My webinar on building a business case for email archiving was very well-attended, so I was not able to get to everyone during the question and answer section. Since the questions were really excellent, I thought I would include them (and my responses) here.

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I’ve just started writing an article for Storage Magazine on the topic of large filesystem backup.  It’s always been difficult to handle really big filesystems - whether they contain lots of little files or a few big ones.  There are parallelism issues, latency, throughput/streaming, etc.

If you have experience with this topic, I’d appreciate a comment or email so I can pick your brain!  Whether you’re a vendor or end user, let me know what you think about this topic - maybe you’ll see your name in lights in the April or May issue of Storage Magazine!

Robin Harris blogged today about Google’s pay-for-storage service, and he hit the nail on the head. It (and pretty much every other current online storage service) is nearly worthless to most folks because it lacks one simple thing: A usable interface. Set aside Google’s traditionally horrid (lack of) marketing and you’re left with a service that’s sure to confound everyone. But Microsoft’s recently unveiled SkyDrive isn’t any better… Read on for my take on these services and what they should offer.
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Symantec announced availability of the latest NetBackup revision today, version 6.5. This release is nearly complete in its buzzword-compliance, with enhanced support for VTL and backup to disk, data deduplication, CDP, LAN-free backup, SharePoint and Exchange, and even VMware! What’s the matter, Symantec, was Thin Provisioning not ready for release? How about green computing? Holographic storage? Yes, I jest…

Seriously, you gotta cheer when a “big gorilla” app like NetBackup adds this kind of technology, though. CDP and deduplication were great ideas but needed n application to focus them, and data backup is an excellent place to apply them.

And although the press release doesn’t highlight it, the application-specific recovery enhancements look especially tasty to me. NetBackup leverages VCB in VMware but can do file-level restore, which is awesome. And it can also do document-level or full-database restore in SharePoint from the same image. Over in Exchange land, it claims to be able to restore from snapshots instead of the backup image, speeding (all too frequent) recoveries.

EMC’s Mark Lewis posted another thoughtful “blog episode”, outlining five predictions he has for the next few years. I don’t really agree with him much more than I did the last time, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless! Continue Reading »

VMware released version 1.0.3 of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) today. While a minor software rev wouldn’t normally warrant a blog post, this is anything but minor.

VCB was a good idea, but implementation experience found it lacking. For one thing, it didn’t support iSCSI, which is a major omission in the world of Windows and VMware! This alone probably accounted for much of the slow uptake of the feature. I can imagine Marc Farly is warming up the blogging software as we speak!

But there were other problems, now fixed. It couldn’t recognize a LUN if it was presented with a different LUN ID than it had on the virtual machine, and it left old snapshots hanging around if the backup failed. I don’t use it, but users complained to me about these issues.

Note that you have to upgrade VirtualCenter and ESX Server at the same time, which may not appeal to everyone…