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I was at Dell EMC World2017 last week and although most of the news was on Dell’s new 14th generation server and Dell-EMC integration progress, Wednesday’s keynote was devoted to storage and non-server infrastructure news.
There was plenty of non-server news but one item that caught my attention was new functionality from Dell EMC Data Protection Division that used Avamar and Data Domain to provide disaster recovery for VMware VMs directly to AWS.
Data Domain (AWS) Cloud DR
Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR (DDCDR) is a new capability that enables DD to backup to AWS S3 object storage and when needed restart the virtual machines within AWS.
DDCDR requires that a customer with Avamar backup and Data Domain (DD) storage install an OVA which deploys an “add-on” to their on-prem Avamar/DD system and install a lightweight VM (Cloud DR server) utility in their AWS domain.
Once the OVA is installed, it will read the changed data and will segment, encrypt, and compress the backup data and then send this and the backup metadata to AWS S3 objects. Avamar/DD policies can be established to control how many daily backup copies are to be saved to S3 object storage. There’s no need for Data Domain or Avamar to run in AWS.
When there’s a problem at the primary data center, an admin can click on a Avamar GUI button and have the Cloud DR server, uncompress, decrypt, rehydrate and restore the backup data into EBS volumes, translate the VMware VM image to an AMI image and then restarts the AMI on an AWS virtual server (EC2) with its data on EBS volume storage. The Cloud DR server will use the backup metadata to select the AWS EC2 instance with the proper CPU and RAM needed to run the application. Once this completes, the VM is running standalone, in an AWS EC2 instance. Presumably, you have to have EC2 and EBS storage volumes resources available under your AWS domain to be able to install the application and restore its data.
For simplicity purposes, the user can control almost all of the required functionality for DDCDR from the Avamar GUI alone. But in case of a site outage, the user can initiate the application DR from a portal supplied by the Cloud DR server utility.
There you have it, simplified, easy to use (AWS) Cloud DR for your VM applications all through Dell EMC Avamar, Data Domain storage and DDCDR. At the moment, it only works with AWS cloud but it’s likely to be available for other public clouds in the near future.
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There was much more infrastructure news at Dell EMC World2017. I’ll discuss more details on their new storage offerings in my upcoming Storage Intelligence newsletter, due out the end of this month. If your interested in receiving your own copy of my newsletter, checkout the signup button in the upper right of this page.
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[Edits were made for readability and technical accuracy after this post was published. Ed]
Earlier this week I attended Hitachi Summit 2016 along with a number of other analysts and Hitachi executives where Hitachi discussed their current and ongoing focus on the IoT (Internet of Things) business.
Hitachi has been in the OT (Operational [industrial] Technology) business for over a century now. Hitachi has also had a very successful and ongoing IT business (Hitachi Data Systems) for decades now. Their main competitors in this IoT business are GE and Siemans but neither have the extensive history in IT that Hitachi has had. But both are working hard to catchup.
For one example of what Hitachi is doing in IoT, they have recently won a 27.5 year Rail-as-a-Service contract to upgrade, ticket, maintain and manage all new trains for UK Rail. This entails upgrading all train rolling stock, provide upgraded rail signaling, traffic management systems, depot and station equipment and ticketing services for all of UK Rail.
The success and profitability of this Hitachi service offering hinges on their ability to provide more cost efficient rail transport. A key capability they plan to deliver is predictive maintenance.
Hitachi said their new trains capture 48K data items and generate over ~25GB/train/day. All this data, will be fed into their new Hitachi Insight Group Lumada platform which includes Pentaho, HSDP (Hitachi Streaming Data Platform) and their Content Analytics to analyze train data and determine how best to keep the trains running. Behind all this analytical power will no doubt be HDS HCP object store used to keep track of all the train sensor data and other information, Hitachi UCP servers to process it all, and other Hitachi software and hardware to glue it all together.
As you may recall, Scality is an object storage solution that came out of the telecom, consumer networking industry to provide Google/Facebook like storage services to other customers.
Scality open sourced their S3 driver just to make this process easier. Now, one could just download their S3server driver (available from 
Firing up the S3server on my Mac
NetApp announced a new version of their object storage solution, the 
Somewhere during Bycast’s journey they developed support for tape archives and information lifecycle management (ILM) for objects. The previous generation, StorageGrid 10.2 had a number of features, including:
But customers complained StorageGRID was too complex to install and update which required too much hand holding by NetApp professional services. StorageGRID Webscale 10.3 was targeted to address these deficiencies. Some of the features in StorageGrid 10.3, include:
ILM policy change predictions/modeling, so that admins can now see how changes to ILM policies will impact StorageGRID.
Apparently, service providers are adopting object storage to provide competition to AWS, Azure and Google cloud storage for backup and storage archives as well as for DR as a service. Also, many media and other customers managing massive data repositories are turning to object storage to support their multi-site, very large file libraries. And as more solution vendors support S3 object protocols for data access and archive, something like StorageGRID can become their onsite-offsite storage alternative.
We talked with 