The other factor that Asigra accounts for is differences in database and file system behavior when they are backed up. To account for these differences, the Data Collectors measure LAN/WAN speed, available application resources and sub-system resources.

This blog entry is the second in a series of interviews with David Farajun, Asigra's CEO, where David looks at how Asigra Televaulting addresses new corporate concerns around information data protection and information recovery.

In this entry, David explains why an appropriately configured Data Collector is so important to data protection and information recovery and what features Asigra has introduced into Televaulting in time to ensure its Data Collectors are appropriately configured in order to optimize the management and placement of data long term. David also shares his views on the use of removable media in data protection and information recovery.

Jerome: Why it is so important to appropriately configure the Data Collector and what can happen if it is inappropriately configured?

David: A new Data Collector introduced into a client environment can be a powerful piece of hardware that will interact with applications on physical and virtual machines across the company's environment. Asigra's Data Collector software (also called DS-Client) uses an agentless architecture, so it is less intrusive when introduced into a customer's environment. The agentless DS-Client does not require any other software installed on the source machines it will protect.

A data collector that is configured inappropriately may not allow an enterprise to finish their backup of data during the backup window or to restore the lost data according to the company's SLAs.

One of the challenges encountered by customers when installing any backup and recovery solution in their environment is sizing the Data Collector and sizing the storage for their backed up data.

Asigra has developed the LAN discovery tool in Televaulting that addresses these issues so it can, so to speak, measure how deep the water is in the pool before it starts protecting any servers in the environment. Still using its agentless architecture, it scans each server for the number of files on it and examines multiple parameters on each file (attributes such as the file's size, number of shares, last access date, last modified date, etc.). By gathering this data for 1 - 2 weeks, it can help companies build a profile of their environment and then put in place intelligent SLAs on the Data Collector. These SLAs will adjust requests for data and input for data based on the customer environment.

Jerome: If the Data Collector has this level information about the files on the servers, what options does that provide companies for managing their data after it is backed up and stored?

David: Asigra sees data broken into two general categories: Critical, or business continuity; and Important, or archived. However Asigra would like to create a new "Retention" category of data. The reason Asigra seeks to create this new category is that if 80% of data that is protected is never or rarely accessed again, why put it on Fibre Channel or even SATA drives that are constantly spinning and consuming power?

Asigra's customers do not want to pay $5/month per GB for data that they will never access again. By classifying the data, our clients can define the value of the data and place it on the appropriate tier of disk. In so doing, customers may find they can "park" 80% of this retention data on readily accessible but low cost MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage systems that spin down disk drives or entire disk arrays when they are not in use.

Jerome: Does Asigra have any plans for the management of removable media such as tape?

David: If you add tape, you have to multiply the recovery time objective by a factor of 10 and Asigra's whole focus is to reduce recovery time and costs. Tape has a number of soft costs so you need to include tape hardware and handling to arrive at the true cost of restoring data. You also don't know much about the environment where the tape cartridge is stored which can also lead to problems. Hard-disk drives running at low speeds on MAID technology can keep power costs down and, using intelligent controllers, this technology can reconstruct the disks should they fail.

Jerome: What about removable disk drives?

David: If you put removable disks on the shelf, what happens to the oil and bearings? It is better to pay a little more in electricity costs to make sure the disk is useable and the data is recoverable.

Hard-disk drive storage is taking center stage as the preferred media for enterprise archiving, data protection and information recovery needs. But as the shift to using disk for long term data storage needs occurs, companies are coming to realize that the software that they have relied on for years is, in many instances, poorly equipped to deal with the management of hard-disks as part of their larger data management scheme. Optimizing the placement of data on hard-disks, replicating data to disk storage systems at different sites and then recovering the data are new challenges that companies face as they introduce larger capacity hard-disks into their environment.

Of course, this is not true for every data protection and information recovery software product. Asigra Televaulting has since its inception in 1986, utilized hard-disk drives as its primary target for backup and recovery while using its agentless architecture to backup and recover servers on corporate networks.

