It was a week of HAM in the enterprise storage industry and angry arguments in the CloudCamp camp. But things looked up at the end with a productive discussion about backups. Google sent us a wave, but nobody was happy when GM threatened to collapse. Enterprise Storage HDS’ HAM-Fisted Announcement did not impress, with many wondering [...]
Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
May 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
There were some interesting events and blog posts last week. This new weekly feature highlights those! Enterprise IT Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog. Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into [...]
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
February 5, 2009 By 14 Comments
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system. Many of the advances in capacity utilization put into production over the last few years rely on deduplication of data. [...]
TechTarget Posts 2009 Event Schedule
December 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Although the details have not been released, TechTarget updated its web site today with a list of events by region for 2009. My understanding is that, although the formats and locations are tweaked slightly, the user-focused character of their excellent Storage Decisions conferences and one-day seminars will remain. Some highlights from the calendar: The Storage [...]
Answering Your Email Archiving Questions
September 5, 2008 By 2 Comments
Input Needed: How to Back Up Big Filesystems?
February 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment
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 [...]
Online Storage? Hardly!
August 16, 2007 By Leave a Comment
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 [...]
NetBackup 6.5 Spreads the Love Around
August 14, 2007 By 2 Comments
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 [...]
Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
August 8, 2007 By 2 Comments
Big Little VMware Update (VCB and iSCSI!)
August 3, 2007 By Leave a Comment
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 [...]
