Managing data, the Symantec way

In this conversation with Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News, Oussama El-Hilali, vice president - Engineering for NetBackup, Information Management Group (IMG), Symantec, shares some in-depth analysis on data or information and the issues faced by enterprises while dealing with the rise in data, its storage, management and the trend towards cloud.

Excerpts…

For businesses, data remain core part of decision making process. So, what are the issues faced by enterprises while investing in technologies such as data storage, archiving and its management?

We try to provide a number of solutions to address these issues either collectively or individually. In organizations where data is exponentially growing, we can keep up buying additional storage but sometimes the facility may not be able to host that storage, and so the cost is also exponential and has implication beyond just the storage. So for those types of organization, the de-duplication solution is essential because the more copies you keep of the data, the more deduplication you create and that’s where this technology comes in handy.

De-duplication is a very simple concept — you take a set of data — whether it’s a file or database and then you segment that file into equal segments and for each segment you assign a certain key. Having a unique reference to the key that was created helps you while backing up the data, as you will be able to compare the segments that are already being backed up. It helps you send the keys and create a new reference without having some of the data. This technology makes the most office backup possible, so the bandwidth you use is not as high as you use if you are sending the entire data and the backup times are shorter.

And we have enhanced technology that allows interruptions. So if you are doing backup assuming a low bandwidth line as it interrupts the communication, the backup get stopped. But the technology will help resume the backup process later and complete it. So in this type of situation, you will be able to successfully integrate into the backup process the remote offices and extensions of data centers but at the same time the total amount of data that you are storing here is significantly reduced, in some cases it is reduced by 50 times less than the total data stored.

Traditional backup approach does not work very well when you are backing up about one or two millions of these one or two megabytes files. In that case, we apply technology like Flash backup, which, instead of going through file by file, takes the snapshot, maps block by block, does the copying and then recreates the file structure at the backend by taking the snapshots and synchronizing it. In fact it’s so optimized that if you are retrieving from tape when you have 3 files, it will retrieve the farthest first then the next and the following one. So it doesn’t go back and forth. This way, we address these issues related to data protection.

it comes to information management, what we are trying to do is by having archival solutions available with backup, creating policies that allows you to set a certain specific time for the data - that may be backup made data - and putting it on the staging environment.

How do you see the trend towards clouds among enterprises?

Cloud possibilities are here and they are growing as there is a great deal of interest in them among companies. However, there are some legitimate concerns about security and I think, we being a security company, can address those concerns and customers will be eventually become more and more comfortable with these implementations. They will be comfortable in two ways — by implementing internal clouds - when they see that this is a very reliable mechanism, they can explore the external clouds as well. And obviously when they see the mechanism like encryption and other, they will be more comfortable about cloud and its use. Security as you know is a type of situation where you can provide assurances.

From IMG perspective how is the cloud business for the organization?

It's still a very nascent technology, there’s been lots of questions being asked, lots of exploration is happening and we are responding to it. We are the forefront in terms of providing ideas and solutions, but I would still say that it’s still at very nascent stages of implementation