In the last 20 years, the complexity of customer environments and the scope of backup have increased significantly. Asigra's historical strengths such as backup to disk and agentless architecture will get an organization's attention but it is new features that Asigra now offers that can help enterprises meet their specific challenges in regards to data protection and recovery.

Enterprises expect the next generation of data management software to provide a wider range of services than just supporting backup to disk. Making a change in a company's enterprise data protection and information recovery strategy and the product that delivers on it is a large step and companies need numerous reasons to substantiate a move of this magnitude. More intelligently managing data stored in archives and backups, multiple recovery options and the support and management of replication processes are examples of the new features that companies now look for in their software.

To understand how Asigra is addressing these new corporate concerns as well as gain a better understanding of where Asigra is headed longer term, I recently met with Asigra's CEO, David Farajun, to discuss these issues with him and gain an understanding of how Asigra is responding to them.

Jerome: How have you seen customer environments evolve over the last 20 years?

David: 20 years ago customers had a pretty firm handle on their environments and knew what they had. If they said they had 10 servers in their environment that required backup, you had a fairly high degree of certainty that's what was there. Now the situation has changed significantly. Enterprises can add or remove servers from a LAN and you never know about it since even the enterprise network managers themselves may not know these changes have occurred.

The introduction of networks in general and the Internet specifically has translated into a general loss of control over corporate infrastructures. This presents new challenges when trying to meet customer service level agreements (SLAs) for information recovery. If the original SLA specified 10 servers, you sized your backup and recovery environment accordingly. But now 2, 3 or more servers can be unknowingly added to the backup configuration that can change the backup and recovery requirements significantly. The actual impact will depend on how fast the servers are, what applications are on the servers, how much data is on the servers and how much the data changes nightly. To address this, companies need a good understanding of the data on these servers in terms of its recovery and retention requirements.

Jerome: So what steps did Asigra take to help users first quantify and then pro-actively manage their server environment?

David: As part of Televaulting, its DS-Client helps companies perform pre-assessments before they implement Televaulting in their environment. The DS-Client is first deployed in a prospective client's environment and allowed to run for 1 - 2 weeks to gather information about the customer's environment. The DS-Client then produces a number of reports that help companies appropriately size the production Data Collector (also called the DS-Client) for day-to-day backup requirements and helps them size the disk storage for their backed up data.

Virtualization is having the same type of revolutionary impact on corporate data centers that using disk as part of the data protection process has had. Though companies utilize virtualization in many ways, server virtualization is where its impact is most apparent. VMware, Virtual Iron and Xen are contributing to server virtualization's current growth while Hyper-V in Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 is poised to join the virtualization fray this summer.

In the face of these fundamental shifts among corporate data centers in server data protection and virtualization, data protection software needs to do more than just adapt. It needs to embrace backup-to-disk and server virtualization in order to transform data protection software into an information recovery platform. That is exactly what today's 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting brings to the table in the following three ways:

First, Televaulting 8.0 introduces on-demand grid computing. Televaulting has used an agentless architecture since its inception. However its DS-Clients (its agentless backup servers) were configured as one-to-many. This architecture precluded a single DS-Client from helping other DS-Clients complete backup jobs in enterprise shops with large numbers of servers - physical or virtual.

Using Televaulting 8.0's new on-demand grid computing architecture, a parent DS-Client is now created that is aware of the other child DS-Clients residing on virtual or physical machines in the backup environment. As child DS-Clients complete backup jobs assigned to them, they notify the parent DS-Client that its jobs are completed and that it can help other child DS-Clients complete their assigned backup jobs. The parent DS-Client then re-distributes jobs from busy child DS-Clients to the idling child DS-Client so it can help in the backup process.

Second, as I go to storage conferences and speak to end-users, the wide-scale acceptance and adoption of wide area replication astounds me. The size of the company no longer matters. Whether they as small, medium or large, companies want this feature because they understand the age of recovering data anywhere, anytime, and anyplace is upon them.

