Categories
Apps Cloud Engineer virtualisation

EMC datadomain compresses 103TB of VM backups to 6.8TB using deduplication

john milner - top timico applications engineerJohn Milner is one of our top systems engineers specialising in Virtualisation. Over the last year he has been running an experiment to see the potential of using an EMC datadomain as the primary repository for VM backups. He has approximately 200 VMs (150 Linux and 50 MS Windows) backing up nightly to this appliance. What is amazing is that this appliance has managed to reduce nearly 103TB of production VM backups to 6.8TB using de-duplication and compression!

The below chart shows the actual data (blue) growing rapidly compared with the disk used to store this information (purple).

This allows us to retain data for much longer periods of time than usually possible. John’s next experiment will be to try the same using Veeam Backup and Replication as a comparison.  It’ll obviously take a while to get the results but I’ll let you know when we have some numbers to show.

deduplication in actionCheck out the Timico Data Vault page here.

Categories
Cloud Engineer storage backup & dr

Human Face of Big Data launch today #hfobd

screenshot from android version of #hfobd#hfobd "trust"Attended the EMC sponsored launch of The Human Face of Big Data this morning and picked up some data:

Any kid born in 2012 will generate more data than all the information that mankind has ever generated. In his or her first year he will have generated more info than is currently held in Smithsonian Institute and 10% of all photos ever taken were taken in 2011.

At that point I stopped writing. People spout so many facts about data these days that it starts to lose its impact. Some numbers are so big they almost become pointless.

There are plenty of good and bad uses of big data and we as a society need to think how we go about minimising the risk of the latter.

Coincidentally a taxi driver yesterday told me that he had had four laptops left in his cab in seven years. There are apparently over 19,000 registered black cabs in London. If he was representative that suggests that on average 10,857.141  laptops are left in taxis every year.

I wonder how much sensitive data was on those laptops and how many of them were unsecured?

I’ve not really told you anything about the project – check it out here The Human Face of Big Data. I downloaded the app and entered my data. You can look at and filter the (anonymized) global data set and compare results for different demographics.

Apparently the Apple app isn’t ready yet but don’t worry – Apple usually manages to catch up eventually.

As a footnote, I am interested in exploring Big Data over the next few millennia (think big). If anyone wants to discuss projects drop me a line.

1 No arguing, I have total editorial control:)

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer virtualisation

We are in! – new Timico datacentre

Cisco blades are being used at the new Timico data centre in NewarkAt 10am this morning, 28th November 2011 we officially took delivery
Timico development engineers review progress so far at the new Data centre of a datacentre. Not quite the same impact as the ceremony that ended the first world war (10th hour of the 28th day doesn’t sound quite the same as 11th hour of the 11th day) but hey…

I’m not even sure there was a physical ceremony. If there was I wasn’t there but the new build is certainly buzzing with engineers doing their stuff.
EMC storage now in situ at new Timico data centre

Progress is going to be rapid now with the official launch/opening ceremony due on Wednesday 18th January. The box on the right is one of the EMC SANs I showed being delivered on Friday.

The initial environment will have Juniper in the core network with VMware running over Cisco Nexus and EMC. I’ll post more detail on this as we get nearer launch though if you urgently want to know more drop me a line at [email protected].

Timico is using Juniper in the core network of its new data centre in Newark

Categories
Cloud datacentre Engineer

Psst wanna buy a Storage Area Network? #SAN #EMC

EMC SAN arrives at Timico offices in Newark for installation into new datacentre

When a man in a white van turns up at your place offering you a good deal on a Storage Area Network what do you do? In our case we were expecting him to turn up though I suspect he had no idea what was in the boxes.

I wouldn’t normally bother writing about this but the delivery caused a flurry of excitement amongst the engineers in the office that I felt compelled to do so.

Also quite a few people at the LINX75 meeting mentioned they were following the progress of the data centre build so now that it is getting to the technically interesting bit it seems reasonable to post stuff as it happens.

I’ll put up some more photos when the kit is unboxed. Oh and also it won’t be long before I’ll be saying “Psst wanna buy some storage/virtualisation/hosting/colo etc etc”.

If you are interested in knowing more or want to use some of these services drop me a line at [email protected].

All the best.