Entries categorized under “Data Protection”

The reasons for using CDP for data protection and recovery are pretty well documented. There are no gaps in your data protection. You eliminate backup windows. You can do any point-in-time recoveries. You can do roll forward and roll back recoveries. However positioning CDP strictly in the context of backup and recovery may not demonstrate the cost savings that are necessary for companies to take funds budgeted for backup and recovery and re-allocate them for CDP. (read more)

The NEC HYDRAstor grid storage platform is best described as one that can evolve and grow on an as-needed basis while introducing newer technologies as they become available. Today's announcement continues to reinforce this compelling value proposition that the HYDRAstor platform delivers. In today's software release NEC improves HYDRAstor's performance, adds in-flight encryption to its replication feature and extends its support of application-aware deduplication to Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC NetWorker all at no extra charge to HYDRAstor users. (read more)

When businesses think of Microsoft, it is not just Windows, Office or Internet Explorer that comes to mind. Increasingly it's SharePoint that they identify as one of Microsoft's most compelling solutions. Using a drive letter path for document collaboration is no longer practical in this day and age and SharePoint is now the tool to which many organizations turn to fill their collaboration needs. So while SharePoint fills this new need for many organizations, what is not so obvious to them is how to manage SharePoint so they can search, find and deliver relevant documents in a timely manner if faced with an eDiscovery request. (read more)

Dedupe is an easy concept to grasp. At its most basic level it reduces storage requirements and touts the improvement in backup and recovery times. It seems as if it is a "win-win" scenario and, for the most part, it is. But let's not lose sight of the fact that dedupe is still in its infancy and is being continually fine-tuned and changed. This should keep us from becoming lackadaisical in our perception of this technology and how it is still in its early stages. (read more)

One specific item that caught my attention was an article posted earlier this week on SearchStorage.com's site regarding Texas Memory System's acquisition of Incipient's storage virtualization intellectual property. Being fairly familiar with Incipient's technology and having talked to a few of its early customers off-the-record, I thought its technology was sound. However like every storage vendor regardless of its size, a pure network-based storage virtualization play has remained a tough sell, especially in enterprise environments where Incipient played. (read more)

To say that storage clouds are gathering in the distance is probably an understatement. Everyone is beginning to see the benefits - both technical and financial - that cloud storage provides, especially in the archiving and backup realms. But there are more factors to consider than just the underlying architecture of the provider's cloud storage offering or the price per GB. Managing and accessing data in the cloud presents entirely new risks that organizations either are still failing to address or may not even know exist. (read more)

I arrived home from VMworld 2009 last night after spending much of the flight reflecting on what I learned, the conversations that I had and the technologies that I had a chance to view. However at every conference there is usually one technology that piques my interest and this one was no different as I had a chance to do a deeper dive into one company's method of doing virtual machine backup while at the show. What made this technology transcend other virtual machine backup approaches is that it is by far the most scalable, easiest to implement and simplest to manage that I have yet encountered. (read more)

A recent Enterprise Systems article reported on the results of a recent SHARE survey of about 400 IT professionals. It revealed that nearly 70% of these users had virtualized some or all of their servers, 50% of their storage infrastructure and some are even starting down the path of virtualizing their desktop and network infrastructures. But what is notably absent in this article is any discussion around data protection in these newly virtualized infrastructures. (read more)

VMware ESX Server and its latest vSphere software release have become instrumental in helping organizations tame server hardware costs within data centers while improving the ROI associated with existing and new projects. But this isn't to say that virtualization doesn't come with any pain points--and managing virtual storage infrastructures is one of the biggest. So to help combat these challenges, FalconStor Software today announced at VMworld 2009 a comprehensive VMware Initiative that will help organizations bridge their physical and virtual infrastructures and provide continuous availability in multi-vendor storage environments. (read more)

In the last few years no technology has experienced more of its shares of ups and downs than continuous data protection (CDP). Initially hailed by some as a likely successor to backup software, CDP has yet to come close to fulfilling on that original promise. However recent changes in IT data center environments coupled with ongoing improvements in CDP are giving this technology a second chance. (read more)

The current recession's wrath has spared few, and technology has seen its hard times just like all industry sectors, but one area that appears poised to be one of technology's biggest benefactors is healthcare. When the Stimulus bill was passed, President Obama made it a point to bring healthcare technology front and center by providing $19 Billion dollars for the implementation of an electronic medical record (EMR). $19 Billion dollars certainly gets companies attention and most are either positioning themselves, or renewing their focus on healthcare to glean their share of this substantial investment of dollars. (read more)

Changes in buying behavior among companies are probably a big motivation behind Quantum's recent announcement to include esXpress backup software with its disk-based DXi-Series backup systems. While most mid-size companies and larger are looking to deploy disk-based backup that incorporates deduplication into their backup infrastructures (which the DXi-Series certainly addresses) it is not always that simple. (read more)

