Entries categorized under “Managed Service Provider”

Maybe it is just me but 2010 has, up until now, seemed pretty slow on the news front. Or maybe it is just that much of the news released did not really pique my interest. Regardless, the last two weeks a number of news items jumped out at me that I wanted to spend a little time commenting on today in my weekly Friday recap blog. (read more)

At the conclusion of a recent call I had with Rob Tellone, the CEO of vBC Cloud, he asked me, "What do you consider the difference between business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR)?" I gave him my definition of each but then went on to explain to him that on the business side of the house no one really cares about the definition of either BC or DR. At the end of the day, all they care about is how quickly and cost effectively IT can bring the affected parts of their business back online regardless of the scope of the incident. (read more)

Last week's blog took a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. This week I wanted to step even further back and reflect upon the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of when they were written as I find this insightful in two ways. It lets me know what information continues to hold the attention of readers on as well as what topics from the past might become new trends in 2010. So while there is definitely some overlap between the two, there are also some entries that appear on this list that knock some of the top 10 blogs from last week off the list. (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)

Every week I talk to a lot of people within the storage industry - end users, other analysts, resellers, public relations, CEOs, storage engineers, etc. While none of the news I pick up is necessarily enough to substantiate a blog on its own, when aggregated it becomes interesting and noteworthy. In fact, I was talking to Don Jennings at Lois Paul and Partners (LPP) about this yesterday and he suggested that I weekly post a blog that recaps what I hear and do on a weekly basis. Since Friday's are typically a slow day during the summer months and anyone who is anyone is always looking to cut out a little early on Fridays anyway, I thought I'd give everyone a reason to check out the DCIG website before they do. (read more)

Many deduplication technologies attack the storage optimization angle at the tail end of the data management process: when it is transmitted by the backup software to a target storage device. However, some storage providers believe that as the benefits of deduplication are better understood by organizations, deduplication technology will rapidly move upstream such that it will become a core feature in more primary, value-tier and cloud storage offerings. (read more)

Let's face it - the concepts behind cloud computing and cloud storage are just plain cool. The whole idea that an organization can move any application to any hardware platform and pro-actively meet the constantly changing needs of an application is more akin to something you might see in an episode of Star Trek than something you might find in today's data centers. Yet cloud computing and cloud storage are becoming a part of today's reality for tech-savvy data centers because these feature are not just cool, they ease the complexity of common data center management tasks, drive down costs and increase profitability. (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)

Virtualizing the data center has become the new end game in data center management if, for no other reason, the more resources you virtualize, the more money you save. But as anyone who manages a virtualized data center already knows, to realize the full benefits of virtualizations means one should also look to optimize the management of the components that make up the virtualized data center. That's where most software tools still fall short but StrataScale's IronScale represents a new breed of software that is promising to change this dynamic. (read more)

"Scalability is one of the biggest pitfalls that managed solution providers need to watch out for." That statement by ESG's Senior Channel Analyst, Paul Myerson, in a recent SearchITChannel podcast highlights one of the new difficulties that today's solutions providers are encountering, especially as they begin to implement solutions such as archiving and eDiscovery in all size customer accounts. Even though each customer's environment is different, customers still expect their reseller to quickly and cost-effectively deploy these increasingly complex solutions and then support them on an on-going basis. Yet finding a solution provider that has the skill sets and can cost-effectively scale to meet these new customer demands is still easier said than done. (read more)

Organizations have learned that the benefits of piece of mind, simplified operations and lower TCO that MSPs can offer are too good to pass up. By taking much of the burden of application maintenance and management off of internal IT resources, organizations can focus on more strategic initiatives that will help them respond more quickly to market opportunities and grow the business. (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)

Right now the economy may be sick but if the recent results of Symantec's annual State of the Data Center survey are any indication, enterprise IT budgets look surprisingly healthy for 2009. 84% of enterprise companies with 5,000 or more employees responded that they plan to keep their current IT budgets intact and a full 50% plan to increase them to 2009. Adding to the validity of the report, Symantec's research was performed by a third party firm (Applied Research) that spoke to1600 enterprise companies (5000 employees or more) in 21 countries. (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)

However as the number of MSPs proliferate, the decision about which MSP to dial up gets harder, not easier, since more and more VARs are jumping on the SaaS bandwagon to offer Managed Backup Services. Further, companies need to quantify their own needs and expectations as they select an MSP. Below are some examples of questions that they need to ask and answer internally and externally before making this important decision. (read more)

