Storage Service Provider - The Beginning
In The End of Yesterday's Post
Yesterday i've left the Disk-to-disk backup short because i need to meet a friend. This friend owns part of a company that would change the telecommunications world with a technology called JAIN SLEE. I'm the believer of this technology since the day i've heard 3 years ago. It will take another 3-5 years for it to mature. I've known him almost 4 years and still we could have had success in selling to DTAC had i not been driven away from Sun MicroSystems. We are planning our collaboration for this year's activities. I now am a free agent. In addition, since i've been away from Sun for more than 1 year. Legally, I can go back to Sun's customers, Sun's employees (yes, if i want to hire them, i can now!).
So let's look at the technology in another perspective (newbie's perspective)
Disk-to-disk Backup
Backup is the most fundamental thing in IT business. You need backup because everything will fail. (Your computer, your hard drive, any computer components) So the only way to cope with failed equipment is to make sure that you have "backup". Most people think backup is just the data that you've created. In fact, backup is everything. It depends on how important the backup is to you.
If you are a multi-billion-dollar business, you cannot afford to lose computing service at anytime. For example, one of my previous engagement at a large Petro-chemical company brought me to realize that losing their computing service for an hour caused them 5 million US dollars. I was there in 2001 right after the outage of 4 hours. All of their tankers couldn't leave the port, causing 4 hour-delay to its production. So they lost 20 million USD. This corporation's revenue is approx. 100 Billion US dollars a year.
With the above customer, they have to backup everything - Data centers, Computing resources (server, storage, network, electricity, cooling), including people who operate their computing services. Since they didn't have a functional secondary data center, they had to lose 20 million dollars on one not-so-fine day. Had they known the complication, their management would definitely agreed on building backups.
When you put the two words together, Disk-to-disk backup, it means making sure that you copy your data from one disk to another disk. D2D focuses on data redundancy alone. So it means that you will need redundant storage systems to do D2D.
D2D Requirement
1. Redundant storage system (to copy the production data to the secondary (redundant) storage system)
2. Network (data path from where the production data is to the secondary storage system)
3. Backup software (in most cases, backup software is required for ease of setup). But if the production system is not required to run 24x7. The customer may not need backup software. I've seen a customer who has scripts to shutdown the database, copy the data from production to secondary, then restart the database.
What Is The Differences Between D2D And File Copy?
Most D2D format is GNU tar format. It's one large file that would contain all backup'ed files. For example, you have 1000 documents in your "My Document" folder, when you do D2D backup, you'll get one large file called my-document.tar that contains all of your 1000 documents. GNU tar format is comparable to Zip file format. GNU tar supports compression, and encryption as standard.
So when you do D2D for all important files, you will get one large file. When you want to restore, you can simply extract files that you need from that large file.
D2D, in principle, is just having a backup file (GNU tar file) on another disk. So copying all files to another copy is not really D2D backup. Copying all files to another directory gives you the ability to access to your backup'ed files directly. In some sense, copying-all-the-files method is comparable to flash backup (Veritas term).
Flash backup is used when there are too many files to be backed up. For example, a customer of mine have 2 TB (2 Terabyte) of data. However, they are having problems with their backup. They couldn't finish their backup within 3 days. The reason? They have too many files. (20 million files). For a system to open a file, write the data to backup, then close a file. A lot of time is spent opening a file, closing a file. With 20 million files, they need to opt for a flash backup or flash copy. Because flash backup will copy the whole volume to another space block-by-block not by file. Their backup window is reduced from 3 days to 8 hours.
The advantage of flash backup is that the customer can browse their backed up files. Since flash backup also copies the FAT (File allocation table) that would allow their users to browse through the 'flashed' backup.
And What About What I Mentioned Yesterday About Storage Service Provider?
Storage Service Provider is is a company that provides storage space and related management services. SSPs also offer periodic backup and archiving and the ability to consolidate data from multiple company locations so that data can be effectively shared.
Storage Service Providers are not new. There were a lot of them during Dot-com. Back then there were Network Service Provider, Storage Service Provider, Internet Service Provider, and more providers than I ever remember.
During Dot-com days, there were a number of SSPs that tried to convince a number of customers to outsource their storage system to SSPs. They failed because the price (FC-AL technology was the only SAN technology then), the new market (noone would outsource their data to a new service provider), the downturn of Dot-Com (many IT companies were wiped out during those few years). SSPs that survived Dot-Com crash became Storage Software companies. These companies are Creekpath and Storability.
