Storage Networking Times

Issue 10, February 2009

SNIA Spotlight: Data Protection, Deduplication, ILM and Long-Term Archive and Compliance Data Management Initiative
Philippe Nicolas, Chair, DMI, dmi-europe-chair@snia.org , Mike Dutch and Daniel Budiansky, Co-Chairs, SNIA Data Deduplication and Space Reduction Special Interest Group (DDSR-SIG)

The SNIA Europe Data Management Initiative (DMI) is a strategic component of the association and a key resource for the industry and the end user community. In order to address the constant evolution of the function of data in today’s businesses, the initiative’s parent body, the Data Management Forum (DMF) developed a number of groups focused on the key topics:

• The Data Protection Initiative (DPI) defines new approaches and best practices for data protection and recovery including data deduplication.



• The Information Lifecycle Management Initiative promotes a unifying vision of what ILM will become and its impact on the datacentre.



• The Long Term Archive and Compliance Storage Initiative focuses on the challenges of long-term digital information retention and preservation.

The DPI concentrates on data deduplication, CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and VTLs (Virtual Tape Libraries). A great amount of content has been created including buyer’s guides, tutorials and white papers as well as presentations. Recently, the group was also tasked with covering data reduction technologies; because of the data deluge due to massive usage of IT in many day-to-day activities, data redundancy became a significant IT cost and a technology was developed to use cryptographic algorithms to reduce this redundancy.

The Data Deduplication and Space Reduction (DDSR) SIG held its first Webcast in late 2008, and it was titled ‘Data Deduplication in the Backup World’ (a recording of the entire session is available at http://sniadmf.cmail4.com/t/y/l/dyjltr/jlirtudud/y). The goal of this series of webcasts is to provide regular educational presentations to give IT professionals the opportunity to ask DMF experts questions in real-time.

Final terms and definitions were approved by the SNIA Technical Council. These will be included in the next edition of the SNIA 2009 dictionary. Common terminology is particularly important for new technologies where product selection is challenging because relevant points of comparison may be masked by vendor marketing messages. Previous SNIA technical tutorials and webinars on data deduplication have focused on subfile data deduplication. While this focus is likely to remain, the SNIA dictionary will position the term “data deduplication” in a more general context, encompassing both single-instance storage and subfile data deduplication.

Building on the success of deduplication exercises included as part of two labs in the SNW fall 2008 Hands On Lab program, a new lab, focused specifically on deduplication, will be included in the program this year at the spring 2009 SNW in Orlando. The lab will be a companion to the deduplication tutorial, giving participants the opportunity to work with various deduplication technologies, by completing exercises developed by the participating vendors.

The DDSR SIG delivers technical tutorials, white papers, articles, and updates the DPI Members Buyer's Guide on an ongoing basis to help educate the market on these exciting new technologies.

The two other groups focus on ILM and LTACS (Long-Term Archiving and Compliance Storage) and represent the other two key components of the DMF. ILM, one of the great buzzwords a couple of years ago, has evolved into data classification with service-level objectives. The current idea for ILM is to link different storage tiers and data values to business frameworks.

With regard to archiving, the underlying project is essentially dedicated to allowing data to be archived for 100 years while preserving easy access, online storage and of course disk preservation. This group has already created content and recently launched the LT-TWG (Long-Term Technical Working Group) to develop some best practices documents and a new logical application-centric format standard. The concept behind this new format will define a "preservation-oriented" logical container consisting of the content (the data) and associated preservation metadata, including reference information, integrity and authenticity controls, audit records, and potentially event readers. This new standard will be the perfect companion to XAM (eXtended Access Method), which was developed to address migration, management of long-term data based on disk storage systems.

If you would like to find out more about the DMI or any of the technology discussed above we look forward to hearing from you. We are always interested in better understanding your business needs and IT challenges to tune and adapt our initiatives. For more information about data deduplication visit www.snia.org/dmf or contact the co-chairs at ddsr-sig-chair@snia.org.

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