Entries categorized under “Replication”

Replication is becoming an ever more important component in the protection and recovery of applications. Anecdotal evidence already suggests that 50% or more of all SAN and NAS storage systems ship with some form of replication software while many more organizations use replication in its other forms (application, appliance or host-based). But regardless of what form of replication software that organizations buy, they are many times unaware of the subtle ways in which replication software products differentiate themselves. (read more)

Sometimes when you find a good thing you have to roll with it and that is exactly what DCIG plans to do with its new line of Buyer's Guide products. Last month DCIG announced the availability of its first ever Buyer's Guide of any kind for either storage or ESI products. Since then its reception among storage providers and end-users alike has so surpassed our expectations that DCIG has decided to expand the scope of these offerings. It is for that reason DCIG is today pleased to announce that it is beginning research and plans to bring to market by the end of 2010 four more DCIG Buyer's Guides. (read more)

Taking snapshots of applications is fast becoming a prerequisite for backup and recovery as well as a means for testing how well application fixes, patches and upgrades will work. But as more organizations adopt Linux as their preferred operating system to host their applications, they are also finding that the native Snapshot utility found in Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) does not provide them with all of the functionality they need. (read more)

One of the key concerns that businesses have is how providers of the cloud will handle and respond to spikes in application demands. It is these questions that InMage's newly announced cloud-optimized infrastructure is designed to answer. (read more)

I started this blog entry last week while I was in attendance at Compellent's C-Drive. However it was only last night as I was flying to Boston to attend EMC World that I had the opportunity to wrap it up. The specific items on my mind that I wanted to highlight in this blog were two emerging technology trends that came into sharper focus while I was in attendance at C-Drive. (read more)

This week I am spending a couple of days at Compellent's annual C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN where about 500 users, value added resellers (VARs) and Compellent sales reps are in attendance. Since a couple of years have passed since I attended the last one, I thought I would make the 6-hour drive from Omaha to Minneapolis to catch up on the latest going-ons with Compellent and gain some insight as to how they plan to recoup after their latest earnings stumble. (read more)

Today's blog entry comes out of some recent conversations that I have had with end users in the small and midsized business (SMB) space. Some common themes about how these individuals want to scale their storage solution are beginning to emerge and they strike a different tone than what individuals in the small, midsized and large enterprise space have to say. In short, they want to control their storage growth at a much more granular level and they do not want to be penalized for having that level of control. (read more)

In this day and age, what organization doesn't want a turnkey disaster recovery and business continuity plan? In fact, a recent 2010 InformationWeek survey published in the February 1, 2010, issue of InformationWeek revealed that 36% of organizations have implemented and regularly test disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans versus only 28% the year before. (read more)

Since EMC acquired Iomega about two years ago, the range of new features that customers can find as standard on Iomega's StorCenter™ lineup of network attached storage (NAS) products continues to grow. One of the more exciting additions is the new replication feature which gives small businesses new found flexibility to protect and recover their data at alternate locations. But like with any replication software, there are some "Do's" and "Don'ts" associated with properly using it. (read more)

Virtualization, consolidation and servers are becoming inextricably linked in the minds of mid-sized organizations as they look to reduce data center footprints and energy consumption while increasing server hardware utilization. Yet what can get overlooked during the consolidation and virtualization of their Windows applications is the development of a corresponding storage strategy. This is where the specifics on what is needed to deliver on an appropriate storage solution for this environment become a necessity. (read more)

Anyone who has ever witnessed a disaster knows that one of two things can happen. Either the area affected by the disaster can be devastated, never to recover; or, new life can spring up in its place. In many respect, the economic disaster that hit the entire nation and world hit the data storage industry equally hard. However the data storage industry is picking itself back up and, based upon what I saw and heard this week at The BDEvent in Palo Alto, CA, it has brought an end to one era in data storage while the dawn of another is now upon us. (read more)

I have heard it said that you cannot compare the complexity found in small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) to what is found in the "really big" enterprise shops. That is certainly true in some cases but when one starts to examine the complexity associated with backing up, recovering and managing data at the dozens of branch offices that many SMEs support, it equates to any challenge that large enterprises face. However it is this exact complexity that the new features on the Nexsan Dedupe SG 2.0 are designed to address. (read more)