Multi-directional Data Center Replication in Televaulting 8.0 addresses this growing enterprise need. Asigra Televaulting has for years deduplicated and then replicated data from remote sites back to its central site. However, enterprise companies may have multiple data centers with a need to replicate data between these sites. The Multi-directional Data Center Replication in Televaulting 8.0 capitalizes on the new on-demand grid computing architecture to create an "N+1" configuration. Using "N+1", DS-Systems (the parent Televaulting server into which child DS-Clients feed their data) are aware of each other, sending and receiving backup data to one another. A DS-System can also take over for a DS-System at another site should it fail or need to go off-line for maintenance.

Finally, Asigra Televaulting has always used disk as its primary target for backup but treated all files as the same and worked on the assumption that there was only one tier of disk. Televaulting 8.0 makes no such assumption. Instead, it leverage its knowledge about the files it is protecting (age, size, date last accessed, etc.) plus it now understands that multiple tiers of disk (Fibre channel, SATA, MAID) may exist.

By using this knowledge about the data and disk storage systems, Televaulting 8.0 introduces intelligent archiving as a feature set by placing a server's most active data on FC disk to improve performance during backups and recoveries. However it can store infrequently accessed data on SATA or MAID disk storage systems to take advantage of their lower disk costs and higher capacities while minimizing power consumption.

Asigra recognizes that a fundamental shift is occurring in data protection and it is about more than just supporting or adapting to backup to disk or virtual machines - it is about embracing them. Televaulting 8.0 takes this next logical step in its product evolution by not just adapting to these technologies but making them core to its next generation of prodcut. The introduction of on-demand grid computing, multi-directional replication and intelligent archiving in the newest version of Televaulting 8.0 demonstrate Asigra is committed to helping its clients usher in a new era of information recovery.

Anyway, what caught my interest on his May 1, 2008, broadcast was that he took on the Technology sector and he said that it is time to sell traditional technology stocks. At that point I began to listen more carefully because I have tended to disagree with his observations about technology in the past. Also, since my entire career is centered on covering technology in general and storage technologies specifically, I was curious about how in touch he was with this sector.

To summarize, Cramer feels that many technology companies in Silicon Valley have forgotten their engineering roots and are no longer providing game changing technologies. They now have become so focused on sales and have so many sales people running around trying to sell their products that their engineering departments have gotten lost in the shuffle. As a result, they are no longer focused on delivering products that solve today's immediate problems. Instead they are busy re-packaging yesterday's technology and re-branding it in such a way that it sounds like it solves today's problems.

Having worked as a storage engineer in a Fortune 500 and being involved in the day to day operations as well as having input into its storage buying decisions, I can certainly see his point of view. Sales representatives from traditional technology companies would constantly call on me selling products that did little or nothing to solve the problems that I was trying to solve at that time.

So in the last week I stopped by the place where I used to work just to see how things were going and little has changed except one thing: the people with whom I used to work. All of the people who bought into these 10+ year old technologies that solved yesterday's problems are pretty much gone. And by gone, I do not mean that they were promoted to better paying jobs or leadership roles within the organization. They were gone - as in laid off. Even more ironic, the current regime is now taking the same approach as the previous generation - trying to make old technologies solve today's problems. In that respect, my feelings echo that of Cramer's - "They know nothing!"

I say this not to disparage my co-workers or even traditional technology companies. But when I look at the type of problems that companies face today and how they are trying to fit square pegs (traditional technology) into round holes (today's problems), I have no doubt in my mind that a tsunami of change is gathering that will sooner or later sweep through enterprise organizations.

So do I agree with Cramer? Partially. He is right in the sense that traditional technology companies are behind the curve and that sales departments have overtaken engineering departments in too many of these companies. But I disagree with him that no innovation is occurring in technology - it's just from his vantage point he still can't see it.

