How fully virtualized organizations are is often a calculated guess based on anecdotal evidence or surveys conducted by virtualization providers who just sample organizations who already use virtualization. King Research's Windows Server 2012 Migration/Virtualization Survey, commissioned by Symantec, eliminates much of this guesswork and built-in bias. However it more importantly provides key insights into just how virtualized organizations are right now, how quickly they plan to virtualize their environments in the next few years and how they would prefer to protect them once virtualized. (read more)
I have been looking into clustering and high availability (HA) a lot lately, mostly as it pertains to my day job but also because I just like to keep myself up to speed on things. What has been changing? An abundance of things! (read more)
Identifying who the "best" individual is to handle backup and recovery within an organization has always been at best a crapshoot. The choice usually came down to some arbitrary evaluation of a person's education, experience, knowledge, skills and their willingness to perform the task which had mixed results. The customer education services, certification program and online learning portal now available from CommVault trains and equips individuals to perform backup and recovery so this task of identifying the "right" person to do the job is a far more quantifiable and defensible process than ever before. (read more)
It seemed only moments after EMC announced its ViPR software-defined storage platform at EMC World this week that the attack dogs (primarily its competitors) were out in full force pointing out ViPR's shortcomings and attacking its merits. But its competitors need to be careful how they go about discrediting EMC's version of software-defined storage. EMC promoting it will lift the entire software-defined storage tide and help make it a viable option for end-users which many want and need. (read more)
It can sound so easy to back up to the cloud. Just plug in a backup appliance and it does all of the work. While there is an element of truth to that, there are certain steps organizations should take to ensure they are getting the results they expect when implementing a backup appliance that backs up to the cloud. In this third and final segment of my interview series with STORServer's Jarrett Potts, we discuss best practices for backing up to the cloud and recommend some steps that organizations should take to maximize backup and recovery times while minimizing costs. (read more)
The main theme at this year's EMC World is "Lead the Transformation" that EMC is illustrating through the use of superhero characters. The superheroes are represented as end users who come up with solutions to manage today's complex storage environment while the villain is pictured as "Doc Lock-in" who requires our superheroes to "lock-in" on a single vendor to mitigate this complexity. Yet for those users who think strategically about their storage acquisitions, Doc Lock-in may not be the full-fledged villain that EMC World portrays him to be. (read more)
About a decade ago, give or take a few years, a huge debate raged in the storage industry as to what was the best form of storage virtualization. However all that debate created over time was an equally large sense of fatigue with many people souring on the whole topic of storage virtualization. To resolve that, the term "storage virtualization" has been given a facelift at the 2013 EMC World and with it a politically correct name: Software Defined Storage - that is available from EMC as EMC ViPR. (read more)
Last week's acquisition of NexGen Storage by Fusion-io was greeted with quite a bit of fanfare by the storage industry. But as an individual who has covered Fusion-io for many years and talked one-on-one with their top executives on multiple occasions, its acquisition of NexGen signaled that Fusion-io wanted to do more than deliver an external storage array that had its technology built-in. Rather Fusion-io felt it was incumbent for it to take action and accelerate the coming data center transformation that it has talked and written about for years. (read more)
A reality check is going on in enterprises when it comes to cloud backup. While the vast majority recognize its value and are aggressively adopting it at many levels, the intangible issues of recovery and support tend to rear their head and preclude these enterprises from to date adopting a core cloud offering: cloud backup. It is these concerns that IBM and Symantec are teaming up to tackle so that enterprises may confidently do more than backup to the cloud - they can recover their data once it is in the cloud with a process that is supported end-to-end. (read more)
O'Reilly School of Technology does what many organizations now do when daily backing up its production data: it uses array-based snapshots on its NAS filer. However its internal policies call for it to copy each set of weekly or monthly array-based snapshots to another storage media (disk or tape) for long term data retention and offsite protection. (read more)
Hybrid storage arrays use flash memory in combination with hard disk drives to create storage that balances performance, capacity and cost. Because the majority of the data will ultimately be stored on slower HDD instead of flash memory, the trick is to achieve consistently high performance without 100% flash. The secret sauce the Hybrid Storage Array vendors bring to the table is a combination of storage architecture, hardware, and software features. (read more)
Identifying a virtual machine backup software solution that delivers on the intangible new features that a small and midsized enterprise (SME) needs to backup and recover its virtualized environment is easier said than done. The DCIG 2013 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide identified and evaluated over 20 virtual server backup solutions with more than 150 different features. The trick for SMEs is to identify which of these 150 features match their specific needs and then select a backup software solution that delivers on them. (read more)
Just because a backup appliance can back up and recover data to the cloud does not mean they all do so equally well. Further complicating the decision process, some companies back up to their own private cloud while others opt to back up and recover from public clouds. In this second part of my interview series with STORServer's Jarrett Potts, we examine how backup to public and private clouds differ and what features a backup appliance needs to offer to meet these different requirements. (read more)
In the last few years security has shifted from being an issue that organizations only deal with when a crisis occurs to one with which they must now daily confront. This is putting pressure on organizations to stop taking a knee jerk reaction as their means of ongoing security management and instead adopt a systematic approach to effectively deal with both external and internal threats. The problems that internal threats present and why they are so difficult to detect were openly discussed this past Wednesday morning during that morning's keynote at Symantec Vision 2013. (read more)
Backup and the cloud are becoming increasingly linked as they solve two issues that have plagued organizations for years: automating the movement of data offsite and providing a cost-effective means to store it there. But just because one can back up to the cloud does not mean all solutions do so equally well. In this first part of an interview series with STORServer's Jarrett Potts, we examine what specific features a solution needs to offer to effectively back up to the cloud as well as how the solution needs to be constructed. (read more)
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