Entries categorized under “Data Protection”

I regularly write about the inner workings of current and new technologies and how they can benefit organizations from a technical and financial perspective. But when talking to individuals out in the field who are actually using these products, it provides me with an entirely different perspective as to what specific benefits they glean from using them. In fact, when I recently chatted with InfoReliance's John Chirhart, a consultant to the US Government, he said that after he completed his recent testing of CommVault's Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore, he had to re-examine what data protection strategy that he should recommend to his clients and how they should manage data protection going forward. (read more)

However as the number of MSPs proliferate, the decision about which MSP to dial up gets harder, not easier, since more and more VARs are jumping on the SaaS bandwagon to offer Managed Backup Services. Further, companies need to quantify their own needs and expectations as they select an MSP. Below are some examples of questions that they need to ask and answer internally and externally before making this important decision. (read more)

The ongoing success of virtual server environments is unprecedented in terms of shrinking the footprints of servers in data centers, decreasing the time to deploy new applications and delivering needed cost savings to corporate IT organizations. Yet one component of the virtual environment that is often overlooked, and that can introduce new levels of complexity, is the backup and recovery processes required to protect virtual server environments. In fact, it is only now that significant advances are occurring that are making the protection of virtual servers a simple and straightforward operation. (read more)

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)

Despite what happens out on the pitch, the Premier League is experiencing a small awakening amongst its clubs - and some unexpected harmony - for their IT disaster recovery solutions. The challenges, demands and expectations to deliver a robust backup and recovery solution for these clubs is just as pronounced as any other corporate datacenter. However, faced with meeting the escalating salaries of their best football players, the IT staff often comes out on the short end in these organizations. (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)

Any storage architect or administrator that has ever dared to accept the challenge of engineering or re-designing their company's backup and recovery environment has undoubtedly discovered that he or she has had to sacrifice functionality or features based on the practical limits of their budget. Reasons for this vary from vendor to vendor, but mostly it comes down to how many backup and recovery software options are they willing to pay for? Most vendors offer reasonably good licensing for the core software, but once you step outside of that realm, some of the most basics features are not included. (read more)

With all the debates going on out there today about which vendor offers the best deduplication approach, one wonders, "How is a customer supposed to make the right deduplication decision?" Of course, any approach that demonstrates real-life space reductions ratios makes the technology worth purchasing. But even in this scenario, there are several different camps about the best way to deduplicate data and where the deduplication should occur. Should companies deduplicate data on the client; should they do it using in-line processing; or, should they deduplicate data using a post-processing algorithm? (read more)

As small and midsize businesses (SMBs) take a look at the worsening economic crisis and begin to understand how it impacts them, reality is starting to set in. A recent survey reports that nearly 80 percent of SMBs are not convinced the U.S. government's $700 billion financial bailout will help them. Furthermore, SMBs' purchasing power is being drastically altered, which will undoubtedly cause ripple effects throughout the economy. Case in point, the reluctance and abrupt spending halt of SMBs has impacted SAP -- causing SAP's third-quarter earnings to tank. This has already prompted SAP to implement financial help and discounts on its software that is explicitly intended for SMBs. (read more)

As 2009 approaches, the traditional benchmarks for enterprise backup software such as the management of physical tape libraries, support for multiple operating systems and SAN backups are yesterday's news. Instead support for backup to disk, continuous data protection (CDP), protection for laptops and desktops and a common repository where protected data is stored, deduplicated and available for rapid access and search is how enterprise data protection software is now defined and measured. Yet even when one factors in these new benchmarks for enterprise data protection, how products such as Atempo Time Navigator play in this rapidly evolving space, and in which verticals they best play, are less than intuitive to the untrained eye. (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)

An area that is often overlooked in an IT infrastructure, at least until it's needed, is the backup and recovery environment. Then when the realization hits the company that it needs backup software, it's typically complex to install, configure and maintain, even in small environments, because of the fact that backup consists of so many moving parts (backup servers, tape robots, disk-based arrays, SAN networks, etc.). The good news is that more hardware and software vendors are stepping up to the plate and partnering to take some of the complexity out of installing and configuring backup software in these size environments. The most recent announcement between Dell and Symantec is the latest in the growing number of symbiotic relationships between hardware and software vendors in the backup space. (read more)

The statement that "data growth is continuing at an exponential rate" rarely ever conveys the exact location of the data that is growing so fast. But it just so happens that a consensus of industry analysts agree the majority of this rapidly growing pool of corporate data (up to 60 percent) now resides at remote corporate offices. While more companies now recognize that the data created and stored at remote sites is vital to their ongoing success, protecting it presents a unique set of challenges. Of these challenges, moving backup data over corporate WANs is one of greatest. (read more)

