Why you should care about Copy Data Management
After diving into the details of the recent Okta breach enabled by password manager vulnerabilities, Curtis and Prasanna tackle the growing issue of copy data sprawl. They define copy data management – the practice of tracking and governing all duplicated production data for backup, DR, development, analytics etc. What problems result from copy proliferation? How feasible is a single consolidated platform? What regulatory and cost implications exist? Tune in as our hosts break down best practices for cataloging, securing, reducing, and better leveraging your organization’s data copies. Specific topics covered include:
- Password manager risks exposed in Okta hack
- Copy data management 101
- Storage cost, compliance, security issues
- Tools and solutions landscape
- Backup reuse considerations and cautions
- Cloud vs. data center copy management
Join Curtis and Prasanna for another engaging combination of news commentary, frameworks, debates, warnings, and recommendations – this week with a data protection slant. Whether you’re a backup admin or IT leader grappling with copy sprawl, this insightful episode has something for you!
Articles discussed in this week's episode:
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ATR2500x-USB Microphone & Logitech BRIO: Have you ever thought about how many
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copies there are of your production data?
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There's the primary copies, snapshots copied to another array.
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Cloud snapshot stored in object storage.
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A copy each for dev and test other copies for analytics and of course, dozens to
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hundreds of copies for backup and Dr.
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Ever thought about who has access to all those copies, how long they're going
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to stay around and what they're costing the company while they hang around?
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No.
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Well, your welcome.
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You've just entered the world of copy data management.
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It's perhaps the most boring and the most important thing you can do to
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protect your company's information.
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And save money at the same time.
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Hi, I'm W.
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Curtis Preston aKA Mister backup.
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And each week on this podcast, we dive deep on one topic
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somehow related to backup Dr.
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And ransomware.
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We turn unappreciated, backup admins and to cyber recovery heroes.
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This is the backup wrap up.
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W. Curtis Preston: Hi, and welcome to the backup wrap up.
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I'm your host, W.
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Curtis Preston, I have with me my LinkedIn algorithm commiserater
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Prasanna Malaiyandi, how's it going?
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Prasanna.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm good, Curtis, and I am sorry that your LinkedIn
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stuff did not go as well as you were hoping it would go, but I think it's
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because they've probably caught up with you and realized how you use
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things and are like, okay, Curtis, Mr.
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Backup, we're going to change the algorithm just for him.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't, I don't think so.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think, you know, it's the, you know, when, when things go wrong, we're
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taught, what did you last change?
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And when I was taught, like when I had, we had these consultants
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that taught us how to use LinkedIn.
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One of the things they said was, don't post within 24 hours.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
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Don't, don't bang.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know that, that wait at least 24 hours before you do your big post.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I didn't wait at least 24 hours.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I tried something different yesterday where I posted to a group, um, with
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the link and, and just to see what kind of in attention I got there.
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And then today I posted to, you know, the greater LinkedIn.
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And, um, it was not 24 hours, it was more like 18.
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And so I think that in the end was my, my boo booo.
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So I won't make that boo booo again.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and uh, but yeah, I, yeah, so I think there are reasons.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't think they just changed the algorithm
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't know, maybe it's just Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Curtis, disable him.
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Done.
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W. Curtis Preston: yeah, I was having too much success on LinkedIn.
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All right.
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Well let's get onto the news of the week.
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First story of this week is a follow on from a story from a week or so ago,
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and that is what we originally referred to as the one password slash Okta hack
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really turned out to be an Okta hack.
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You want to talk about it Prasanna.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, so this is the one that we've been following along.
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Um, Okta had someone breach their environment, which then
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let them get into one password.
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Um, turns out that Okta recently finished their investigation and
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they published their findings.
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The findings were that one of their employees.
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Had a corporate device, they were using it to access a service account at Okta.
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Right.
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Typical.
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That's what you would do, right?
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They needed access to it and then they used their Chrome browser and
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they logged into their personal email account using the Chrome browser, and
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then when they went to go access using that service account, they said, save
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password, and the password for the service account then got stored in.
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The Chrome browser's password manager associated with their personal email
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account, and then supposedly somehow the employees, either personal
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device or their Gmail account was hacked, and that's how the bad actors
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got access to the service account.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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So much to unpack here, right?
