Start-up investors typically target opportunities with the largest addressable market share. For the last ten years in data protection this has meant the virtual server market, specifically VMware. Standards and easy access APIs have created a plethora of copycat backup vendors all struggling to form a position in the minds of buyers. You would assume this gold rush created value, choice and low prices but in fact confusion, complexity and runaway costs has been the result. Why is this?

Enterprise data protection isn’t easy. To be more precise, getting a consistently good outcome isn’t easy. A good outcome is always being confident of recovering whole systems, not just individual VMs; in a timely manner, with all the data in place. For many customers with mixed operating systems and platforms this requires a lot of planning, daily administration and regular testing. Systems administrators are fully aware of the administrative grind required which makes them susceptible to the headache-busting promises of “snake oil” sales people.

When good enough is not good enough

At Silverstring, we work with clients who are as obsessive about their data as we are and who share our philosophy that good enough data protection is not good enough. We add value by solving the hard stuff, even if it is not the largest addressable market share. Let’s give you an example.

IBM won the battle versus Sun, HP and others in the Risc/Unix wars, but it won a market that has shrunk by a factor of 10x. That said, just like the mainframe, many companies run their most business-critical applications on IBM Power architecture. So, when it comes to good outcomes the time spent on protecting these systems should be disproportionately high. In our experience, investment of money and time follows the high-volume or mass market, rather than the tail-risk of the few, revenue bearing systems which lie outside of the standard deviation “bell curve”. Risk is not evenly distributed, or predictable, and neither should be your investment in data protection.

It’s the recovery stupid

To recover a business process in the event of a disaster requires the coordinated recovery of potentially multiple inter-connected servers. If these servers are not homogeneous this can be a tricky task, requiring significant skill and coordination. Silverstring is working to eliminate the fear and unknown risks that come with recovering complex, mission-critical systems. How are we doing this?

Firstly, we are developing a common orchestration platform to recover multiple, heterogeneous but connected servers, from multiple backup solutions.

Secondly, we have built solutions which leverage the economics of cloud to allow you to self-provision and self-test recovery scenarios from any location, at any time.

Thirdly, since hunting perfection in data protection can be an arduous journey, we offer a fully managed data availability service, backed by our unique, Sleep Easy Guarantee™.

Next step?

Our flagship solution, Alchemis Protect, provides a backup and recovery target platform from which recoveries can occur with minimal manual effort, remotely and on a pay-as-use basis. This makes recovery testing on a frequent basis less time consuming and far more cost effective.

To find out more about our new offering for IBM Power System users, please check out this Silverstring web page –  Power DRaaS

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This new rule could be just the beginning of the end for much more supposedly “trusted” institutions and one of the technologies which could accelerate their demise is ‘Blockchain’.

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a simple technology but describing what it can do, or how it can disrupt, is more difficult.

It can be described as many things by many people; a database with massive resiliency and no single point of failure; a platform on which to build new applications with security provided by a network of computer nodes and encryption; or a transparent, trusted marketplace where assets and value can be exchanged.

Blockchain as a platform for change

Right now our businesses and personal lives are dependent on central organisations to verify, arbitrate and make decisions for us. Traditionally, trust has been bestowed on financial institutions, registration offices, polling stations and even social networks which are trusted with our digital identity. In the past decade, this has been called into question. The financial crises dented our confidence in the big banks and professional political commentators damaged our trust in polls and election processes. Social media has connected us with many more people but like some digital echo chamber, with people just “like” us, people from the same backgrounds who reinforce our view of the world. This only builds higher digital walls between people from different social or economic backgrounds.

This is changing, big banks are working on Blockchain primarily to make current processes more efficient and to cut costs. Meanwhile “Fintech” start-ups are completely re-engineering old processes and offering new services. In Ukraine, the government in 2016 used Blockchain technology in local elections to build trust and help eliminate fraud,(the full article can be read here.) If nobody believes the polls in the UK or US elections maybe an election polling Blockchain, with built-in anonymity and security, would be a more trusted prediction vehicle?

It’s very anonymity makes it a strange platform for social media but even the quasi-religious language of Blockchain makes you wonder just what’s possible (followers refer to the first block in the Blockchain as the “genesis block”).

How quickly will Blockchain be adopted?

The adoption curve for Blockchain could be even faster than that of the World Wide Web. Both technologies require the internet to function. However twenty years ago, in 1996, only 1% of the world’s population had an internet connection. Fast track to 2016 and 47% have an internet connection. Also, when you consider two billion smartphones are now in circulation, Blockchain has the potential to be adopted much faster than the World Wide Web. In five years’ time it might be more common to hear “is it on the Blockchain?” rather than “is it in the database?”

The last few years have seen the incredible rise of disruptive platforms changing business models using web 2.0 services. Good examples are Uber and Airbnb, the former being the only taxi firm not to own cars and the latter the largest hotel which doesn’t own any property. These platforms, however, are still centrally controlled and trust remains a problem. These disruptors now face disruption themselves from true peer to peer sharing where no one organisation controls the exchange of value. Instead, it is achieved through distributed, decentralised networks where value can be both created, shared and exchanged. Blockchain provides frictionless and democratised trust and could deliver on the internet’s potential to bring power to the user, a promise the web has only partially delivered on. One example of a storage company disrupting the file sharing marketing is Maidsafe which has built a secure, decentralised peer to peer network to store your files; this is more secure than centrally controlled sites such as Dropbox.