Companies sometimes assume that they must continue to use legacy archival techniques for retaining their critical intellectual property and business data. Based upon my experience, when developing new and more up-to-date archival strategies for organizations, tape and optical can no longer be viewed as the primary media for archival data. (read more)

Robert: One of CommVault's objectives is to leverage the experience we gain at each customer account and make that experience extensible throughout our services and support organization so we can use that regardless of where our customers are located. By doing this, CommVault can treat every customer as a special project and not try to fit them into one specific mode. (read more)

Too often one of the requirements in the enterprise data protection equation for corporate remote and branch offices (ROBOs) is "rip-and-replace." While this approach is fine for dealing with aging hardware and software, it ignores the majority of scenarios where ROBOs have hardware or software that they can't afford to replace but are being asked to rip out anyway in favor of OEMs' latest solution. ROBOs are just as apt to want a "bolt-on" solution that enables adding new technology to their environment while continuing to use what's already in place. The latter scenario is what Overland Storage's announcement of its REO Compass is designed to provide. (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)

Breaking new ground or turf wars? That's the question that crossed my mind when I heard that Symantec combined its Backup Exec and NetBackup product groups into one new Data Protection Group earlier this year. One of two things can happen in a scenario when you merge the engineering teams of the two data protection product market leaders, NetBackup and Backup Exec, into one. You either get outright war where nothing gets done and everything devolves into turf wars; or the two teams put aside their egos so they can take advantage of the new synergies that come from working together and sharing common code. So far, it strikes me more as the latter. (read more)

There continues to be a lot of buzz about storage consolidation and, more specifically, consolidating file servers. Regardless of what form NAS consolidation takes - monolithic NAS filers, file virtualization or clustered NAS - companies tend to focus on its obvious benefits. Smaller data center footprints, improved storage utilization, centralized consoles for simpler administration and even deduplicating redundant files are some of the advantages that companies will realize should they consolidate NAS. Yet what companies may forget to consider is the new backup challenges that consolidation creates and that the new backup problems created may mitigate whatever benefits consolidation delivers. (read more)

The benefits that continuous data protection (CDP) technology provides as part of a company's overall data protection strategy are becoming more evident everyday. Point-in-time restores, faster recoveries and off-site replication of data for disaster recoveries are just some of the benefits that companies using CDP are already experiencing. However one of the challenges that companies may encounter as they look to deploy CDP that may hinder or even prevent its adoption is the need to deploy host agents on servers. (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)

In my many conversations with backup software vendors, I definitely get the sense that if they hear how great disk-based deduplication appliances are one more time, they will explode. Of course, part of the reason that deduplication appliances are getting under their skin while winning the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of many end-users is for one simple reason: turnkey deployments. But that option of turning primarily to disk-based backup providers for deduplication starts to change as today's joint announcement from Dell and CommVault makes plain. By bundling the CommVault® Simpana® software suite with the Dell PowerVault DL2000, companies can now purchase a single solution and get everything they need to protect their environment - data protection software, file deduplication and storage capacity. (read more)

Today's Rapid Recovery 4.0 backup software announcement from Unitrends continues to reinforce one of the growing trends in disk-based backup - ever more powerful backup software bundled on backup appliances intended for use by small and midsize businesses (SMBs). No longer do these size companies need to cobble together their own backup solution or rely upon a value-added reseller (VAR) to architect one. Instead SMBs can realistically expect to obtain fairly robust, near-turnkey backup solutions for prices starting at $5,000. The real trick when going down this path is selecting a backup appliance that can scale capacity as your business grows as well as offers backup software that meets the specific needs of your company's environment. (read more)

A recurring theme in terms of what I hear from users is how VMware adds new complexities to their day-to-day management tasks. For instance, even before server virtualization came in vogue, companies were already complaining that their physical servers reproduced like rabbits. Server virtualization just makes server growth that much easier to occur since now companies don't even need to purchase a new physical machine anymore - it now is little more than a copy-and-paste like exercise to create a new virtual machine (VM) once server virtualization is in place. (read more)

Day 2 at VMworld has come and gone and probably my biggest regret was that I had to miss this morning's keynote by VMware's new CEO, Paul Maritz. In reading through some other blogs this evening about the event and assuming Storagezilla called it right, it was a doozey essentially declaring open war on other operating systems. In any case, my day was focused on catching up with a number of vendors to get some of the latest behind the scenes scoop in the storage world. In fact, as one walks into the exhibitor hall in VMworld, it is hard not to mistake this conference for a storage conference. (read more)