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Um, first, you know, just to understand, you know, we've talked about the Chrome
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and password manager before, and I, you know, we've put it in the category
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of it's better than nothing maybe, um, because of this problem, right?
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So it's better than nothing in that.
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It would allow you to have a unique password for every
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site, which that is good.
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But the problem that I have with the Chrome Password Manager is that
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it stores the data in such a way that you can pull it out, right?
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When you install one password or um, you know, Dashlane or any of
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these other guys, they will pull.
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Uh, they can pull your password stored in your browser out and then put them
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into your new password manager, which sounds really nice and convenient.
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What it should tell you is that there is an API to pull out the plain text data.
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All you have to do is ask the browser apparently.
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There was another article that was written in our Technica that basically said, no,
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Okta Senior Management, not an errand employee, caused you to get hacked.
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Do you wanna talk about that?
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Yeah, and the big thing here is.
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ARS Technica article talks about the fact that there should have been IT
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policies in place to prevent these sort of things, and they covered the two
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that I remember off the top of my head.
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One is that for a service account, you shouldn't just allow anyone who has a
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credentials to be able to access it.
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You want to be able to limit the ips that can access it or do other things like
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that to make sure that you're restricting access, especially a service account is.
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Pretty powerful.
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And usually you don't have MFA associated with it because it's used
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in cases of running automated scripts or automated access, and so you
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can't really do MFA in those cases.
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So it makes sense to have the service account, but at the same time, you should
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restrict who has access and their ability and where it can be accessed from.
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The other part that they also mentioned in the article is that Okta, their
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IT policy should not allow personal.
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Accounts to be logged into from like a web browser to avoid the same issue.
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And there are multiple ways you could do this.
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You could either have a web proxy, you can, using Google
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Workspaces, you can actually restrict what domains are allowed.
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And so there are multiple tools that they could have done, but they
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did not have a policy in place, and that's what led to this issue.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I'd say it's gotta start with the policy, right?
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Don't log into your personal accounts from your computer, um, and then,
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and then, you know, do what you can to use technology to, to stop that.
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I also wonder if, if there's a way through, through technology,
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if we could go and blow away any stored passwords in any browsers.
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I wonder if that's possible
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I'm sure with the device management software, there's
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, the di device management software.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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All right.
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Well let's talk about some good news.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and you know, I first wanna just put out a disclaimer.
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We don't purposefully go looking for Druva News because you and I used to work there.
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We just Google the same stuff that anybody else does, and it just so
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happened that in a couple of weeks, Dr.
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Made.
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A couple of, uh, big stories, and I think this one is probably my
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favorite story coming out of DVA in a while, and that is that they now
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support natively Azure backup of VMs.
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And specifically, not only do they support basically the, the snapshot.
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Method, which is the supported way to back up VMs inside Azure.
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They are then able to export those, uh backups, de-dupe them,
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and store them in the Druva cloud, it's what they do with AWS VMs.
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You get the best of both worlds.
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You get that native backup and recovery, and you get the cost
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savings of, um, the deduplication.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
, Prasanna Malaiyandi: I think for some of our listeners who may not be familiar.
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Why is it important, that second part that you mentioned of how they work,
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that they're taking the data, the backups out of the customer account
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and moving it to the DVA account.
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Why is that so critical in your opinion?
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I think that, yeah, thanks for asking.
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So I would say that it's because of, you know, we're, we're always talking
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about getting an air gap, getting something that, that mimics an air gap
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if, if, of all your backups are in your.
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Uh, AWS or your Azure or your GCP account, then that account gets hacked.
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They take your backups with them, right?
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There are way too many stories about this that, uh, you need to
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get as much separation as you can.
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One of the ways to do that is to put it into another account that you own.
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I think the best way to do it is to put it into an account that you don't own.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
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Uh, in this case, this is what Druva is providing for both AWS and Azure is that
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it's pulling the data out, de-duping it stored in there, and by de-duping it,
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that's where they get the cost reduction.
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They're saying that it results in an overall reduction of TCO of 40%, which
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is, uh, you know, a solid number.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
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Um, and there is a cost to pulling the data outta the account.
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Right.
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I know that was the first thing you asked me was what about the, the,
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uh, the Egress cost, right?
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Yeah.
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Uh, but that cost is clearly offset by.
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The deduplication features, right?
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So you get the, you get the best of both worlds.
