Entries categorized under “Data Protection”

Determining a solid foundation for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans are a significant challenge for enterprises of all sizes and shapes. Understanding the business value of your organization's data is the first step to achieving that solid foundation as it provides a framework for what's critical and what's not so critical to the operation of your organization. (read more)

By now most enterprise backup users have heard about Symantec's new Open Storage (OST) API that was included as part of the Veritas NetBackup 6.5 release in August 2007. However the full benefits of OST are still largely unknown mostly because so few users are taking advantage of them. Now that more systems have added this feature, Symantec recently held a round table discussion during which it shared some of the progress that has occurred around OST with one early adopter on the call sharing a pretty amazing story about the performance gains that he has seen in his production environment using OST. (read more)

Gone are the days when the sole purpose of storage resource management (SRM) software was to report on file ages and sizes, storage utilization and server-to-storage LUN assignments. Those functions are still important but not nearly enough to meet the demands of today's progressive enterprise data centers. These organizations are demanding faster, easier deployments of SRM software that grant them more insight into their increasingly virtualized environments as well as better reporting and management of their replication processes that are becoming so critical in today's data centers. It is this void that APTARE StorageConsole 7.0 seeks to fill. (read more)

On April 16, 2009, the Iomega® StorCenter Pro ix4-200r was unveiled to the world and was subsequently greeted with an almost universal chorus of "oh's" and "ah's" by press and analysts alike. Now, mind you, this is the same crowd that normally first begins their write-ups with details about new features in the product and then promptly explain what is wrong with them or why they do not measure up. The coverage on this product announcement was definitely an exception to the rule. In scanning what has been written so far, one can hardly find any negative reviews on the ix4-200r with most observers and insiders feeling like Iomega hit it out of the park with its latest major foray into the small business networked storage space. (read more)

Backup software is, if nothing else, a "Me-Too" space with each vendor adding new features to each release of its product to try to match what its competitors are doing as well as trying to add a few new twists of their own to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Today's CA announcement of ARCserve r12.5 continues this trend. To remain competitive, r12.5 adds data deduplication as a core component of ARCserve, improves users' abilities to recover guest VMs on virtual server operating systems and more tightly integrates ARCserve with popular applications. CA seeks to differentiate ARCserve from competitors with new native SRM reporting capabilities and providing assurance that organizations can restore their deduplicated backup data. (read more)

It's easy for organizations to believe that disk will solve their backup problems. But some organizations are starting to discover that while disk solved some of their backup problems, they are still not realizing the full reductions in backup times and improved performance rates on their application servers that they may have initially expected. If an organization finds itself in this predicament, then it probably behooves them to take a closer look at their backup architecture and determine exactly how much backup traffic is going across their corporate LAN. (read more)

In continuing my dialog about my insights at the Spring SNW 2008, I did multiple briefings on Tuesday, April 7, but none was more insightful than the sit-down meeting I had with Fusion-io's self proclaimed Chief Mind Bender Rick White. So while I plan to come back and cover material from some of the other briefings I had on Tuesday, what he revealed to me about what Fusion-io is doing and has on its roadmap is not just disruptive, it's disturbing. Granted, a lot of what he told me he promised that I not reveal but he told me enough public information to get my head reeling with possibilities. (read more)

To understand a specific company's technology, sometimes you have to do more than just understand the company behind the product, you have to understand the philosophy of the company behind the product. That was probably what impressed me the most when I recently had a briefing with Fadi Albatal, FalconStor's Director of Product Marketing. Yes, we went over FalconStor's new HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware feature, but what really piqued my interest was how HyperTrac fits into FalconStor's overall data protection methodology and why FalconStor's customers can anticipate further innovations like this in the future. (read more)

Moving information from primary to secondary storage to relieve operational and performance issues is only half the issue; archiving the data is the problem. Financial institutions that might use Oracle as a back end database will find that relocating information to lower cost storage can be quite difficult. (read more)

One of the most vexing problems in enterprise data centers today is the lack of information that those in charge of data centers have about the infrastructure that they manage. When I used to work for a Fortune 500 company it was like pulling teeth to try to get the base line information that I needed even in order to understand how to manage the infrastructure and this was before the advent of server virtualization. These problems certainly have not decreased and, if anything, organizations now have less time, less money and probably less people but a greater need than ever to understand their infrastructure so they can manage it. (read more)

Everyone is quick to tout the cost-savings that server virtualization provides - less server hardware, lower heating and cooling costs, smaller data center footprints, better utilization of existing hardware. In many respects, it's like a dream come true from a cost savings perspective for many organizations. But successfully implementing server virtualization is another story as it requires organizations do more than just remove the shrink wrap on the software, install it and then watch the savings pile up. (read more)

There is always concern among small business owners that the software on a NAS appliance will become obsolete or out-of-date after they buy it. Iomega takes that concern off the table. Recently I met with Jonathan Huberman, President of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, to discuss Iomega's growing role in networked storage for small businesses. In this final installment of a 3-part series, Jonathan describes what enterprise features are finding their way onto Iomega NAS appliances, how Iomega provides investment protection for products purchased and what Iomega will look like in the coming 2 to 5 years. (read more)

The use of tape as a primary target for backup has changed over the years. The onslaught of low-cost, disk-to-disk based backup solutions coupled with the many problems associated with using tape as a primary target has rightfully enticed many data centers not to use tape in that capacity. But that does not mean there is no requirement to use tape within the data center. (read more)