I consider Cramer a good barometer of how close we are to a revolution of technology in general and data protection specifically. Cramer sees technology from a bird's eye view whereas I am up close and personal with it. So when I look at products like Asigra Televaulting and its Information Recovery Management platform, I know that this is one product that disproves Cramer's notion that no innovation is occurring in technology. Some of the cool, innovative features that Asigra is about to bring to market I will get into in a forthcoming blog entry.

Once Energy XXI's IT Director Andrew Schaefer had determined that a traditional tape backup system was not going to fit the needs of Energy XXI long term, he began to explore the possibility of using a hosted third party backup and recovery solution. Driving this decision was a number of factors:

• Backups to disk using Excel XXI's original backup software were more problematic than he anticipated
• Using a third party managed solution took a lot of the day to day backup management strain off the IT Department
• Data needed to be kept offsite to comply with SOX regulations
• The hosted solution allowed Energy XXI to implement a disk based backup solution which would scale quickly without the need for a large upfront capital investment

After evaluating a number of hosted third party providers, Schaefer selected a vendor that used Asigra's Televaulting for its backup and recovery software. Schaefer considered a number of factors in coming to that decision, including if the solution offered multi-site expandability, data deduplication, common file elimination, local restore ability, and agent or agentless architectures. However as is so often the case in business, the decision came down to what it would cost.

Energy XXI performed a cost comparison between implementing a new upgraded tape system and going with the hosted Asigra solution. It found that the difference in cost for a new tape solution including time of management versus the Asigra Televaulting solution was minimal. However with all of the software features that Asigra provided plus the built-in offsite storage and the ease of management, Asigra Televaulting emerged as the best overall solution.

Energy XXI implemented the Asigra Televaulting solution in the last quarter of 2007 and has been up and running on it for all of 2008. During this relatively short period of time, Schaefer already had some specific experiences to share.

Backup success rates increased significantly from the beginning. Not only were backups successful, but after the initial data seeding process completed, backup windows were reduced from about 15 - 20 hours to only 2 - 6 hours.

The management of the backup solution by its service provider has impressed Energy XXI. Backup jobs are constantly monitored by the service provider, and in the rare event that there is a WAN outage or an issue with a backup job, the provider usually fixes the issue and contacts Energy XXI before it is even aware of a problem.

A big selling point to Schaefer was how quickly Energy XXI could recover in the event of a hardware failure on the Asigra Televaulting server or if some other disaster occurred. When using a tape drive, if the drive experiences a hardware failure, backups are usually impacted for at least a day until a new tape drive can be obtained and installed unless expensive spare tape drives were kept on hand.

Schaefer says, "We have already tested this feature after experiencing a hardware failure on the backup server. We were able to load the Asigra software on a spare server, restore the entire backup configuration from the remote site, and had the backup server back online hours before the next backup window was scheduled to start."

In the event of a disaster, Energy XXI would not be left waiting for tapes to arrive from a remote storage facility. They could setup a new Televaulting server and begin streaming data from the remote data center immediately.

Energy XXI can more easily scale in a fast growing environment. Asigra Televaulting not only scales well for its growing backup demands, but also allows Energy XXI to add backup capability to remote offices by simply adding a backup agent and sending the data to the same managed data center. In the short time that Energy XXI has used Asigra Televaulting, the amount of data it backs up centrally has expanded nearly 10-fold because of data growth and the ease in which it can expand its capability to other network servers.

In order to get a better understanding of the context of these comments, I put a call into Energy XXI's IT Director, Andrew Schaefer. He commented that introducing disk into the backup process had initially provided increased backup performance and higher success rates; however the amount of data that was being backed up would soon outgrow their temporary solution. Without the use of innovative software technologies, any sufficient disk based storage solution would require a much larger investment.

Energy XXI had initially backed up their data using an automated tape library; however their tape backup experience resembled the experiences other users including tape management headaches, extended backup windows and tape errors. In order to try to rectify these issues, Energy XXI created a volume on their iSCSI SAN and presented it to the backup server as a local disk. While backups were completing successfully, the growing amount of data that were being backed up were reaching the limits of the SAN volume.

