Analyst Day Vision Themes: "Application Integration" and "Smart Copies"
We had our annual analyst day in New York this week. That's when we bring in several hundred financial analysts and industry analysts and share our progress, vision and strategy. My focus was on our vision for the future—how we can direct innovation in a way that matters to our customers. I had two main themes.
The first theme was Application Integration. CIOs care much more about the applications that run their business than they do about their storage, so the best way to be relevant to the CIO is to provide the best possible data management environment for their apps. To put it another way: If the application is King, how can we make the King look good? You'll have a pretty good sense of what I talked about if you read blogs like Booth Duty at Oracle Open World: FlexClone is the Big Hit, Using Simple Pictures to Control Data Protection Policies, and Data Management and Automated Teller Machines.
The second theme was Smart Copies. This is a new layer of storage that customers create when they make a second copy of their data—usually as part of a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup scheme—and then use features like snapshots and cloning to get more business value from the second copy. Examples include long-term archives for compliance or clones to accelerate test and development for SAP and Oracle. Many of our customers are starting to create a "smart copy infrastructure" containing copies of almost everything in their primary storage.
Part of what makes our copies "smart" is that we make them so easy to create. For business continuance with mission critical data, create a synchronous copy that exactly replicates your primary storage. For less critical data, save money by putting the copy on inexpensive ATA drives, and by updating the copy at night when bandwidth is cheaper. Or update once an hour if you want. It's completely flexible.
We often brag that our unified architecture makes it easy for customers to choose between SAN, NAS and iSCSI, depending on what's best for the app, but I think it's equally important to offer a wide variety of data protection capabilities. With most storage arrays, the only option for replication is from one storage system to another that's just the same—like-to-like. With NetApp, it's easy to replicate from high-end SAN with 72 GB Fibre Channel drives to a much less expensive iSCSI system with 750 GB ATA drives. We even have tools (see here and here) to bring data from other vendor's primary storage into our smart copy infrastructure.
The other thing that makes our copies "smart" is features like snapshots and cloning. Backup or DR may be the reason you created the copy, but once you have the copy you can clone it to let more people access the data. A clone is a "virtual copy" that takes very little space, so it's fast and easy to create as many clones as you want. Or you can use snapshots to keep data for a long time. For compliance, make the snapshots tamperproof to ensure they can't be changed.
Clones are especially valuable for development and test in SAP and Oracle environments. Clones speed up test and dev in two ways. First, clones speed up the test cycle itself. Copying a multi-terabyte database is slow, but creating a new clone is instant. You can quickly create a clone, run a test, and check the result. If the test fails, fix the bug and try again. Second, you can afford to create lots of clones, since they don't take any extra space until you write to them. Real copies of a big database are expensive, so people have to share. With clones, it's cheap to create a copy for everyone. People are faster and more efficient when they can work in parallel.
In a way, you could say that application integration is all about making the first copy of data better (primary storage), and smart copies are all about making the additional copies better (secondary storage). When you put the two together, you get a very powerful model of data management.
The first theme was Application Integration. CIOs care much more about the applications that run their business than they do about their storage, so the best way to be relevant to the CIO is to provide the best possible data management environment for their apps. To put it another way: If the application is King, how can we make the King look good? You'll have a pretty good sense of what I talked about if you read blogs like Booth Duty at Oracle Open World: FlexClone is the Big Hit, Using Simple Pictures to Control Data Protection Policies, and Data Management and Automated Teller Machines.
The second theme was Smart Copies. This is a new layer of storage that customers create when they make a second copy of their data—usually as part of a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup scheme—and then use features like snapshots and cloning to get more business value from the second copy. Examples include long-term archives for compliance or clones to accelerate test and development for SAP and Oracle. Many of our customers are starting to create a "smart copy infrastructure" containing copies of almost everything in their primary storage.
Part of what makes our copies "smart" is that we make them so easy to create. For business continuance with mission critical data, create a synchronous copy that exactly replicates your primary storage. For less critical data, save money by putting the copy on inexpensive ATA drives, and by updating the copy at night when bandwidth is cheaper. Or update once an hour if you want. It's completely flexible.
We often brag that our unified architecture makes it easy for customers to choose between SAN, NAS and iSCSI, depending on what's best for the app, but I think it's equally important to offer a wide variety of data protection capabilities. With most storage arrays, the only option for replication is from one storage system to another that's just the same—like-to-like. With NetApp, it's easy to replicate from high-end SAN with 72 GB Fibre Channel drives to a much less expensive iSCSI system with 750 GB ATA drives. We even have tools (see here and here) to bring data from other vendor's primary storage into our smart copy infrastructure.
The other thing that makes our copies "smart" is features like snapshots and cloning. Backup or DR may be the reason you created the copy, but once you have the copy you can clone it to let more people access the data. A clone is a "virtual copy" that takes very little space, so it's fast and easy to create as many clones as you want. Or you can use snapshots to keep data for a long time. For compliance, make the snapshots tamperproof to ensure they can't be changed.
Clones are especially valuable for development and test in SAP and Oracle environments. Clones speed up test and dev in two ways. First, clones speed up the test cycle itself. Copying a multi-terabyte database is slow, but creating a new clone is instant. You can quickly create a clone, run a test, and check the result. If the test fails, fix the bug and try again. Second, you can afford to create lots of clones, since they don't take any extra space until you write to them. Real copies of a big database are expensive, so people have to share. With clones, it's cheap to create a copy for everyone. People are faster and more efficient when they can work in parallel.
In a way, you could say that application integration is all about making the first copy of data better (primary storage), and smart copies are all about making the additional copies better (secondary storage). When you put the two together, you get a very powerful model of data management.
Application Integration is not just about adding value to primary storage. Application Integration is the way the application administrator can get access to the NetApp smart-copy infrastructure without having to go through the storage administrator. For example, today, Oracle administrators can use SnapManager for Oracle to clone and snapshot their databases.
More fundamentally Application Integration is about providing complete data management tools to the owners of the data, including management of their replicas, from an application context while allowing the storage administrator to retain control.
Posted by: kostadis roussos | April 23, 2007 at 11:08 AM