Organizations tend to give insufficient thought to the protection of an application before it is deployed. Too often it is only after the application is developed or purchased and put into production that the organization takes the time to consider the protection of the application's data and, even then, it is usually not a major problem to implement. As organizations look to virtualize more of their physical machines that are hosting these applications, waiting until the application is in production before deciding how to best protect it creates new sets of problems. (read more)

In this final entry in a three-part series, I finish my conversation with Deepak Mohan, Symantec's Information Management Group SVP, as he takes a look at some of the current gaps in data protection and recovery today, tape's evolving role in enterprises and why Symantec still views tape as a viable technology and why large enterprises in general and healthcare IT specifically can benefit from Symantec's suite of products. Mohan provides some specifics on data protection and recovery gaps in different market segments, why the transition from tape to disk is going to occur gradually and why enterprise organizations need an enterprise software solution that addresses all of the needs of today's organizations from the end-user to the data center. (read more)

The cost for small businesses and the remote offices of corporations to use networked storage for functions such as centralized storage, data protection and video surveillance is often cost prohibitive. But today's small business NAS products are changing that trend. Recently I met with Jonathan Huberman, President of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, to discuss Iomega's growing role in networked storage for small businesses. In this second of a 3-part series, Jonathan describes Iomega's NAS product offerings and how large corporations can leverage them to more cost-effectively store, protect and manage data in their remote offices as well as how businesses of any size can more easily build and deploy video surveillance solutions. (read more)

Data protection is top of mind with more enterprise organizations today as they look to redesign data protection. Rapidly changing economic forces, new technologies and steadily growing volumes of data are prompting enterprises to rethink how they can best protect, manage and recover their data by leveraging these new technologies without introducing new people or extraordinary costs to accomplish these objectives. To get Symantec's take on these new challenges facing organizations, DCIG lead analyst, Jerome Wendt, recently met with Deepak Mohan, Symantec's senior vice president of the Data Protection Group, to discuss these topics. (read more)

If you happened to attend any recent conferences or trade shows then you know that most of the discussions center on driving costs out of storage environments. In the current yo-yo economy we live in, most IT Directors are looking for new and unique ways to solve their storage dilemma as storage capacity continues to grow. One way enterprise IT organizations are tackling this problem is thru deduplication using a disk-based backup solution. Though this is definitely a good approach of tackling data growth and cost savings in the backup space, it does nothing to alleviate the burden of data growth on primary storage since backup solutions do not remove and archive aging production data. (read more)

A clustered server environment is only as reliable as the system administrators who maintain it. The challenge they encounter after they configure and deploy the hardware and software that make-up a clustered environment is, "How to maintain it?" Most system administrators leave the configuration alone for fear of disrupting a mission critical application after it is initially deployed. Crucial details such as patches and configuration changes are not completed just due to the nature of the system itself. But what catches organizations off-guard is that at some point down the road when an event does prompt a failover from one server to another, the failover fails to occur because smaller changes have occurred in the environment that now preclude the failover from successfully taking place. (read more)

The use of tape as a primary target for backup has supposedly changed in large part due to the onslaught of new disk-based backup solutions with many features that are enticing data centers to change course. One could even say that vendors and analysts have abandoned tape for greener pastures by seeking to associate themselves with disk's sexier features--all the while forgetting about tape's evolving role within the data center. (read more)

Most businesses small and large have many IT needs but one that they continue to focus on as they move into a completely paperless world is data protection and, more specifically, data recovery. They know their current in-house backup and recovery processes are often less than adequate so when they ask hard questions like, "How long can I afford to be without my data?" and "What does losing that data mean to the company and the company's public reputation?", they don't like the answers. But what IT managers are surprised to learn as they look to move to a SaaS offering based on a cloud-based computing architecture for their backup and recovery services, they find there are many options from which to choose. (read more)

It is common for users to tell me they are just going to add some SATA disk trays to their existing primary storage while others have said they are going to just purchase the cheapest possible JBOD system that they can. There are a couple of concerns I have with either of these two approaches. In these examples, they are way too focused on the short-term cost savings that JBOD offers and they fail to fully consider the protection and preservation of their archived data over the long-term. If enterprises really did not need the archived data, then they are better off directing their IT staff to just completely remove the data from their environment anyway. (read more)

Microsoft Exchange email and backup administrators are continually faced with the problem of trying to backup and recover Exchange data in a reasonable amount of time, whether that is to meet a shortening backup window or satisfy new recovery time objectives that call for faster disaster recovery and business continuity. Currently, there are oodles of different backup and recovery applications out there that claim a more simplified approach when performing backup and recovery in a Microsoft Exchange environment. However, most of them use the same basic approach when performing Exchange level data protection. (read more)

The portability and high capacity of flash drives is creating headaches for many companies. The Net is swarming with stories of the ill-use, illegal activities, and security concerns as more and more of these devices are lost and stolen or used to steal sensitive information. There are two basic categories of threats to information when corporations allow the free-will use of flash drives within an organization: the introduction of viruses, and the potential for lost or stolen data. (read more)

To say that organizations are approaching 2009 with more than just a little apprehension would be an understatement. Scandals are rocking the financial markets on an almost daily basis. There is the looming threat of new legislation in 2009 which will make it more expensive to conduct business going forward. And, in the US, nearly 700,000 individuals in the private sector lost jobs in the month of December alone - Yikes! That leaves those left in organizations trying to figure out new ways to deliver the same amount of value and services with less money and people and nothing is more clearly in the sights of businesses than lowering their IT costs and keeping them under control. (read more)