Once the SAN volume neared capacity, the backup software would pause the backup jobs requiring manual intervention to resume them. Even though backing up to disk provided a more reliable backup medium, the software managing the backups proved inefficient. Equally problematic, the amount of data Energy XXI needed to backup on a nightly basis continued to grow. Energy XXI needed to find a solution which would scale with their business. It was at this point that Schaefer began to expedite his search for an alternative backup solution that would match Energy XXI's environment.

In part 2 of this series, I'll take a look at why Energy XXI selected Asigra's Televaulting and what specific benefits it provided for them.

Acquisitions of and mergers with other companies; internal consolidations; specific backup requirements for certain applications; and, as often as not, the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, contributed to the company ending up with a menagerie of backup products to manage. Yet, as any user who works for an enterprise is aware, this situation occurs more common than not as many enterprises use multiple backup products in their environment.

The problem is that the environment in which enterprises find themselves has changed significantly in the last few years. While in the past this has created management headaches, now having this many backup platforms presents a significant risk to enterprise corporations.

Aside from the difficulty of recovering the data should a disaster strike, the more real threat is from electronic discoveries and legal holds that can result from laws like the recently amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). These laws put the onus on companies to retain and preserve corporate data, backup or otherwise, for indeterminate periods of time, that can become nearly impossible to comply with when multiple backup platforms are involved.

So what options does an enterprise have? In these situations, the last thing that it may want to do is introduce yet another backup platform into their environment. Introducing a fifth or sixth backup platform into one's environment is probably not in anyone's best interest since for every problem it solves, it probably creates just as many problems and makes the environment more complex, not less.

Reducing the number of platforms to one isn't always an option either. Enterprises may need to keep 2 or 3 backup platforms in their environment to address specific application needs. They may have also made a business decision to keep multiple products in-house so they can ensure a competitive environment between vendors exists.

In these circumstances, enterprises should consider Asigra's Televaulting as one of the backup and recovery platforms to use as one of the two or three to which they consolidate and use as part of their overall data protection strategy for two reasons. Its agentless architecture makes it easy to implement to protect the large number of application, file and print servers that enterprises need to backup but which do not contain data deemed mission-critical. It also is economical. Televaulting is not licensed by the number of servers but by total managed capacity after the data is deduplicated. This licensing minimizes the cost associated with protecting these servers.

The other reason is that enterprises now have a greater need to create common backup stores and manage the data that is stored there. While backing up and restoring this data is important, keeping the data too long or expiring it when it is subject to a legal hold can be just as damaging to a business as never having backed the data up in the first place. Using Televaulting's backup lifecycle management feature, companies can set policies that retain and expire backup sets in these dynamic environments. Because Televaulting's architecture brings all of the data back from these disparate sources to one central backup data store, the task of managing this previously unmanaged enterprise backup data is simplified dramatically.

The article rightfully asserts that Asigra has less than 75 full time employees. It also states that its Televaulting platform is most often used by managed service providers (MSPs) to provide backup and recovery services for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Yet these two statements may leave readers with the impression that Televaulting is not really ready for the prime time challenges that it will find in enterprise environments.

The problem Asigra has developed, if you can call it a problem, is that its Televaulting platform quickly found a willing and underserved market - SMBs. SMBs are typically in dire straits when it comes to managing their backups: their network and system administrators have minimal experience managing backups, the administrators are pulled in multiple different directions and managing backup software and tapes is often a low priority and not the best use of their time.

So when MSPs showed up on these businesses' door steps and said they could deploy agentless backup software and solve their backup problems, it sounded like a godsend. Even it didn't work, businesses hadn't lost anything because Asigra licenses Televaulting based upon the total backed up capacity so if Televaulting backs nothing up the cost is zero. The good news is that Asigra's Televaulting worked so well it has contributed to the recent huge uptick in SMBs outsourcing their backups and the rise of many MSPs that use Televaulting.