The next question is why now? Why SSP market is going to grow in the next couple of year?
1. Downturn of US economy is almost over (and some of the western economies)
2. Storage demand still grows at the same rate or more than ever before but IT budget only grows slightly (IDC report August 2005), so storage must be managed more efficiently
3. Business continuity requirement - sign up for a replication service is a good idea to satisfy this requirement. From a storage standpoint, data must be replicated so corporate data will be available at the time of disaster.
4. Regulatory requirement - SOX, HIPPA, ISO 17799, and more
5. New storage technologies that lower costs - virtualization, iSCSI (IP SAN), 10GigabitEthernet network, MPLS technology.
Why a company would outsource their storage/data to SSP? There are many companies without enough budget to build fault-tolerant and highly available network or even storage. These companies may want to sign up a service from SSP to manage these systems (network, storage) at their corporate office or at SSP's data center (point-of-presence). Since we've mentioned network, having enough bandwidth between sites is critical (MPLS is a good technology candidate).
Currently, SSP market is growing rapidly. All the big players are already in namely AT&T, MCI, Verizon, British Telecom, or even AOL(with xdrive.com purchase). In Thailand, we currently enjoy the market alone since we strategize to create our small monopoly. (Read Monopoly Rules)
SSP requires the following:
1. Data Center - 24x7 world-class data center is a must
2. Network connectivity - large network pipes are mandatory
3. Large storage pool - best if storage is cost effective
4. Storage feature - snapshot and replication capability is a plus
5. People/Process/Procedure - people understand the technology, process, procedure to manage and deliver SSP service
There are multiple service offerings: D2D backup, Replication(Disaster Recovery), recovery (in case a customer has a disaster), restore (in case of human error), archiving (for regulatory compliance), data migration (customer adding new system), outsourced data mining, or even business continuity test.
I have done all of service descriptions, service details, service delivery, processes, procedures, customer SLA, up until marketing collateral. This requires hundreds of hours to sit down with SSP to work out these detailed documents. This is a simple list of documents SSP will need in order to start offering SSP services.
Next issue, we'll talk about where and how to start your own Storage Service Provider?
Yesterday i've left the Disk-to-disk backup short because i need to meet a friend. This friend owns part of a company that would change the telecommunications world with a technology called JAIN SLEE. I'm the believer of this technology since the day i've heard 3 years ago. It will take another 3-5 years for it to mature. I've known him almost 4 years and still we could have had success in selling to DTAC had i not been driven away from Sun MicroSystems. We are planning our collaboration for this year's activities. I now am a free agent. In addition, since i've been away from Sun for more than 1 year. Legally, I can go back to Sun's customers, Sun's employees (yes, if i want to hire them, i can now!).
So let's look at the technology in another perspective (newbie's perspective)
Disk-to-disk Backup
Backup is the most fundamental thing in IT business. You need backup because everything will fail. (Your computer, your hard drive, any computer components) So the only way to cope with failed equipment is to make sure that you have "backup". Most people think backup is just the data that you've created. In fact, backup is everything. It depends on how important the backup is to you.
If you are a multi-billion-dollar business, you cannot afford to lose computing service at anytime. For example, one of my previous engagement at a large Petro-chemical company brought me to realize that losing their computing service for an hour caused them 5 million US dollars. I was there in 2001 right after the outage of 4 hours. All of their tankers couldn't leave the port, causing 4 hour-delay to its production. So they lost 20 million USD. This corporation's revenue is approx. 100 Billion US dollars a year.
With the above customer, they have to backup everything - Data centers, Computing resources (server, storage, network, electricity, cooling), including people who operate their computing services. Since they didn't have a functional secondary data center, they had to lose 20 million dollars on one not-so-fine day. Had they known the complication, their management would definitely agreed on building backups.
When you put the two words together, Disk-to-disk backup, it means making sure that you copy your data from one disk to another disk. D2D focuses on data redundancy alone. So it means that you will need redundant storage systems to do D2D.
D2D Requirement
1. Redundant storage system (to copy the production data to the secondary (redundant) storage system)
2. Network (data path from where the production data is to the secondary storage system)
3. Backup software (in most cases, backup software is required for ease of setup). But if the production system is not required to run 24x7. The customer may not need backup software. I've seen a customer who has scripts to shutdown the database, copy the data from production to secondary, then restart the database.