Maybe it has always been this way, but when a vendor hosts a customer event, it always seems that you (Mr. Customer) must pay to go and to learn about their (Mr. Vendor's) product. To me, this has always seemed somewhat backwards. You (Mr. Customer) pay a whole bunch of money for their product in the first place, then another 15 - 20% annually for support, then more for training and then, to add insult to injury, they make you pay for airfare, hotel and a registration fee to attend their annual customer event. (read more)

"We were getting to the point where we had more and more data and less and less time to back it up", says Mike Fishell, Director of Information Technology for Hay House. "And then there were the increasing expenses of doing the backups. Between time, money and storage space, we needed a new solution." (read more)

It's easy for IT folks in the US to think we have problems. Whether it is worrying about our jobs, how we are going to stretch the budget to get everything done that needs to be done or trying to decide if and when to innovate, our problems can pale in comparison to the stresses that individuals working abroad can face. This is especially applicable for those individuals working for missionary organizations that work in the remote parts of the world such as Papua New Guinea that have huge technology needs but who do not really have any viable, affordable data protection options available to them. (read more)

Every week I talk to a lot of people within the storage industry - end users, other analysts, resellers, public relations, CEOs, storage engineers, etc. While none of the news I pick up is necessarily enough to substantiate a blog on its own, when aggregated it becomes interesting and noteworthy. In fact, I was talking to Don Jennings at Lois Paul and Partners (LPP) about this yesterday and he suggested that I weekly post a blog that recaps what I hear and do on a weekly basis. Since Friday's are typically a slow day during the summer months and anyone who is anyone is always looking to cut out a little early on Fridays anyway, I thought I'd give everyone a reason to check out the DCIG website before they do. (read more)

""We are experiencing explosive rates of data growth." That statement is made every day by many organizations in many places. But when it is your organization experiencing the explosive data growth rates and you are the one responsible for managing and protecting it, it takes on a whole new level of meaning. (read more)

The impact of virtualization on the IT Infrastructure has shaken IT at its core. Virtualization is changing the current model of assigning one physical server for each application by effectively consolidating multiple servers onto one piece of server hardware and then optimizing its resources. Despite these benefits, virtualization initiatives can prove challenging. For example, deploying certain components of the IT infrastructure with backup and recovery is one area where there can be unanticipated challenges in the support of virtual infrastructures. (read more)

The "Wow" factor. Everyone innately knows that's what separates the great from the good in any industry no matter what product or service it is that they are evaluating. Of course, no one ever really knows exactly when it is the "Wow" moment will occur and it was no different for Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, when he was evaluating enterprise backup software products from CommVault, EMC and Symantec. (read more)

Over the last few years, it is understandable why Symantec Backup Exec users may have felt a little unloved as deduplication has proliferated throughout the backup space. While NetBackup, its data protection product for the enterprise space, was getting all sorts of deduplication capabilities, the best that Backup Exec users could say was, "Hey, we can deduplicate data using 3rd party deduplication appliances." (read more)

Data protection is a ubiquitous need that cuts across all size organizations and has resulted in dozens of products with specific features to address these needs. In fact, one can easily wonder why any vendor even thinks it stands a chance to compete by coming to market with new backup software. But still they do and part of the reason is that backup problems still persist; so much so that backup redesign has topped the list among end-users for three (3) years running as they struggle to meet new backup requirements. (read more)

One might think the data protection world has gone mad. After all of the coverage over the last few years about the "goodness" of disk and the "evils" of tape, a recent announcement from Spectra Logic that it had entered into a new OEM agreement with Symantec ran counter to this disk-based backup craze. What specifically caught my eye in this announcement was that Spectra Logic was now bundling solutions that would integrate Symantec's NetBackup and Backup Exec software solutions with either its disk or its tape library products. (read more)

Exposed. That was the position that Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, found himself in more frequently in mid-2007 as he watched Herbalife's data growth explode and the backup software that he was using struggle to keep up. Much of Herbalife's new data growth was driven by its new corporate-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) software initiative that increased its production data stores from 32 TBs to 240 TBs of data. This growth plus new backup demands left Hansen uncertain as to if Herbalife could recover from data loss or application disruption should any type of outage occur - minor or major. (read more)

Attempting to make your entire SAP environment highly available can be a gargantuan challenge, especially considering the number of moving parts contained within an SAP landscape. Most of the time when one looks to ensure that any application is protected and made highly available, it's common practice to ask the application vendor for a set of best practices and guidelines to do so. However, SAP's typical response is, "Work with our partners and/or 3rd party consultants to help you achieve the level of availability you are looking for." (read more)

The proclivity of vendors to emphasize jumps in performance is almost as commonplace as the proclivity of IT veterans to view such claims in performance gains with high degrees of cynicism. So when a system administrator recently went on the record during a recent round table and said that he experienced a 4 - 5x improvement in testing and a 2x improvement in his production environment using Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) API for backup, it caught my attention. (read more)