I'd like to say I've talked to some clients who are unhappy with Asigra but I can't. In fact, when I talk to some current users, they wonder why I am even bothering them and wasting their time. Televaulting works, case closed. Oh sure, they are some new features they would like to see but most are just ecstatic that they finally got the backup monkey off their back.

MSPs are the same way. I've managed hundreds of TBs of data before and I know what a pain it can be. At the last company I was at, we had 4 fulltime individuals dedicated to managing backups. Conversely, Asigra MSPs routinely manage hundreds of TBs of backup data with one part time person and have the rest of their staff making sales calls.

So why do I write all of this? Asigra has 75 employees and primarily works through MSPs now because they are like any smart business - they went into accounts that were receptive to new, innovative ideas for eliminating their backup pain. But now that Asigra has been in business for 21 years, has "hot" new technologies like CDP and deduplication embedded for free in its product and PBs of backup data under its management at its MSPs, their product isn't just designed and ready for the enterprise, it is enterprise-proven.

Asigra's recent management hires are not a case of getting the cart before the horse as is so often is true with new technology. In Asigra's case, it appears it is putting the right people in place at the right time to take Asigra to enterprise companies that are experiencing the same level of pain that Asigra has helped SMBs cope with for years.

This topic was brought into focus by a reader response to a recent blog entry about how Asigra Televaulting eliminates the need for backup agents on each VMware VM. What this reader wanted to know was:

• How does Televaulting handle the different VMware-specific file types?
• Will alternative storage solutions fit with these related file types?

To answer this reader's questions, I checked with Asigra's technical support to get a deeper understanding of what the differences are between these VMware-specific files and how, or if, Televauting manages them.

For all practical purposes, Televaulting treats these different files as one common entity and not as separate files. The vmx file is a configuration file associated with each VM while the vmsd file stores metadata associated with VM snapshots. By themselves, they are quite useless since the core VM data is stored in the vmdk file associated with each VM. The vmdk file contains hard disk images and represents over 99% of the useable data found in these different types of VMware files that are associated with each VM.

The level of recovery that Televaulting provides for individual VMs hinges on how administrators configure Televaulting's DS-Client to back them up. Televaulting offers two agentless backup options from which administrators can choose: a full VM backup and a guest VM backup.

Using the full VM backup, there are no choices of file type when doing recoveries; the Televaulting DS-Client backs up and manages the VM as a full image so companies can only recover the entire VM image. When doing these backups, the Televaulting DS-Client only backs up the VMware-specific files associated with a specific VM.

Conversely a guest VM backup acts like a normal backup and treats the VM as it does any other server that is not virtualized. Therefore it has all of the normal backup and recovery options such as application awareness and the ability to perform selective backups of specific databases, emails and file systems.

The backup options that Televaulting offers for VMware compare favorably to other backup software products that may use the VMware snapshot option that is natively found in VMware. The VMware snapshot option creates a point-in-time snapshot of all of the VMs hosted by the VMware ESX server so all VMs are protected at the same time and the only recovery option is to recover all of the VMs back to that same point.

Using Televaulting, administrators have more granular control of what sort of backups they create and what level of detail they capture. Using the full backup option, administrators can recover all of the data on a specific VM as opposed to the entire server. Using Televaulting's guest VM backup, companies can restore the application data, email message or file on a specific VM and, when they select Televaulting's continuous data protection (CDP) feature, companies can also restore this data to a specific point in time.

The ease of creating new virtual machines (VMs) is one of VMware's more enticing features but contributes to this problem. Companies can quickly create new VMs to support new applications or for testing and development without needing to acquire more server and storage hardware. The trap companies can fall into is failing to license the needed software for each new VM. Each newly created VM requires a licensed version of the server operating system, server agents and whatever application software the VM needs to host.

