Appliances, vacations, and lots of storage

Having written and deleted five different entries on five different topics over the weekend I decided to consolidate some of my thoughts in one handy dandy entry.

-RSA's SecurID Appliance

What with my somewhat awkward decision to take that vacation I've been putting off for six years next week, (I'm going to Le Web 3.0 followed by a few nights at Disneyland Paris. A geek's vacation if there ever was one), I've only just unpacked and powered up an RSA SecurID Appliance. Out of the box the product itself looks more like a high end home entertainment component than a boring old server, right down to the tuning knob and back lit LCD display on the face of the system. Being a Mac user and therefore obsessed with form over function I find this to be a "good thing". More thoughts on the product later this week after I've taken it for a test drive.

Besides, it's good to be told there's a box waiting for you and finding that that it's really a box. Not something which has arrived in numerous crates, weighs a few tons when assembled, occupies numerous floor tiles, and costs enough to put everyones kids through college. ;)  

-Symantec buy what's left of Revivio

Revivio was one of the first CDP vendors but one wonders if, glowing obituaries aside, it wasn't the least successful? A price tag of $20M and with only 12 customers it doesn't seem to me like it was a company struck down in it's prime.

Symantec had been shopping around for a CDP solution for months, and while they now finally have something which didn't cost them a whole lot, they didn't exactly have a lot of choices after Kashya and XOSoft were bought out by EMC & CA respectively. Come to think of it XOSoft may have been a bad fit for Symantec due to the amount of overlap with existing Veritas products and since Revivio requires a Volume Manager to perform it's write splitting Symantec already have a bit of a head start when it comes to integration, but there's nothing there after that. From here to where ever they plan to take it will require a whole lot of new code.

On the topic of CDP in general I've been working with CDP technologies for over a year and the issue I keep on seeing is that they're either badly positioned to customers or customers think CDP is nothing more than a bunch of snapshots taken at regular intervals.

Microsoft's creation of the marketing term near-CDP for their DPM product doesn't help clarify matters either.

CDP is one of those technologies which successfully turns restores which used to take days into hours, hours in minutes, and minutes into seconds. The price you pay for this restore performance gift from god comes in the form of the N+x amount of storage required to journal all the changes made in order to give you that continuous protection. The higher the rate of change the higher the journal storage requirement, but it's high change rate systems which usually are the mission critical ones and therefore require such a granular level of protection along with a rapid restart.  

As with any information protection technology it's all about where you put it, and the last place you want to put CDP is everywhere*.

*Everywhere is exactly where you probably should put de-dup. That's a different post.