I’ve Got The Remote Replication, Single-Storage Image MPIO Blues

There are not a lot of customers I meet that don’t want some form of replication to a disaster recovery/colocation facility. What used to be financially unreachable has come down over 10-15 years to be affordable for most businesses. Remote replication, coupled with VMware or one of the other hypervisors providing server virtualization has made recovery quick, easy and within budget.

So as I look at some of the new storage systems being released lately, I’m scratching my head. Why would an affordable small to medium business mid-tier storage system provide only FibreChannel-based replication – today?

The Storage Evolution Part 2: Deduplication

This is part 2 in the Storage Evolution series.

When we created SANs we stored more and more data retrieved at higher and higher speeds, and it was good. Then we added advanced functionality like creating copies (clones, snapshots, etc.) quickly, and it was good. Then development wanted to have 6 copies of that production database, one for each developer, also test, QA and staging. We needed a daily clone for the data warehouse and business intelligence. We virtualized our servers, we booted from SAN, some of us ditched the desktops and workstations opting for Citrix and VDI. We were making copies of the same data, over and over and over again. And at the 11th hour of the second half of the day, we backed it all up.

And it just got worse.

The Tale of Tape

We had a love/hate relationship with tape. We loved it’s density, it’s streaming speed, we hated its bulk, daily off-site management, library management and load and seek time. But it was cheap, alternatives expensive.