One thing that struck me was that Compellent users really understand what a game-changing technology that virtualization is. I sat through 2 or 3 presentations during the two days of the conference (May 7 - 8) and also met with a fair number of users (~10) between sessions, over meals and at the evening events and all of them were pretty stoked about the capabilities that virtualization in general and Compellent specifically delivers. (read more)

Paulk revealed that he is now in full production with the production code loaded on the NEC HYDRAstor. However he is still using the same hardware configuration (two Accelerator Nodes and four Storage Nodes) that he started out using due to the high deduplication ratio that he is achieving with the HYDRAstor. Last fall he was achieving a 17:1 deduplication ratio and hoped to eventually achieve a 35:1 ratio. Six months later, his deduplication ratio is now approximately 39:1 which has mitigated his need to buy additional capacity and has driven his cost/GB down to approximately 70¢/GB. "It's like getting 390 TB for the price of 10 TBs," says Paulk. (read more)

Today and tomorrow I am putting on both my reporter and analyst hats. Living in Omaha, NE, I am only a hop, skip and jump away from Minneapolis, MN, so I took the opportunity to drive up here to attend Compellent's annual C-Drive user conference that runs from May 6 - May 8 and do some live, on-site blogging about my experiences while I am here. Already a few notable items to report from last night's customer reception and this morning's opening presentation. (read more)

SharePoint Portal Sever was generally unprotected from 2003 through 2007 and couldn't be effectively supported in a disaster recovery/business continuity scenario. Thankfully Microsoft resolved that issue in SharePoint Portal Server 2007 by releasing a VSS writer for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Earlier this year I explained what a VSS Writer did and how VSS works in a two part series Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Continuous Data Protectio (Part 1) and Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Continuous Data Protectio (Part 2). (read more)

One of my favorite shows to watch is nightly reruns of Jim Cramer's Mad Money on CNBC. Aside from his crazy antics and "They Know Nothing" sound effect, he provides some good laughs just before I call it a night. Part of the reason that I find him so entertaining is that he is not necessarily in a position where he has to be politically correct - though some might argue he no longer has to be a good stock picker either, but that's a topic for another day. (read more)

Any time one looks at midrange backup appliances, the appliances are almost always NAS based. When configured this way, the backup appliance is attached to the local LAN it appears as a filer server to the backup server and files are backed up to a folder on that appliance. Though I initially called to speak to Overland Storage's Senior Product Manager, Jeff Graham, about REO's Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) technology, I first wanted to get some clarification on why Overland Storage's REO-series appliances are configured as Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) rather than as a NAS-based appliance. (read more)

Bringing backup data from remote and branch offices back to a home office is a particularly thorny problem that enterprises continue to face. Directly sending nightly full, incremental or differential backup jobs over a wide area network (WAN) connection back to the home office can saturate the WAN link and cause backups to exceed backup windows and result in failed backups. However the current procedure of backing up data to disk or tape at the remote site perpetuates the problem of how to most efficiently and securely transmit backup data back to the home office or disaster recovery site. (read more)

InMage addressed the challenge of system recovery through replication. To do this they needed to be forward thinking about how they would replicate the data. InMage DR-Scout uses two data protection agents. The VX Agent manages volume/block based continuous data protection. Their FX Agent manages file based continuous data protection and works as the scheduler within the InMage system. (read more)

NEC's Vice President of Advanced Storage Products, Karen Dutch, recently brought out some salient points about storage management in her Spring 2008 SNW presentation, "Defining Storage Solutions in the Data Center 2.0". Specifically, she described the features that new storage architectures should deliver in order to keep storage management manageable as storage growth in organizations continues. Of course, the not-so-subtle message is that NEC's HYDRAstor delivers on these new features. (read more)

One of the toughest aspects of being a storage administrator is finding reliable information that one can use to make decisions about competitive storage hardware or software products, especially when it comes to making decisions about newer technologies like Single Instance Storage (SIS). Even when data does become available, it is often too generic or not applicable to their situation so the individual is left in the position of either trusting the vendor's literature or doing some level of testing. In the case of Blessing Hospital's Technical Support Analyst II, Doug Barry, he opted for the latter. (read more)

In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage's Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website. (read more)

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn't be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers. (read more)

As corporate counsel becomes more savvy and comfortable with the 'reasonable' standards of due diligence, they have begun to take control of the spend. The first question that many a General Counsel asks is "Why don't we just do this ourselves?" Your vendors will have a polished set of answers sprinkled with names like Morgan Stanley, Qualcomm and Merrill Lynch, all designed to use the Sanction Scarecrow to keep their golden goose producing. The smoke and mirrors have lost their effectiveness in the face of new guidance from the Sedona Conference, EDRM, conference panels and waves of webinars. (read more)

Once Energy XXI's IT Director Andrew Schaefer had determined that a traditional tape backup system was not going to fit the needs of Energy XXI long term, he began to explore the possibility of using a hosted third party backup and recovery solution. Driving this decision was a number of factors. (read more)

This is delivered by marrying efficient resources, high-speed review applications and proactive project and process management. We also use higher level strategies, such as our Dynamic Data Analysis™ (a blending of statistical, conceptual and legal analysis), to both identify relevant documents as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, and to simultaneously reduce the total amount of data required to be reviewed. (read more)