Entries categorized under “Disk Based Backup”

This is one of my favorite blogs of the year to write. Even though this is only the second time since DCIG launched its blogging site two years ago that I have had the opportunity to write a blog in this format, I have been looking forward to looking back all year. In case you have not yet figured it out, today I take a look back at the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 on the DCIG site. However this year I am doing a two part series with today's blog examining the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. (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)

Perhaps the biggest industry buzz coming out of the October 2009 SNW show was not any product announcement or new technology but an interview with EMC's Frank Slootman that appeared on SearchDataBackup.com. Minimally this interview made a number of revelations about EMC's current strategy and future direction for its Data Backup Division. But of greater concern for those enterprises planning to use EMC's products, it revealed a lack of understanding on Slootman's part in terms of what enterprise organizations are looking for in disk-based backup and deduplication solutions. (read more)

This past spring a debate erupted on BackupCentral.com between a user complaining about not getting new features in his backup software as part of his annual maintenance contract and his backup software provider wanting to charge extra for it. The user was, in his words, 'faithfully paying his annual 20% fee for maintenance' and now wanted the backup software's new Advanced Recovery option as part of his support costs. (read more)

Anyone who has followed my blogs knows that solid state drives (SSDs) have been at the top of my mind ever since this fall's SNW. However conversations that I have had with storage providers since SNW regarding the current and planned deployments of SSDs reinforce that a major shift in how storage systems are architected is coming. Already these changes are starting to show up in a number of small ways in current products that foretell a coming wave of innovation in storage technologies. (read more)

Deduplication contributes to expedited backups and recoveries, high backup and recovery success rates and frees up IT staff time associated with managing these tasks. Yet in the face of these benefits that deduplication offers, many midsize organizations still continue to use other technology as their backup target, citing cost and complexity as their primary reasons for not adopting deduplication. It is these specific obstacles that the new DXi6500 family from Quantum seeks to overcome. (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)

The lines between NAS and VTL have started to blur. More NAS solutions can now scale to hold more than one petabyte of deduplicated data, deliver sustainable aggregate throughputs of more than one TB/hour and handle multiple concurrent backup loads. This combination of features may make it seem like a face-off between upper end NAS and VTL solutions is looming in enterprise environments. (read more)

Yesterday and today I am attending the Bare Metal Data Conference in Nashville, TN, which is a small gathering by all accounts (50 attendees). But what I enjoy about this conference is that it is a gathering of a select group of records management providers that provide paper and tape storage along with online backup services to their clients. The invaluable insight that I glean from this conference is a reality check as to the current state of tape. This time it revealed something new: Tape is still doing just fine but for the first time I am detecting genuine concern among the attendees about tape's future. (read more)

Making backup software easy and simple to use is the mantra for almost all products today. Yet knowing whether or not users will perceive a product as "simple and easy to use" is almost impossible to quantify until it is widely deployed in the field and users get some hands on experience with it. Well, apparently Symantec received a lot of feedback on what would make its NetBackup PureDisk 6.5 simpler and easier to use and took it to heart. (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)

New corporate mandates for improved application availability are placing a new premium on software that can deliver centralized data management. These requirements call for software that can provide a central management console from which data management policies can be set and applied. Enterprise backup software is where many organizations are looking to deliver this functionality but for this to become a reality, features like archiving, continuous data protection (CDP), deduplication and support for disk-based backup targets must come under backup software's purview. (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)

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)

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)

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)

Over the last couple of weeks my weekly recap blogs touching on the subject of cloud storage has prompted a lot of emails and phone calls to me in the background to discuss this topic so I wanted to touch on that again this week. In addition, I've also been doing a little research into some of Data Domain's claims (and the counterclaims of its competitors) in regards to the advertised performance numbers on its new DD880 and under what conditions enterprise users might expect to achieve those numbers. Finally, I wanted to comment on some of the statements that I made last week about a CEO change and a corporate acquisition and end up with a new rumor that is circulating in the storage industry. (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)

Recent feedback from InMage Systems' existing customer base indicates that 100% of them use its Scout software for disaster recovery. That probably comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Scout or its heterogeneous recovery capabilities. But what may come as a surprise to some is that nearly 40% of these existing Scout users are seeing a 200% return on investment (ROI) in Scout because of how it can be used in multiple ways in a company's IT infrastructure. (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)

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)

"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)

It's time to start thinking ahead. Over the next 60 - 120 days someone is going to acquire Data Domain - be it EMC, NetApp or some other suitor that may yet emerge. That means Data Domain, today's leading mid-market deduplicating disk-based appliance player, will be changing its colors. To discuss how and if ExaGrid can take advantage of this opportunity, I recently met with ExaGrid's CEO, Bill Andrews, to discuss this development, his perspective on the deduplication market as a whole and how ExaGrid stands to benefit (or lose) from Data Domain's acquisition. (read more)