What Is The Differences Between D2D And File Copy?
Most D2D format is GNU tar format. It's one large file that would contain all backup'ed files. For example, you have 1000 documents in your "My Document" folder, when you do D2D backup, you'll get one large file called my-document.tar that contains all of your 1000 documents. GNU tar format is comparable to Zip file format. GNU tar supports compression, and encryption as standard.
So when you do D2D for all important files, you will get one large file. When you want to restore, you can simply extract files that you need from that large file.
D2D, in principle, is just having a backup file (GNU tar file) on another disk. So copying all files to another copy is not really D2D backup. Copying all files to another directory gives you the ability to access to your backup'ed files directly. In some sense, copying-all-the-files method is comparable to flash backup (Veritas term).
Flash backup is used when there are too many files to be backed up. For example, a customer of mine have 2 TB (2 Terabyte) of data. However, they are having problems with their backup. They couldn't finish their backup within 3 days. The reason? They have too many files. (20 million files). For a system to open a file, write the data to backup, then close a file. A lot of time is spent opening a file, closing a file. With 20 million files, they need to opt for a flash backup or flash copy. Because flash backup will copy the whole volume to another space block-by-block not by file. Their backup window is reduced from 3 days to 8 hours.
The advantage of flash backup is that the customer can browse their backed up files. Since flash backup also copies the FAT (File allocation table) that would allow their users to browse through the 'flashed' backup.
And What About What I Mentioned Yesterday About Storage Service Provider?
Storage Service Provider is is a company that provides storage space and related management services. SSPs also offer periodic backup and archiving and the ability to consolidate data from multiple company locations so that data can be effectively shared.
Storage Service Providers are not new. There were a lot of them during Dot-com. Back then there were Network Service Provider, Storage Service Provider, Internet Service Provider, and more providers than I ever remember.
During Dot-com days, there were a number of SSPs that tried to convince a number of customers to outsource their storage system to SSPs. They failed because the price (FC-AL technology was the only SAN technology then), the new market (noone would outsource their data to a new service provider), the downturn of Dot-Com (many IT companies were wiped out during those few years). SSPs that survived Dot-Com crash became Storage Software companies. These companies are Creekpath and Storability.
The next question is why now? Why SSP market is going to grow in the next couple of year?
1. Downturn of US economy is almost over (and some of the western economies)
2. Storage demand still grows at the same rate or more than ever before but IT budget only grows slightly (IDC report August 2005), so storage must be managed more efficiently
3. Business continuity requirement - sign up for a replication service is a good idea to satisfy this requirement. From a storage standpoint, data must be replicated so corporate data will be available at the time of disaster.
4. Regulatory requirement - SOX, HIPPA, ISO 17799, and more
5. New storage technologies that lower costs - virtualization, iSCSI (IP SAN), 10GigabitEthernet network, MPLS technology.
Why a company would outsource their storage/data to SSP? There are many companies without enough budget to build fault-tolerant and highly available network or even storage. These companies may want to sign up a service from SSP to manage these systems (network, storage) at their corporate office or at SSP's data center (point-of-presence). Since we've mentioned network, having enough bandwidth between sites is critical (MPLS is a good technology candidate).
Currently, SSP market is growing rapidly. All the big players are already in namely AT&T, MCI, Verizon, British Telecom, or even AOL(with xdrive.com purchase). In Thailand, we currently enjoy the market alone since we strategize to create our small monopoly. (Read Monopoly Rules)
SSP requires the following:
1. Data Center - 24x7 world-class data center is a must
2. Network connectivity - large network pipes are mandatory
3. Large storage pool - best if storage is cost effective
4. Storage feature - snapshot and replication capability is a plus
5. People/Process/Procedure - people understand the technology, process, procedure to manage and deliver SSP service
There are multiple service offerings: D2D backup, Replication(Disaster Recovery), recovery (in case a customer has a disaster), restore (in case of human error), archiving (for regulatory compliance), data migration (customer adding new system), outsourced data mining, or even business continuity test.
I have done all of service descriptions, service details, service delivery, processes, procedures, customer SLA, up until marketing collateral. This requires hundreds of hours to sit down with SSP to work out these detailed documents. This is a simple list of documents SSP will need in order to start offering SSP services.
Next issue, we'll talk about where and how to start your own Storage Service Provider?
posted by Peter Srivaree-Ratana at
2:24 PM
1 Comments:
Very interesting.
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