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Um, and this is good news for.
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Druva, you know, they, they acquired Cloud Ranger like five years ago and
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I think five years minus one day ago.
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I said, okay, that's great.
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What about Azure?
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Yeah.
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W. Curtis Preston: And uh, so I'm glad to see that they're finally supporting
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it and I'm assuming that GCP is next well that is the news of the week . Alright.
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On this episode of our continuing backup to basic series, which
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of course what we're doing is we're working our way through.
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Modern data protection.
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My latest book here, I'll show, hold it up for the camera for the
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27 of you that are watching in the, the video version of this.
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We have a, we have a nice following on the audio side, but you know,
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I, I just think nobody knows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You can also watch this on YouTube.
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If you go search on the backup wrap up on YouTube, you can, you
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can watch our lovely little mugs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I put a lot of effort into that video version,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Oh, I know you do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: you know, nobody, nobody watches it.
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Just someday maybe we will, we'll be discovered on YouTube and then,
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We take off.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: our, our, it'll just take off.
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But anyway, you know, you might think, and I did not do this on purpose,
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but the YouTube copy might just be, it's just one of the many copies
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of this show that I need to manage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You see what I did there?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I like what you did there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: So we're talking this week about this phrase that I
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think, I think at one point it was really big, and then like lately, I, I,
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I don't hear the phrase too much, but again, it's a backup to basic series.
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So I want our listeners to know what this phrase is when it comes
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up in conversation and, and to know.
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It's pros and cons, uh, and the ways in which it might manifest itself.
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And that is, of course, copy data management or C uh, dmm.
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CDMI never hear I hear any, I never hear anybody call it CDM,
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I, I haven't really heard.
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Yeah.
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W. Curtis Preston: They
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always, they always seem to say copy data management,
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Copy data management, copy data
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management, copy data management.
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W. Curtis Preston: copy data.
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It rolls off the tongue, you know,
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W. Curtis Preston: of copy data.
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Does it roll off the tongue?
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it does.
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W. Curtis Preston: Um, so what do, do you want to sort of give the basic
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concept behind copy data management?
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Yeah, so copy data management is really.
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It literally is what it says, right?
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It is.
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How do you manage the copies of data in your environment?
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Uh, it, depending on what you want to think about backup
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is one copy of the data.
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I know we've talked about replication and snapshots and CDP and near CDP, right?
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Those all create copies.
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Your archive, if you go off.
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Do archiving, right?
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That's another copy of the data.
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And so copy data management is sort of how do you manage all these copies and
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the life cycle of those copies because it's not just, okay, where are the copies?
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How do I create those copies?
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But also I.
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How long do I keep the copy around?
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Because different copies in different places will be kept
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for different periods of time.
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Snapshots, maybe I'm only keeping for 14 days backups, so maybe I'm keeping for 90
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days long-term retention slash archiving, maybe I'm keeping those for like 10 years.
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So how do I manage the retention process for those copies?
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And then the last bit of copy data management is really around how can
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I now start to use those copies?
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Which I think is kind of what a lot of people have now started to think
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about is, okay, I have copy of the data sitting there and I wanna just
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leave it sitting there because it could be useful for other business
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purposes for me to drive insights from.
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So how do I now start to manage the lifecycle of using a copy, destroying a
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copy, and keeping that around if need be?
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W. Curtis Preston: I Would describe it as like perhaps a more holistic view.
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Of all of the copies that are out there.
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You know, in, in our world, we tend to worry primarily
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about one of the copies, right?
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Or maybe two of the copies, right?
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We want at least two copies, right?
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You know, we wanna, we want a backup copy, hopefully on-Prem, and
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we wanna backup up copy off-Prem.
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So that's kind of two copies.
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And then a lot of people primarily focus on the, on the, on the,
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on the primary copy, the, you know, the, the production copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, the, and you talked about copies that might be kept for archival purposes.
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I think the one, the only one that I, that I, uh, thought that you left
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out was the, the development side of
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Test and dev.
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W. Curtis Preston: because that is, yeah, yeah.
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That is another big area where if you are a, if you're the type
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of company that does any kind of development or any kind of testing.
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Where you're, you know, where you, you want to have this other copy of your data.
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What you often want is you want production data, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You want, um, a, a copy of your production data to use for testing you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, I'm just saying if you want, I know, I know why you're
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wincing, but, but if you want to,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Before it goes out to prod.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I agree.