Offering the appropriate technology solutions to your internal business customers is a priority for any technology manager that desires to provide high levels of service at the lowest possible costs, particularly in the troubling economic times that we are living in today. However, knowing when to pull the trigger and outsource a critical IT function such as backup versus making further investments in infrastructure choice is not so cut-and-dry when your name is on the dotted line. Further, every IT manager now regularly faces the "Do I continue investing in hardware and software upgrades to support the data growth in the data center and remote locations ?", or "Should I start leveraging the backup services of a Managed Service Provider via a cloud computing offering?" conundrum. (read more)

Despite what happens out on the pitch, the Premier League is experiencing a small awakening amongst its clubs - and some unexpected harmony - for their IT disaster recovery solutions. The challenges, demands and expectations to deliver a robust backup and recovery solution for these clubs is just as pronounced as any other corporate datacenter. However, faced with meeting the escalating salaries of their best football players, the IT staff often comes out on the short end in these organizations. (read more)

Any storage architect or administrator that has ever dared to accept the challenge of engineering or re-designing their company's backup and recovery environment has undoubtedly discovered that he or she has had to sacrifice functionality or features based on the practical limits of their budget. Reasons for this vary from vendor to vendor, but mostly it comes down to how many backup and recovery software options are they willing to pay for? Most vendors offer reasonably good licensing for the core software, but once you step outside of that realm, some of the most basics features are not included. (read more)

When server and storage managers out there hear the "A-Word" (Agents) come up in a conversation with a software vendor, they typically cringe, and think to themselves, "Oh great, another set of agents that I have to not only deploy but that I have to manage and track." In the server world, some agents are unavoidable, like performance/security monitoring, virus and worm detection and prevention etc. (read more)

If you have spent any time in the IT world you have seen technologies come and go, but few areas have been subjected to the dramatic changes that storage has endured. As enterprise networks have matured the storage of data has exploded. This has fostered new and inventive ways to store and retrieve critical data like the emerging cloud storage platform. Cloud storage's time is upon us and as large companies such as Amazon take the lead in this area it has brought legitimacy to the cloud concept. In 2007 IDC released the Digital Universe Study which stated between 2006 and 2010 information stored in the digital universe would increase from 161 Exabytes to 988 Exabytes. Based on this incredible projected growth in data and how cloud storage is evolving we quite possibly are witnessing the future of storage unfolding before us. (read more)

Backup has become a fairly innocuous method for companies to use to test the capabilities of a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and start companies down the path of outsourcing some of their storage services. However the task of selecting an MSP should go well beyond just determining how well it backs up data. Outsourcing backups is likely just the first step for most companies in a larger journey that companies are embarking are towards outsourcing more of their storage management requirements. So it behooves companies to regularly analyze their MSP to determine what steps it is taking to improve the management of its backup data stores and keep its data storage costs down long term. (read more)

The one I want to focus on in this entry is Televaulting's new replication functionality. Replication is a key function in any facet of the storage landscape and, with Asigra adding this feature into its latest release of Televaulting, it becomes an even more robust player in the enterprise space. (read more)

This last week Byte and Switch released an article covering Asigra's recent management hires that came on board to help Asigra expand more aggressively into the enterprise space. However, a viewpoint that crept into the article is a common but incorrect assumption that the size of the company and its clients is somehow indicative of the caliber of Asigra's Televaulting platform. (read more)

Companies have a love-hate relationship with VMware. What companies are coming to realize is that introducing VMware into their environment needs to change their entire paradigm of how they manage servers - from the applications running on them to the data they protect. In the case of data protection, the change is even more extreme. Enterprise companies can not and should not expect their existing version of backup to work well in this new virtual world as it was designed to work from a totally different premise. This new data protection paradigm is what Asigra's Televaulting is designed to address. (read more)

CDP and deduplication are now on the forefront of the minds of more enterprise managers as they contemplate how to best introduce disk-based data protection into their backup environment. Contributing to the difficulty in selecting one of these technologies is that they address different data protection needs: CDP provides shorter application recovery time and point objectives while deduplication reduces disk data storage requirements. To better understand how Asigra's Televaulting delivers on these features in an agentless fashion, I spoke with Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting. (read more)