There were a lot of interesting statistics that came out of the just released June 2009 study that was done by Applied Research on behalf of Symantec Corporation. However the one stat that caught my attention was the increasing involvement that upper management is taking in disaster recovery within enterprise organizations. Executives in North America increased their participation on DR committees by almost 50% in the last year (67% in 2009 versus 46% a year ago) while globally executives more than doubled their participation on these DR committees from 33% in 2008 to 70% in 2009. (read more)

One time occurrences that are accompanied by spikes in capacity and performance requirements are the bane of data centers. While many organizations can excuse IT for their inability to respond to unexpected one-time or occasional demands, perceptions and attitudes change when organizations know a heavy load is coming and IT cannot adeptly respond. It is this type of challenge that Carrenza Hosting, a managed hosting company based in London, England, intended to solve when it began to start down the path of adopting cloud-based computing and storage services. (read more)

"If it really costs millions to do that [e-discovery], then you're going to drive out of the litigation system a lot of people who ought to be there." This quote by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cuts to the heart of current issues surrounding eDiscovery. A recent DCIG blog highlighted how out of control litigation costs have become and have left companies with hard decisions on whether it is best to settle cases based solely on the cost of eDiscovery or attempt to litigate. But as companies face unprecedented economic pressure, a key question comes to mind, "Are these costs driving risky data retention strategies such as destroying all of your data?" (read more)

Most organizations simply do not like to think about their backup problems. To many their backup problems feel so overwhelming and the steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. (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)

Most organizations recognize that the introduction of disk into the data protection process is fundamentally changing the landscape of how data is protected. But what organizations are failing to entirely grasp is how disk fundamentally alters how applications can be protected and recovered. Disk can minimize the impact of data protection on production applications while providing shorter recovery times and improving recovery reliability. It is as organizations come to this realization that they also begin to grasp how recovery can displace backup as the next IT headache. (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)

Plug-n-play - that's part of the idea behind the Microsoft Exchange Storage Calculator spreadsheet which provides organizations the general guidelines that they need when planning and configuring the storage that will support an instance of Microsoft Exchange. However one should not assume that this spreadsheet takes into account every possible variable regarding storage systems - it most certainly does not and says as much within the spreadsheet. (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)

Independent software vendors (ISVs) that sell software based on x86 hardware platforms face a new type of challenge in today's economic environment. While their software can run on any vendor's hardware platform, the time it takes for them to install, configure and support their software on each platform gives resellers pause and is prompting resellers and customers alike to look for the ISV's software in the form of appliance-based solutions. (read more)

"We need cheaper and simpler backups and recoveries for our remote and branch offices." That statement is repeated more often by mid-size companies as they seek solutions that take the pain and management overhead associated with backup and recovery out of their remote offices without breaking the budget or requiring heroic efforts to implement. This is exactly the type of scenario that the recently announced DXi2500-D appliance and version 3.0 of Quantum Vision™ Software from Quantum is designed to address. (read more)

In the face of its public tussle with EMC over Data Domain, NetApp forged ahead with its annual Analyst Days at its Sunnyvale, CA, headquarters. Well attended by many NetApp executives and 80+ analysts from the US and around the world, it was both informative and well run. However it was the kickoff keynote by NetApp's CEO Dave Warmenhoven that I first wanted to summarize and comment on as he did a pretty good job of encapsulating the major themes of the presentations and one-on-one meetings that were to follow. (read more)

Best practices for configuring storage systems in enterprise Microsoft Exchange environments requires that they look beyond Microsoft's basic guidelines for how to configure their storage systems. While these guidelines may be sufficient when deploying Exchange in smaller shops where direct attached storage (DAS) or traditional array-based storage systems are the norm, enterprise organizations need to know when to look beyond these guidelines and tweak them when deploying Exchange on a next generation storage system like the 3PAR InServ Storage Server. The key to making these tweaks, however, is to satisfy Microsoft's best practices without negating the inherent benefits that storage systems like 3PAR provide. (read more)

Symantec's recent announcement that it will support its Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows (SFW) 5.1 in the Microsoft Hyper-V parent tremendously increases the breadth of functionality available to the child virtual machines (VMs) of Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Immediate new benefits that child VMs will realize include the restoration of full path and storage management capabilities that often were severely handicapped once physical servers were virtualized. But other benefits that also come along with moving SFW 5.1 into the Hyper-V parent include better utilization of thinly provisioned storage volumes assigned to the Hyper-V parent along with an attractive SFW licensing option for Hyper-V servers. (read more)