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Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
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If you want to test it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I understand the, the concern that you're, that you're talking about.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, and we, and we can talk about that, what, you know, that that's one of
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the things that you deal with in a copy data management, uh, configuration, right.
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The, the, the closer that you can use sandboxed.
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Information.
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Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, so with, so for example, with Salesforce, right, you can very
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easily create a sandbox environment of your production environment.
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And it's got all of your production data over in that other, um, world, uh, so
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that you can test whatever new thing that you want to do without, uh, destroying
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your, yeah, without impacting your
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I, I, I go back to the story that I think
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you've told us before on the podcast about how you, what was it?
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You downloaded Salesforce, you exported the Salesforce records,
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you sort of screwed up the changes and the rearranging of the tables
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completely ruined all the records, and you luckily had a backup, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you were able to go
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I, um.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, so first off, Excel, whoever wrote Excel and made it way too easy
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to sort just one column, why would anyone in the history of people want to
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sort just one column in a spreadsheet?
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It's got to be the non-fat, right?
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It's gotta be the one out of a hundred use case I, for the life of me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Can't think of.
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Any use case where that would be the case.
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But, uh, I sorted the phone number column, you know, and, and, and
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only the phone number column.
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And so I put all the wrong phone numbers to all the wrong, uh,
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people and, and then uploaded it, not realizing what I had done.
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And then I realized that I had basically destroyed a.
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A 2 million record Salesforce database.
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And luckily, luckily I had a backup of that.
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You are like, thank God for that.
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W. Curtis Preston: So, so, well, what's the problem with that?
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What's the problem with the status quo where we have all of the,
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um, all of these copies around what, what's, what's the big deal?
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There are multiple problems.
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One is from a compliance governance perspective, you
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need to know where your data is.
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If this is production data, you need to know where those copies are, who has
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access to it, who's spinning them up, how long are they being kept around for all of
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these things, which become very difficult when you don't know who's creating
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copies and where the copies are going.
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So that's kind of one problem, just compliance aspect.
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The other thing is you also want control over the lifecycle of those copies, right?
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How easily can I spin up a copy?
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Because if it takes me three weeks to copy over data, I.
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I have another copy that I can now start to use for tests that's going to
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impact my how quickly I can do testing and find issues and all the rest.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so you want mechanisms that make it easy to create these copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And also along with the compliance piece, making sure
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that you have proper retention.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You don't want these copies living around forever either.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right, because this is a copy of your data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It could be exfiltrated if someone, if you get hit by ransomware or a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
attacker gets into your environment.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You don't want them pulling out like copies of your production data because
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you didn't realize, hey, someone had squirreled away a copy over here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And to go back to the earlier thing, you don't want 'em pulling out
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
copies of your development data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If your development data is copy of your production data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
One of the, one of the reasons why you winced when I said that, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of course one of the things that we talk about when we do pull.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Production data and put it into the development is this
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
idea of masking it, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So that you have product Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Sanitizing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, so that you have production like data, but not actual production data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
One other thing to add with copy data management is it's not
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
like you take one copy once and you're done forever with copy data management,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
there's an ongoing lifecycle it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Developers are constantly building new features, needing to test, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So it's not like you could take a copy of your production environment
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
from a year ago and continue to use it because things change.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so you also need that ability to refresh these copies and make that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
as automated and as easy as possible.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Agreed.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, the, the other thing I, I, I think you alluded to it in your.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know, when I, when I was, when I was asking you about the, the, the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
problems of the status quo, one of the things, at least when CDM vendors were.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Describing this, this new wonderful world of CDM was the cost of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
all of those copies, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Did every one of those copies, I mean, you know, you talked about you definitely, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
want to, you wanna manage that process.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You wanna make sure that, that you, you know where all the copies are.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You want to make sure that people are, the, the right
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
people are accessing copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The wrong people are not accessing those copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Maybe some of the copies are encrypted, maybe some of them are not.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, maybe they have different performance, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
aspects.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Performance characteristics, better word.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And the, but the, the other thing is that if, if all of your copies
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
are indeed on extra storage, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or, you know, if, if each copy is on, on its own storage, that is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a very expensive process indeed.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I know we talked the other day about snapshots and clones along with that, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that's one way to sort of get your space optimization is by taking clones on the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
