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 … [Read more...] about Input Needed: How to Back Up Big Filesystems?
data backup
Online Storage? Hardly!
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. … [Read more...] about Online Storage? Hardly!
NetBackup 6.5 Spreads the Love Around
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 … [Read more...] about NetBackup 6.5 Spreads the Love Around
Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
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! … [Read more...] about Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
Big Little VMware Update (VCB and iSCSI!)
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 … [Read more...] about Big Little VMware Update (VCB and iSCSI!)