Entries categorized under “Business Continuity”

Recently a blog entry appeared on the Byte & Switch website that asks the question if tape will be cancelled due to a lack of customer interest. In short, the author of the article, George Crump, postulates that customers are losing interest in tape partly because tape manufacturers are taking more interest in selling disk than tape. As a result, more innovations are occurring in disk libraries while tape libraries languish. But has tape in fact outlived its usefulness? (read more)

Many of the clients I work with are taking a closer look at their data protection solutions. Currently much of their focus is on trying to decide between purchasing additional storage (disk or tape), replication licensing, or deduplicating virtual tape library (VTL) technologies. The trouble is there are so many data protection products that the selection process becomes extraordinarily complex. So while companies may think of data protection as a singular function or strategy, companies will employ multiple strategies, staff and point products in order to attain a form of universal data protection. (read more)

The general economic malaise of the past few months is not going unnoticed by anyone as it seems every day more companies are cutting back and tightening their belts in anticipation of a lean 2009. Just in the last months, numerous companies including 3M, Dow Chemical, and Hewlett-Packard, just to name a few, have announced cutbacks in staffing. But for those individuals that remain, the task does not get any easier. Most if not all end-users that I talk to are getting a hard push by their IT executives to cut costs as the days of simply purchasing more infrastructure is an unacceptable solution. (read more)

Today's tough economic times are changing many aspects of the way businesses run that range from the way businesses promote themselves to the way they purchase products or support their growth internally. Yet one thing that all businesses have in common is that tough economic times force them to focus on their core objectives and how well their current technologies are delivering on meeting these goals. As companies go through these self-examinations, businesses tend to discover that the promised features of technologies they purchased in the past may turn out to provide them far less value than they anticipated or are becoming irrelevant as their infrastructures evolve. Nowhere does this hold truer than with their approach to enterprise data protection. (read more)

For the vast majority of the IT Directors and CIOs one of the more elusive questions that that they need to answer is, "Will the useful life of the infrastructure I just acquired match up to my depreciation cycle?" This is a slippery financial slope that anyone in IT management has to constantly be concerned about. If the useful life estimate is three years of depreciation and the equipment lasts only two, then you and your company are stuck with an extra year of depreciation on the books, as well as an extra year of maintenance you didn't really need. Conversely, if it lasts four years, you end up depreciating too much up front and not extending the depreciation out over the appropriate period of time. (read more)

A few years ago an article appeared on TechTarget's SearchDataManagement site that examined the top 10 reasons that disaster recovery plans fail. Granted, that article is over three years old but the points that the author makes are just as valid now as they were then even though from a technology perspective a lot has changed. (read more)

Anyone who works as an end-user is continually confronted with crafting SLAs for various infrastructure components. Aggravating the situation, once SLAs are signed-off on, it is nearly impossible to make changes without completely rocking the boat so it is extremely important to get it right from day one. (read more)

The analogy that business continuity software is a lot like automobile insurance is a valid comparison to make. Companies buy business continuity software for the same reasons that they buy automobile insurance: protection against unexpected loss. In fact, most companies cannot fathom NOT buying automobile insurance since if their employees are driving company vehicles and are involved in some type of wreak it presents an incalculable and unforeseen financial risk to the company's bottom line. It is for the same reason that companies buy business continuity software for their corporate applications - they need similar levels of assurance that their data is protected and is readily available in the event that they have to bring their applications back online should a man-made or natural disaster occur. (read more)

Most enterprise companies share one thing in common: they are most comfortable doing business with other enterprise companies. Buying from other enterprise companies gives the purchasing company some level of confidence that, after they make the acquisition, the other company will be around to provide support for the product. It is only when the costs of purchasing technology from another enterprise company are so outrageous, and do not come with similar assurances of success, that sometimes one has to innovate. (read more)

Organizations do not like to think about business continuity for some very simple reasons: it's costly, it's complex and it exposes to companies just how vulnerable they really are should a disaster occur. So companies tend to live in denial about implementing a business continuity solution until some triggering event occurs that makes them have to deal with the problem head on. (read more)

When server and storage managers out there hear the "A-Word" (Agents) come up in a conversation with a software vendor, they typically cringe, and think to themselves, "Oh great, another set of agents that I have to not only deploy but that I have to manage and track." In the server world, some agents are unavoidable, like performance/security monitoring, virus and worm detection and prevention etc. (read more)

Microsoft SharePoint presents a particularly vexing problem to companies in terms of data protection. A single instance of SharePoint, that keeps all of a company's documents or files in a single Microsoft SQL Server database, may potentially be satisfactorily backed up using existing SQL Server data protection tools. However, if companies start to store data on external storage devices or as the number of SharePoint instances in a company begins to grow, the complexity associated with protecting SharePoint increases significantly. (read more)

At the turn of the millennium, email in general and Microsoft Exchange specifically became the must-have corporate application. Today businesses cannot imagine how they ever functioned without Exchange as it has become the most mission critical application in most organizations. Now that same experience is again repeating itself as companies come to understand the power of Microsoft SharePoint and what it means in terms of improved productivity for their employees. The bad news is that as more companies adopt SharePoint as a key application, they are encountering the same problems protecting and recovering SharePoint data that they used to encounter with Exchange. (read more)