same storage array that you have, the production or a copy of the production,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you can now quickly spin up those copies in a space efficient manner, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Rather than requiring hundreds of copies that are each occupying
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the full amount of dataset space.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so, all right, so that's our problem.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The problem is that we have way too many copies that we're paying
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
for way too many copies, each of which is its own attack vector.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, and, and we still, we still want to protect all of that, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We want to protect it from a backup and recovery and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
disaster recovery perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Whoa.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: how does cd, what, what did I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Just that last one about we wanna protect it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think it depends.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You may not
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: don't want to predict it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
well, the copies you may not care about your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Well, I just, I just, I just meant the data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The data in general.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We don't necessarily want to protect each copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I just meant the data in general.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you know, if we have nine copies of the different data, we
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
only want to protect one of them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: So we're on, we're on the same
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
okay, good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, so just trying to understand the environment and I think this is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
where it becomes difficult because differentPrasannaonas in your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
organization use different tools and have different requirements.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Mm-Hmm
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I look at, say your database admin.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're gonna wanna spin up a copy, copy off a production in order
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to be able to do testing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or to give to the database team for them to do application
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
development and all the rest of that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so they're gonna wanna copy off of that using their own tools.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So they might integrate with something that is more database
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
friendly, like Delphix, which allows for spinning up test and dev copies
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
off of Oracle and other databases.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Then you have, uh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Folks who might wanna care about, okay, I need to be able to spin up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a copy to do like my backup team.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I wanna be able to spin up a copy to make sure that I can verify my backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And make sure that I could restore my data in case I need to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So do backup verification.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so in order to do that, I need to spin up a copy off of my backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
system in order to be able to access that copy, do my testing without
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
impacting the original backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
'cause that's a key.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You don't wanna change any of the original data, you just wanna
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
copy of that data and manage it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so there's a separate lifecycle for that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: And I think that there are products like Veeam, and I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
know Rubrik has done this quite a bit.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I believe, uh, Cohesity has done this quite a bit.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I know Druva did this as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, well, they, yeah, they specifically, Dr you know, since I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
worked there, but specifically Dr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
For, for VMware.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, uh, uh, so that's, you know, you talked about Delphix.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
There are products that are specifically aiming at this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Backup side of of CDM.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I think one of the biggest challenges you have is each Prasanna
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
is gonna use a different tool.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I know three, or like five, seven years ago, everyone was like, Hey,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we'll just have one single tool that can cover the entire environment,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that can manage copies everywhere.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I think that's just a difficult problem to solve.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, because you're never gonna have that one tool that everyone likes because every
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Prasanna is going to want their own tools or gonna have their own custom workflows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so it's hard to say there is a single ring to rule them all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I, I think that's probably Actifio that, that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that's what Actifio was going for.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, they eventually got acquired, I forgot by whom I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, um, the, that, that was certainly what their goal was, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Was to, was to provide a copy, a copy for everybody.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's like everything else in the IT world.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If, if you do everything, you're not gonna be any good at anything, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so, and so, you're going to run into, you know, like the delphix of the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
world or the, the beams of the world.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You're gonna run into somebody who's really good at that particular workflow.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so, um, so, so it sounds like what we're saying is there's, at least right
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
now, we're not aware of any one tool that meets all of these copy data management,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
uh, needs for every type of, uh, workflow.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that I'm aware of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The only thing you could possibly do is have some sort of reporting tool
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that's at least able to discover where all the copies are and kind of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
stitch together a picture for you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But that may not give you sort of the orchestration you need across everything.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: We look at the world of copy data management, I, I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
see sort of, I think there's like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Three big things, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So one is the discovery, where is everything?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Where are all my copies?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And then the second one is who has access to those copies?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And then the third is, um, how long are those copies going to be around?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because for, and I'd say that's primarily for cost reasons,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
but it's also for risk reasons.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because as long as something is sitting around, it's something that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
can be, uh, potentially attacked.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Does, do you think that sums up the, the,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: we're worried about?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I know you talked about cost, but I wanted
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to talk a little bit about that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But yes, I agree with the three things that you summed up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, the cost is sort of the reason we care about the, the,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the three, the third thing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That, that, that time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, I wanna mention though, why copy data management, though
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
sort of has gotten better now and why it was talked about a lot more versus before.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
