Remarkably, as we work with clients we discover that they rarely analyze the component costs of their operations. So let me make this easy: the bulk of the money is in whatever you do for data protection. But even if you know this, have you looked at the details of what you’re protecting and how it flows through you systems? What components make up the bits you write? How often do you write them and why?

Last year we worked with a client who had done this analysis. They discovered that 40% of what they were writing each day was user PST files in home directories, independent of server backups. (This is a financial institution whose corporate policy requires the preservation of email. Each user needs and wants their own record.)

Outlook, as you may know, has the annoying feature of updating your PST file each time you open it whether you have changed its contents or not. This means that if you do daily incremental backups every PST file for every user is written every day. And, if you’re keeping most or all of your emails, and you have lots of users, this is lots of data. Can this be made less burdensome and less expensive?

We worked with the client to set a system-enforced limit on the size of an individual PST file. This means that each user now has a series of smaller files. Outlook only attaches and updates the current PST file; the others are left as they are. Enterprise-wide, this eliminated 100 tapes from a year’s worth of incrementals. 3M is commonly cited as stating that the cost of maintaining writing and maintaining one tape in a typical backup scenario is about $3,500 a year. One hundred tapes times $3,500 is a lot of money – a third of a million dollars a year. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that your operations are less expensive – only $1,500 per tape per year. This is still $150,000 a year.

We would all agree that every user’s archival mail is something we have to protect. But, maybe it’s worth drilling deeper into how you do it…

Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:54:45 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Observations | Storage Management

We have all watched the price of on-line storage decrease year after year. While it is still neither infinte nor free (and it's certainly not free to manage), it is pretty inexpensive these days. So inexpensive, in fact, that tape is now dramatically more expensive. This cost inversion (tape used to be much cheaper than on-line storage) should change the way we manage our storage.

If you are a large corporation with sites all around the world, you need to replicate your data to these sites anyway. If London, New York and LA have all ceased to exist, you probably won't care much about the tapes at Iron Mountain... Trust me, your concerns will be elsewhere. As a result, there is really no need to have any of these tapes.It's a costly security blanket that really accomplishes nothing.

A smaller company needs tapes for disaster recovery, (although on-line vendor-based alternatives exist) but daily backups should be on-line. Writing tapes everyday is error-prone and costly. You just shouldn't do it anymore.

Thursday, December 01, 2005 5:16:11 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Storage Management

Listening to all the hardware vendors, you would think that virtualization is the greatest thing since sliced bread... It is true that it solves a number of problems, but it also comes at a price. For example, many organizations maintain historical backups. Suppose I use the facilites of my virtual storage to do some reoganizing. How do I then trace the files that I have - in their new locations - back to their ealier backups? You can't. At least you can't without NTP Software's technology. Does it matter? It matters to a lot of our customers. In fact, we work with clients who refuse to reorganize their storage for just this reason. The bottom line? Everything comes at a price...

Thursday, December 01, 2005 5:03:55 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Storage Management

I'm just back from watching the Red Sox get spanked by the Yankees... Normally I don't rant, but today I have to. How many times do they have to play out the same script. Pedro starts coming apart. They go out to the mound. Pedro says something that must translate to: “I'm fine, I can handle it.” Everyone leaves; Pedro does worse; the Sox lose the game... It cost us a Series, a pitching coach, and yesterday's game.

What's that old definition of insanity: do something once and get a result. Do it again and get the same result. Do it a third time and nothing changes. Do it again, expecting a different result. That's insane. So is asking Pedro whether or not he should come out. We know how this works - every time!

I see the same behavior in business all the time. People - managers - want to believe the promise rather than deal with the reality. Don't by the promise! Deal based on what happens, not on what gets said. 

Monday, September 20, 2004 11:15:29 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management

In case you haven't noticed, the operating system wars are pretty much over. Going forward, there will be Windows and UNIX. This means the interesting play has moved somewhere else - to the man-machine interface.

Having recognized this, last week, IBM put some of its speech technology out into the open source marketplace. This counters Microsoft's Speech Server, which up until now has been the only real pure infrastructure play in the space.

I've been a Dragon user for a few months now, and the technology is way beyond where most people think it is. The paradigm for speech interaction with your computer still needs some work, but the underlying technology probably recognizes what i'm saying better than most humans.

With digital photography it is already possible to create man-made images that cannot be distinguished from naturally occuring scenes. Pretty soon we will be able to create man-made speech that's indistinguishable as well. When that happens, it's a whole new world... Even if you don't call your bank on the phone, voice I/O is in your future. Trust me.

Monday, September 13, 2004 10:24:22 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  News

Recently I have been reading articles on Apple vs. MSN and the downloadable music wars. More interesting (at least to me) than who will win this battle is what it all means. In the last 25-30 years (one generation), we have gone from phonograph records to half inch square memory chips (which now, by the way, come in gigabyte sizes). Let's look at the trends here:

Music goes from tape, to optical (CD), to bits. Does anyone doubt that video will go down the same path?

Displays go from CRTs at 640x480 to flat screens at 1280x1024.

Why is a music DVD more appealing than it's companion CD? Part of it is the video, but the DVD also has 3-4 times the audio density. The music sounds better because it is better.

Ok. So what does this all mean?

If it were me, I wouldn't buy Blockbuster stock or glass company stock (although Corning is a player in flat screen technology as well). I figure that in the next 2 years I'll have all my music as bits and the CDs will be in the bottom of some closet. How long before my movies get there?

Well... Hitachi now sells a 400 gig hard drive. That's about 100 movies, which is more than I have. But the key for movies is still bandwidth. We are now at the point (just this year) where more than half of all the homes that have Internet connectivity have high-speed Internet. The problem with Movies is that we don't yet have the right software and appliances (something we're working on a bit...). Give it another couple of years.

Oh, by the way, did you know you can produce a pretty good display using laser interference patterns... something to think about!

Friday, September 10, 2004 3:41:45 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Observations

The level at which a technology is a commodity moves up the ISO model over time.

There was a day when a wireless phone was novel, expensive and difficult to make work. Now we take them for granted. The ISO and its interpretations provide the framework for a connected, digital universe. There was a day when getting a 3Com network adapter to exchange packets with a Novell adapter was a challenge. Now everyone takes this level of connectivity for granted. Later there was a time when getting a Mac, a PC, and a Unix box to talk was a challenge. Now this too is commodity technology.

There is a continous trend here. Namely the action and the interesting problems move up the ISO model over time. Below this line, everything is a commodity and can be assumed to work. Above the line, most things have no clear defacto standards and are likely not to interoperate well.

Once you understand where this line is, you can figure out other things like the relative economics of playing in one space or another.

Friday, September 03, 2004 4:46:08 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Backa's Laws

Most of us have heard of Moore's Law, Murphy's Law, and other Natural Laws that apply to technology and sometimes life itself. Backa's Laws add other observable laws of nature to this collection.

Friday, September 03, 2004 4:31:20 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Backa's Laws