The human factor

With Blockchain’s ability to disintermediate the established levers of power perhaps the biggest threat to the adoption of the technology is the regulators and the pillars of power. The Iranian government very quickly killed the “Twitter Revolution” back in 2009 through fear and control of the network. Next time it might not be so easy with Blockchain technology.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog: The case against Blockchain

The post Can Blockchain democratise trust? appeared first on Silverstring.

One of the key disruptors in all industries is data growing exponentially at an accelerated pace. Questions of how you store and access data and move and share information are also becoming critical in the world of globalization.

Facing unprecedented data growth, IT organizations are now tasked with finding ways to efficiently preserve, protect, analyze and maximize the value of their unstructured data as it grows to petabytes and beyond. IBM Cloud Object Storage is designed to handle unstructured data at web-scale with industry-leading flexibility, scale and simplicity.

After attending the event, Alistair Mackenzie summed up how Cloud Object Storage will help solve the problems and become the future of storage with the following quote:

“Cloud Object Storage is a way companies can dynamically allocate data, move data, access information in a much more progressive dynamic way than was previously possible in the more traditional models of storage.”

Watch the full interview here:

For more information on Cloud Object Storage please get in contact and fill in the form below.

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Two things have since happened which has caused the Silverstring team to reconsider this option. Firstly, IBM announced in September v7.1.3 of Spectrum Protect (TSM) and secondly, IBM announced just this week plans to acquire a company called Cleversafe, a market leader in object storage.

When IBM announced Spectrum Protect v7.1.3 our first blog focussed on the new in-line deduplication capability which can be found here. This development was made possible by the complete overhaul in how IBM stores data in Spectrum Protect – using the new concept of container storage pools. These containers can utilise not just traditional storage (SAN, NAS) but also scale-out object storage.

There are some limitations, such as not been able to support backup copy pools or not migrating data from existing storage pools to the new containers. However, in the rare circumstance of building a new greenfield platform would object storage usher in a brave new world of data protection?

Unfortunately, we still couldn’t get past the cost economics so it was looking like being a really niche play until we heard about the proposed Cleversafe acquisition. Most interestingly IBM has decided to roll the technology into its Cloud unit, which for most of us means the Softlayer infrastructure as a service business. This is the real game changer for data protection.

Softlayer allows enterprises to consume storage rather than purchase storage, or to put it another way, pay-as-you-use. IBM has the technology now to build an Amazon S3-like storage tier across its global datacenters and hopefully meet a price point which gets close to tape options.

The technology won’t be available in the Softlayer cloud until well into 2016 but if you are one of those people who like to plan ahead, here are a couple of use cases for your next generation backup you might want to consider

• The combination of cloud and object storage offers “anywhere access”. Do you have backup systems spread across multiple sites and a need to get data off site quickly and securely?
• Do you have a need for retaining a lot of data in backup or archive (Petabytes not Terabytes)?

Let us know what you think? Do you have a use case for TSM 7.1.3 and Object storage? https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGSG7_7.1.3/srv.solutions/c_stg_pools.html?lang=en

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Most importantly, it announced a way to deliver backup cost savings through a new, software based, deduplication method. Solving the deduplication problem is the key to opening up cost savings in software, disk storage and network bandwidth. Cracking this code promises even bigger savings by leveraging cloud compute for disaster recovery. It’s very important if you want to contain spiralling storage costs.

The Competition

Taking the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Protection as the source, IBM’s top competitors are Veritas Netbackup, Commvault Simpana and EMC. Veritas already has client and source side deduplication from v7, Commvault announced deduplication in v8 and improved it with global deduplication in v9 and EMC has a whole bag of deduplication solutions, notably Avamar and Data Domain appliances.

On the whole, software based deduplication has been a bit of a disappointment as soon as you try to scale the workload, so large enterprises have had to invest in dedicated appliances such as EMC Data Domain and IBM ProtectTier. The cost of these solutions is sometimes bigger than the original problem!

If, with this new version, IBM can pull off software based deduplication at scale the cost benefits for existing Spectrum Protect users could be significant and may warrant large enterprises to reconsider their options.

The Bottom Line

Previous attempts by IBM to crack the dedupe code have focussed on post-process methods which have tried to take the strain off the central TSM database but have resulted in scalability issues and extra administrative complexity. A new in-line method attempts to improve scalability, improve deduplication savings and eliminate the extra admin tasks. IBM are claiming a single TSM database can now handle in excess of 30 Terabytes ingest per day with a total primary storage pool approaching 4 Petabytes. This performance would allow for significant consolidation of TSM servers and ultimately more elegant than the competition with their numerous media servers and add-on bits of software.

For TSM users big cost savings could be realised in the following 3 ways:

1. Reduction in primary pool capacity – less disk and less software licence costs if you are using back end capacity licencing
2. Reduced number of backup servers and hence reduced administration
3. When combined with node replication the ability to leverage pay-as-you-go cloud IT for disaster recovery*

*for more details on consolidating backup and DR through DRaaS options you might want to check out this post https://www.silverstring.com/blog/backup-and-disaster-recovery-as-two-separate-items

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