This week it was evident everyone is getting back to work - at least those individuals who still have jobs and received something other than pink slips over the holiday break. People starting returning my phone calls and emails, PR agencies started requesting my time again for briefings and, maybe most importantly, news releases started flowing again so I have something other than 2009 recaps and 2010 trends to write about. This week three news items caught my attention: FalconStor Software's FDS 2.0 release; a cloud storage announcement from Pillar and a new term (like this industry needed any more): Disaster Proof Hardware. (read more)

Right now deduplication and replication are the two main features seen as critical to delivering on the promise of disk-based backup. But as organizations store more of their backup data to disk, they are quickly realizing that other features are required to successfully execute on the redesign of their backup infrastructures. Specifically, companies with numerous remote offices are finding that systems availability and data management cannot be overlooked in their disk-based backup redesigns and is what today's release of FalconStor's File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) 2.0 is intended to address. (read more)

An article that appeared back in 2009 on the Forbes website commented on the questions that executive management teams are asking about proposals that they are receiving from their IT departments. Their uncertainty is probably only heightened when their IT departments bring forward a proposal that recommends a seemingly new process that involves the deployment of lesser understood technologies like deduplication and replication. (read more)

Right now on Yahoo finance it is counting down what it considers the top 10 tech trends for 2010. However some of the trends that it is including in its top 10 are so broad in their definition that when it lists 'Data Centers' as its #2 trend and then identifies nearly every technology company in the space as being part of this trend, you have to question just how real this trend is? The list of what I consider the more subtle storage trends of 2010 will be a bit more specific in terms of what features, products, services and/or vendor alliances are taking place that support these theories. (read more)

Everyone has backup problems, and educational institutions with limited budgets and IT staff may feel the pain of backup more so than most. In a previous blog, I shared some of the specific backup and disaster recovery challenges that Midland Lutherans College (MLC) in Fremont, NE, was facing and how its initial selection of a NAS device fell short of resolving those issues. However MLC's Director of Information Technology, Ken Clipperton, did not abandon his search for a disk-based backup solution and found the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d a good match for MLC's backup requirements. (read more)

As NAS providers like Iomega add more software features to their NAS appliances, they are attracting the interest of an entirely new set of organizations. One such organization, Midland Lutheran College (MLC) in Fremont, NE, was so impressed by the features on the new Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d over competing products that it went ahead and purchased the product for use in its academic environment. (read more)

Data is the lifeblood of any organization and, in the last decade, increasing emphasis has been placed on protecting that data so organizations can recover the information that they need in the time frame they need it. Replication is now rapidly emerging as a viable form of data protection even for midsize organizations because of its lower costs, faster recovery times and the level of protection that it provides. However the process of selecting the right replication solution for the different data types that organizations need to protect is anything but an intuitive exercise. (read more)

The dramatic changes that are currently sweeping through the storage industry are once again preparing to reshape the look of tomorrow's enterprise data centers. Among these changes, features and/or products like high availability, solid state drives (SSDs), server virtualization and thin provisioning are emerging as the predominant ones that IT managers are well under ways towards wide spread adoption. But as the implementation of these features begin, they create new storage management 'gotchas'. (read more)

The new relationship that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) struck with InMage Systems to use InMage about three months ago had a number of immediate ramifications. It provided HDS with a new heterogeneous replication option that it could use across its own storage systems; it made HDS more competitive in customer accounts where it did not traditionally have a foothold and it provided an entrée for HDS into next generation data protection technologies for disaster recovery. (read more)

Cloud computing helps companies hide, intelligently allocate and take control of their IT infrastructure while also supplying users with the appropriate levels of application availability and performance. But, with this flexibility comes the inherent risks. One of the most pronounced risks is protecting the application data stored in the cloud because if you don't, cloud storage horror stories are sure to follow. (read more)

In today's blog I simply wanted to recap some of the tidbits of information that I picked up while chatting with various folks while walking and talking at the Fall 2009 SNW show as well as comment on some interesting developments at a couple of companies. (read more)

Software as a Service (SaaS) is on almost every company's radar screen as a cost-effective means for outsourcing applications that are not core competencies of their IT staff. Yet while outsourcing more applications sounds great in theory, applications such as disaster recovery (DR) that organizations are looking to outsource must support certain characteristics. Specifically, the software needs to support options like partitioning and data security that are inherent in a feature like multi-tenancy. (read more)

It is hard to believe that it is October 2009 already and that we are over a year removed from last year's economic meltdown even though everyone keeps talking about it like it just happened yesterday. However, the upside of the situation that we are in right now is that it is prompting more organizations to think outside of the box and look for better ways to do things.This is resulting in companies choosing some technologies that they may have overlooked or not considered in the past. (read more)