Since the inception of VCS (Veritas Cluster Server), end-users have had access to significant higher levels of reliability and availability on heterogeneous platforms such as AIX, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows for their critical, tier-1 applications. Now with a decade of clustering critical business applications under its belt, Symantec has the experience and understanding of what customers expect from high availability (HA) software and what they need to make it successful in their shops. (read more)

Enter FalconStor with its NSS Virtual Appliance, which is the first software vendor to receive this ratification from VMware in the SRM landscape. FalconStor brings a very open approach to this solution. By placing a FalconStor NSS appliance in between the ESX Server's and the storage farm the solution can now become truly hardware independent as the FalconStor appliance can virtualize some or all of the storage on the back-end. (read more)

After a receiving a briefing on today's announcement on HP Data Protector's enhanced integration with VMware, one has to wonder why HP is making any noise about this new functionality at all. While Data Protector's enhanced integration with VMware virtual machines (VMs) provides some nice integration and recovery features for its HP EVA storage system as well as EMC's DMX storage system, it appears all HP did was take a feature it now offers for physical machines and make it available for VMware VMs as well. Further, we saw little in this announcement that would make us think Data Protector is well suited to provide improved levels of recovery for companies that are anything but primarily homogeneous HP shops. (read more)

The requirements for providing higher, faster and easier means of enterprise business continuity have escalated dramatically in the last decade while the criteria for selecting the software remains rooted in yesterday's premises and assumptions. Today's corporations not only need to re-evaluate what software they are using to perform these tasks but even what criteria on which they should base these decisions. The last six criteria covered in this blog entry provide readers a list of base line features that they should look for when picking backup continuity software and how well InMage Systems delivers on meeting these new requirements for enterprise distributed business continuity. (read more)

The pressures to implement business continuity software that can span the enterprise and recover application servers grow with each passing day. Disasters come in every form and shape from regional disasters (earthquakes, floods, lightning strikes) to terrorist attacks to brown-outs to someone accidently unplugging the wrong server. Adding to the complexity, the number of application servers and virtual machines are on the rise and IT headcounts are flat or shrinking. Despite these real-world situations, companies often still buy business continuity software that is based on centralized or stand-alone computing models that everyone started abandoning over a decade ago. (read more)

Selecting the right business continuity software can rank right up there as one of the more difficult decisions that companies face. No two companies have exactly the same environment or business continuity requirements and rarely is there a meaningful way for any company to quickly and effectively test business continuity software across all of the applications in their enterprise. As a result, companies are often put in the position where they need to select the best software for their environment with only some of the facts in hand and then hope they don't live to regret the decision. (read more)

Here's a question for you to answer. Backup software and continuous data protection (CDP) software: same or different? And if different, is CDP software a replacement kind of different or a complimentary kind of different? This is a critical question for companies to answer as they contemplate the adoption of CDP software in their enterprise because the answer to it influences how companies spend their money and in what circumstances. (read more)

Anyone who is any way involved with trying to implement an enterprise business continuity solution probably knows all too well the compromises they frequently have to make. As enterprise companies try to centralize and deliver enterprise data protection and business continuity across all of their application servers, they are consistently faced with an unpleasant trade-off: Spend a fortune and do your best to guarantee high availability or create a standard, affordable way to do data protection that fails to meet many of your application's specific recovery needs. (read more)

David: The Data Collectors can do an automated discovery of new VMs by connecting to either individual VMware ESX servers, XenSource servers or a Virtual Management Center, which stores and organizes data about physical hosts and VMs. The Data Collector provides a GUI that displays the new VMs that require backup so all an administrator needs to do is select the VM from the Televaulting management interface to initiate backups on those VMs. (read more)

Part of the reason companies are reluctant to go forward on enterprise-wide business continuity solutions is the complexity associated with implementing them. Enterprise-wide business continuity solutions typically rely upon a conglomeration of point products to protect and recover data. Backup software, host and storage system-based replication software and application specific replication software, among others, are just some of the software products that companies use. The trick is configuring, managing and monitoring these point products in such a way that they work together in a cohesive, unified manner. Not only is this nearly impossible to do, the cost and complexity of performing these tasks can quickly escalate when trying to manage and recover multiple applications across the enterprise at the same time. (read more)

A survey that appeared in the May 2008 issue of Storage Magazine indicated that DR testing is not routine for all business. That's probably the understatement of the year. Of those users surveyed, fully half (48%) do not regularly perform testing and, of those that do, they most often test those applications deemed "mission critical". (read more)

Storage managers are regularly put in a position where they need to replace a component of their computing infrastructure. But if you ask them about their druthers as to what they would prefer to replace - hardware or software - almost to a person they would say the computer hardware. However which is older in technology terms - the three year old hardware or the ten year old software? Looking at it this way can suddenly change one's opinion about which of the two is due for a swap-out. (read more)