One of the things, and also some of the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
downsides of copy data management.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So one of the things is when you had sort of traditional disc spinning up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a copy was even if you had snapshots and clones, you could do that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So you're not consuming extra space, but it would take a performance hit.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And when you started to look at SSDs, now you can actually afford to spin up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a copy and offer the same performance.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
To those other application use cases without necessarily fully
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
impacting your production data source.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's what a lot of people are concerned about, which is why they would copy
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
off the data to a secondary system and then spin up their test in Dev with
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
SSDs and high performance Flash arrays.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You no longer had to worry about that as much, and so you can now spin up copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like if you talk to our friend Howard at Vast Data, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm sure VAs will say, yeah, just spin up as many copies as you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
want off of the vast production.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You'll be fine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So that's one way that sort of production copies became a lot more.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Affordable and also not as much concern from performance perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now, the other thing I will mention is backup target systems have always been
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
sort of like, Hey, we have all this data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
How do we add more value?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
How do we allow people to use the data?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I know we talked about backup verification testing or restore
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
verification testing, but people started then thinking about can we
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
start to use backup systems for test and dev scenarios and other things like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Mm-Hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now if you look at an all flash array system, which I don't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
think many purpose build backup appliances exist, which are purely all flash just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because of cost reasons for those systems, they mix flash with a good amount of disc.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so yes, you might be able to spin up 1, 2, 3 copies off of that system, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
at some point you're gonna run into a performance limitation much sooner than
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you would off of your primary system.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The other thing also is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
People don't typically associate backup systems with doing these test
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and dev copies because backup was built for a reason, and that's to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
provide you sort of that last line of defense against everything else blowing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so is that something from a risk perspective,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
as a backup admin, you really wanna give the keys to everyone
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
who wants a test in dev copy to be running off of that backup system.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or really is your main focus of that backup system?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Hey, I'm the last line of defense.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
My goal is to make sure I can restore data, meet my SLAs, protect
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
data in the corporate environment, and test and dev really should be
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
run by a different organization or go talk to the production admins.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so that's why I think copy dev or copy data management never really took off
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
as much as people wanted to from backup systems as it has from production systems.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, and the, and, and I think for other reasons, like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we want to keep you, you talked about.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Why not to use the backup system as a source for copies for test and dev.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I'm also saying why not to think of the backup as just another copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because when, when it's, when you know if we get that full CDM system, if backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
is just another copy, my question is how connected is it to this primary system?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That could go offline and, and does that in some way, uh, put my backup and Dr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Copy at risk.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And my business at risk, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because that is the purpose of the backup and Dr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so I, I think that there's still a good argument to be
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
made for keeping backup and dr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Copies separate and then production and dev copies perhaps together, uh, provided
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
off of the same storage because as, and as long as you do it in such a way
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that you're not impacting production.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Um, if, if you're, and I, I think that with
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
flash, that does solve, uh, that or that ameliorates that concern.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and then, you know, we haven't talked at all about cloud copies
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: because I think that's where the true, like it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
so easy to just spin up another copy of something in the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Then forget about it, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's so easy to make an S3 copy of something to make a, a copy
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of something in EBS to clone a VM from here over to there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I think that when, when we, now, you know, early in this recording I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
talked about, I used the word holistic.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You really have to bring, you know, when we say whole, the whole part
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of holistic, we've been talking primarily about the data center, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we really should be talking about those copies in the cloud because
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it is so easy to create both backup, archive development copies, et cetera.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Entire instances, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Entire, um, virtual data centers That then no longer get used.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, and that's a big thing from like a cost perspective
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because I'm sure there are companies out there which have a bunch of either.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Snapshots or EC2 instances running that they aren't even able to keep track
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of because at some point you have so much infrastructure running, you don't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
know what is being used for what.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so that becomes a concern because that starts to eat
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because it's not cheap right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
To run that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's not your own data center, you're co, you're worrying about, but you're still
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
paying AWS or Google or whoever your cloud provider is for those resources.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think I'm agreeing with you that I don't think there is the one,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the one tool to rule them all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because there's a data center versus the cloud for no other reason other than that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But there could be a tool that could manage, that could do
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
these, the three things, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, find all my copies, uh, find out who has access to them and find out
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
how long they're gonna be around.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And then also I think in the cloud there are ways to find out if a particular
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
resource is actually still being used.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I am sure there is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so if we can, if we can identify these resources that aren't being
