Datasheet

CHAPTER 1 What Kind of Protection do You need?

Hardware Costs Typically, storage arrays that are capable of replication (synchronous or

asynchronous) are appreciably more expensive than traditional disk chassis. Often, while the

arrays are capable, they require separately licensed software to enable the mirroring or repli-

cation itself. As an alternative, replication can also be done within the server as an application-

based capability, which is referred to as host-based replication. Host-based replication is done

from server to server instead of array to array. As such, it is very typical to use less expensive

hardware for the target server along with lower-performing drives for the redundant data. We

will explore this topic later in Chapter 3.

The Platform and the Ecosystem

Years before I joined Microsoft, I was listening to a Microsoft executive explain one aspect of a

partner ecosystem for large software developers (Microsoft in this case, but equally applicable to

any OS or large application vendor). He explained that for any given operating system or applica-

tion, there’s always a long list of features and capabilities that the development team and product

planners would like to deliver. Inevitably, if any software company decided to wait until every

feature that they wanted was included in the product and it was well tested, then no software

product would ever ship.

Instead, one of the aspects of the ecosystem of software developers is that those companies typically

identify holes in the product that have enough customer demand to be proﬁtable if developed. Thus,

while Windows Server was still initially delivering and perfecting clustering, and while applications

like SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange learned to live within a cluster, there was a need for higher

availability and data protection that could be ﬁlled by third-party software, as discussed earlier.

The Microsoft speaker went on to explain that the reality of which holes in a product would be ﬁlled

by the next version was based on market demand. This creates an unusual cooperative environ-

ment between the original developer and its partner ecosystem. Depending on customer demand,

that need might be solved by the third-party vendor for one to three OS/application releases. But

eventually, the hole will be ﬁlled by the original manufacturer — either by acquiring one of the third

parties providing a solution or developing the feature internally. Either way, it allows all mainstream

users of the OS/application to gain the beneﬁt of whatever hole or feature previously ﬁlled by the

third-party offering, because it was now built-in to the OS or application itself.

The nature and the challenge within the partner ecosystem then becomes the ability to recognize

when those needs are being adequately addressed within the original Microsoft product to identify

new areas of innovation that customers are looking for and build those.

Adding my data protection and availability commentary on that person’s perspective — for nearly

ten years, third-party asynchronous replication technologies were uniquely meeting the needs of

Microsoft customers for data protection and availability by ﬁlling the gap between the previous

alternatives of synchronous disk and nightly tape.

But as the largest application servers (SQL and Exchange) and Windows Server itself have added

protection and availability technologies to meet those same customer needs within the most com-

mon scenarios of ﬁle services, databases, and email, the need for third-party replication for those

workloads has signiﬁcantly diminished. The nature of the ecosystem therefore suggests that third

parties should be looking for other applications to be protected and made highly available, or identify

completely different business problems to solve.

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