SyncSort's integration of their backup software with NetApp hardware is a divide and conquer approach to addressing the biggest challenge that the heavily virtualized or cloud data center faces, providing fast, reliable data protection services. The NetApp SyncSort Integrated Backup (NSB) is more than just a bundle of a software package with a hardware product, it is an integrated solution where the two components count on and compliment each other.

The two components of NSB leverage the other to provide complete data protection. For example the SyncSort software counts on NetApp's snapshot capabilities to provide quick access to point in time backup data sets and the NetApp solution counts on SyncSort's cataloging capabilities to quickly find required data. In the upcoming 4.0 release NSB has improved to include better support for true cloud like data centers. Now users can recover entire systems in the cloud without having to move data back to its source.

NSB can protect physical servers, virtual hosts or individual virtual machines providing maximum flexibility for the backup manager. What is unique is that all three server types leverage a changed block transfer of data during the backup process. Most solutions that transfer changed block can only do so in a virtualized environment. While virtualization adoption rates are impressive most large data centers still have stand alone physical servers in the environment and many of these servers have not been virtualized because they are mission critical, tier one applications. In other words data protection is just as important on them as it is on the virtual machines. If the goal of the organization is to be able to protect both the physical and the virtual environment from a single backup platform NSB is ideal.

Also important in the enterprise is that NSB still continues to support tape. Tape copies can be made of protected data for long term but economical retention. While many vendors claim that tape is dead and everything should be on disk, the reality is the most enterprises still have tape. A recent Storage Switzerland Survey indicated that 76% of respondents had tape in their enterprise and that supporting tape is critical to their environments. Once again SyncSort's strong catalog management provides a rich index of data on those tapes and makes restoring data from tape significantly easier than other solutions.

In 90 days SyncSort will ship version 4.0 of NSB. That release will feature agentless VMware backup support. This provides the ability to broadly protect virtual machines. Agent backup will continue to be supported so that application aware data protection can occur. There is a debate developing over agentless vs. agent backup. Each has it pros and cons and is something that Storage Switzerland will explore in the future. The short answer is both have their place. By supporting both, SyncSort gives the user the choice, which is the way it should be. 4.0 brings SyncSort's "Instant Virtualization Recovery" to the agentless space and has improved recovery in remote private cloud environments as well.

A key feature of NSB is its ability to rapidly recover just about anything to just about any state and now with 4.0, to just about any location. Recoveries can leverage NetApp snapshots for fast recovery to production systems or systems can be recovered "in place". Meaning the application can use the backup target as its data volume and return services to users instantly. Then in the background data can be restored to production systems. As I mentioned earlier the state can change as well, a physical machine can be recovered to a virtual instance, more interesting a virtual machine can be recovered to a physical instance and then really interesting is a virtual machine can be recovered from one hypervisor environment to another, VMware to Hyper-V for example.

The NSB solution has picked up 99 customers in its first year. About 50% of these customers were not using NetApp as primary storage proving that NetApp can be seen as a data protection company as well as a primary storage company. The other ~50% were using NetApp for primary storage but not for backup storage. Which means other vendors were encroaching on the NetApp installation and it also meant increase complexity for the customer because they had two processes managed by two or more vendors. With NSB the both processes fall under the single NetApp umbrellas for seamless transition from primary to data protection storage management.

Storage Swiss Take

We like where SyncSort is heading compared to some of its competition. Why try to reinvent features that the storage hardware suppliers have already been providing for years. Instead of creating you own deduplication, replication and snapshots, leverage what is already there. This allows them to deliver a more streamlined application and focus in on features that customers actually need. For example we expect SyncSort to be able to add the management of NetApp snapshots to its product so that users will be able to take advantage of their catalog and quickly find data across snapshots. Clearly the data center is still struggling with data protection, and virtualization has made the task more challenging, maybe the divide and conquer approach is the best way to go.