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
used and then get rid of them, and then I think that that's sort
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of that initial, uh, challenge.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But then once you get that initial lay of the land, I think if you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
have a tool that can then be the one who creates the copy for you,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, if it can create the copy for you rather than just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you as using native tools.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, then I think that you could get that cost aspect and risk aspect, I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
think a little bit more in control.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and I think in the cloud also because of the ability to tag
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
resources, you get a lot more flexibility.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So you could say, Hey, I'm spinning up this test and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
dev copy for this department.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You could tag it in your EC2 instance, and you could use that later to track
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and understand, okay, who's using what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So I think a cloud helps with a lot of the manageability aspects.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You just have to use it in the right way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I think tags are, I think tags are, um, you know, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
an amazing tool that, uh, are really, they're, they're helpful tags, are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
very helpful for a number of things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
This is copy data management is one of them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Another area where they're helpful is backup and recovery.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, because you can apply rules to different tags, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you can say, we're gonna, we're gonna handle, um, our VMware cloud
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
instances like this, and we're gonna handle our, you know, our
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
EBS instances like this, et cetera.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you can just, you, you can attach rules and backup and DR policies
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to those rules, uh, based on tags.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you, you can even have.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you can say, Hey, if a resource gets created and it doesn't have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a tag at all, this is what we do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The default.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: One, one of which, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The, the default policy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, and, and part of that policy would be to go yell at somebody
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to say, Hey, why is there, why is there this resource without tags?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, just to finish out, we, we talked a little bit about, uh, the reuse of data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I think that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
This, there are, you know, as long as I've been in backup, there's been
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a lot of talk, especially in the last, I'd say 10 or 15 years, there's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
been a lot of talk about trying to leverage backup for other purposes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You've touched on it already.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I, I think from a, you know, backup is different than archive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I do think that if you stored the data correctly, if you stored
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the data in such a way that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You had information available for both backup and archive instances,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and you were able to meet both workloads with the same copy of data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I would be fine with that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I very rarely have found I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know, backup software.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I'd say about the only one that I've seen that does it, at least the best that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I have seen would be Commvault, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That they have a single copy and they have both backup and archive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now, the concern that I've, that I've heard is that it does
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
require a significant amount of additional infrastructure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but I, I, I don't have a problem with that additional cut because that I see as.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You're saving money by storing one copy and using it for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
multiple
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I just don't want people, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I just don't want people taking their backup and then holding it for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
10 years and calling that an archive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That is not an archive that we've, we've had episodes about that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I will talk about that till I'm blew in the face.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and, and other, other things that we can use backup for is to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Basically look at the backup and leverage it from a ransomware perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We, we can look at and see if we can identify that the ransomware
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
attack has been, has happened.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, we can see that if anything has been encrypted, we can see if anything
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
has been infected in the backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We can do that with the backup copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but I think I agree with you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and, and potentially, and this is potentially, uh, if
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we have backup an archive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If we have that, potentially we could use backup for, uh, compliance
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If, if we're able to easily query and, and, and this is a big if, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because in order to meet compliance needs, you need to be able to,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the system has to act more like an archive system than a backup system.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I need to be able to say, show me all the files that Curtis made, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I need to say, show me all the emails with this word in them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Show me all the documents with this word in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
which most backup systems don't focus on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: which mode?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Backup systems.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Almost none, basically.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, there have been some advancements, uh, to, to, you know, to do some
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
stuff, but it's just not there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, and even then, it's often very.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Application centric.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like we can do it for 365, but we can't do it for other stuff.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So again, if, if you want to use backup for archive purposes, I'm sorry, for,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
for compliance purposes, then you, um, you just need to make sure that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it's capable of meeting that workload.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I agree.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
All right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, we have once again beat this topic to death.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If you found this topic, uh, interesting and you wanna read more, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
similar topics, uh, you can get my book, modern Data Protection Available
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
wherever books are sold, including, you know, in Rivers in South America.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, some people don't like to buy books there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's fine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't care.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't care where you buy my book.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, all right, well thank you very much, Prasanna for a great discussion.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
As always, Curtis, it was a lot of fun.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: And thank you to our audience.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We'd be nothing without you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And with that, that's a wrap.
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