While Asigra Televaulting can't address all of a company's concerns about licensing software on individual VMs, data protection software is typically used by all VMs. Though Asigra Televaulting uses an agentless architecture that helps expedite and simplify VM backups, it also uses a licensing model that is equally favorable to VMware since it keeps the backup software costs from getting out of control. Three specific features that make Asigra Televaulting's licensing model favorable to VMware environments are:

• Capacity based licensing. Televaulting licensing is based on the total amount of data that is backed up, not the total number of VMs in the environment. This makes the number of VMware VMs irrelevant. It also eliminates the need for companies to track how many VMs they have and verify if each one is licensed to use Asigra's Televaulting.
• Backup data is deduplicated. As companies create new VMs, data used by new VMs may be very similar if not exactly the same as the data that is used by the original VM. This especially holds true if a new VM is created for testing and development purposes and has data that mirrors production data. Since Televaulting deduplicates the data of the VM as it backs the data up, little or no new backup data is added to the backup store so the net cost to the company to protect this new data is minimal or potentially zero.
• Backup data is aggregated and globally deduplicated before calculating the final capacity. Asigra Televaulting uses its DS-Clients to backup server data and its DS-Servers to collect and aggregate data from the DS-Clients. Though each DS-Client deduplicates data, the central DS-Server performs a global deduplication that reduces the backup data store down to its smallest possible size. The globally deduplicated data store on the DS-Server is what companies use to calculate Televaulting's licensing costs.

VMware comes with more than its fair share of "gotchas" for the uninitiated and software licensing costs for VMware VMs are one "gotcha" that may sneak up on unsuspecting companies. Asigra Televaulting's capacity-based licensing model that is based on the size of the backup data store after it is globally deduplicated doesn't really get any better from a cost and management perspective. Since backup software is typically viewed as an expense by companies anyway, this licensing model ensures all data remains protected while adding minimal costs to the corporate bottom line.

While it is almost redundant to say, Asigra Televaulting's key value proposition is that it does not require administrators to install an agent on each VM. This is especially important in the new virtual world. Using Asigra Televaulting, its DS-Client (a single piece of software installed at remote or branch office) automatically discovers all of the VMs on a VMware server. Once detected, the DS-Client displays the complete VMware installation tree (the physical server, the virtual machine/templates and each VM's directories and files) to the administrator.

The administrator can then select from the DS-Client's management console what he wants to backup and how he wants to back it up (including daily incremental backup or continuous data protection). If the administrator selects to protect the entire VMware server, any new VMs created on it are automatically backed up.

Of course one of the hidden drawbacks of backing up multiple VMs on any VMware server is to avoid overloading the physical processing and network resources of the underlying server. This can occur if an administrator schedules backups on multiple VMs on a VMware server at or about the same time.

In these circumstances, the DS-Client does not throttle the reading of data from each VM before sending it across the network. On these VMs, the backup traffic will behave the same as an application downloading large files across the network. So even through the backup job will not get higher priority than any other network traffic, it still generates server overhead and network traffic.

However there are at least three factors working in Televaulting's favor that minimize its impact of backups on the VMware server's network resources:

• Only the first backup that the Televaulting DS-Client performs on each VM is a full backup. That means the DS-Client only needs to do a full backup of that VM one time - the first time.
• Future backups are done using either incremental backups of changed blocks of data or continuous data protection (CDP) at the administrator's discretion. As long as there are not extraordinary amount of changes on the servers, and the typical daily data change rate on Windows servers is under 5%, the amount of data that the DS-Client needs to transmit during an incremental backup is minimal.
• If CDP is used, network traffic and server overhead on the VMware physical server is further minimized since data is transmitted throughout the day rather than at a scheduled time.

Backing up VMware VMs can create new levels of complexity that companies are often unprepared to address from both a management and technical perspective. Asigra Televaulting's architecture gives companies a simple method to detect what VMs are on each VMware server and offers administrators the options and flexibility they need to make sure the data on each VM is protected without creating other server and network performance problems in the process.