Well, it has been about 3 days or so since I have returned from VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) in Las Vegas, and to be honest, there still hasn’t been enough time to fully digest all of what I took in while at the conference. At the same time, I thought it would be a ...

Have heard from a lot of partners wondering about PEX and the EMC plan…  First of all – VMware Partner Exchange is the event of the year for VMware partners – and when it comes to what’s going on in the channel/integrator/partner community, that’s pretty well the center of the universe   It’s Feb 11-16 ...

Not so fast! Before you trade in your backup solution for Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) plus some mix of VMware vMotion, High Availability (HA) or Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), think twice. While there’s no debating the value of DAGs for providing fault-tolerance and ensuring high availability of Exchange database volumes (DAGs allow for ...

No series of blog posts, regardless of wittiness, insight and general brilliance, can provide a prescriptive answer about how to protect your VMs. (Of course, if you do find some blog posts with wittiness, insight, and brilliance, please send them; I’d love to see how it’s done. Except for Chad’s posts. Don’t send those.) The ...

During World War I, Will Rogers, noted American humorist, was asked by a young reporter how he would stop the U-boat attacks on ships, to which Rogers responded, “Boil the ocean.” But when pressed for how he would do that, Rogers quickly replied, “I’m just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out ...

Wow. There are surprisingly few good “big studies” of VMware and storage. Most tend to be very general (the big analysts) or very specific (and connected to a vendor in some way). For fun, every year – I run a Virtual Geek study. I’m always amazed that ANYONE would respond, but respond they do (thank ...

In the last few weeks, I’ve been in the process of moving my lab and as my environment gets bigger, it gets increasingly difficult for me to stay on top of it. In talking with customers, many of you share the same problem and are looking for tools to make managing your environment easier and ...

“Just because I’m not a huge enterprise company, doesn’t mean my data is any less important to my business than theirs is to them.” – Midsize enterprise customer  While many companies deploy traditional storage-based replication for critical applications and data, the disaster recovery (DR) “solution” for much of their data is still “putting tape in ...

Do you remember the anticipation of the conclusion of the serialized stories you loved best? Maybe you waited with breathless anticipation for Harry Potter to finally defeat Lord Voldemort, for Luke Skywalker to defeat the Empire or to find out whether Michael Knight and KITT could save the day in any of the Knight Rider ...

I’ve have had the opportunity lately to participate in a number of EMC Forums, and one of the things I’ve been talking with users about is how to leverage backup and recovery solutions to accelerate virtualization so they can realize the benefits of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) sooner. As we talked about in Part I of this ...

VMware vSphere 5 is a major release that brings a wide range of improvements and new capabilities – ideal for virtualizing mission-critical applications. These include up to 32 virtual CPUs with 1 TB of RAM, VM high availability and better security. As you undergo your IT transformation, it’s time to evaluate current storage platforms and ...

Previously on “The Backup Window,” I had described a scene that would rival a classic 1960s Batman cliffhanger. I was desperately trying to get my daughter dressed for church, so I could save my donut from the clutches of some Joker. Backup administrators tried to solve the Riddler’s question, “How can I protect all my ...

It’s no secret that DBAs crave the rapid backup/restore capabilities of disk but often settle for tape for long-term retention requirements. But the question is, why? While Oracle RMAN has significantly improved the efficiency and ease of backup and recovery of Oracle environments, as Oracle databases continue to grow in size, the number of users ...

This session was on the topic of what are the 2nd and 3rd order effects on backup and storage architectures that VMware is driving.  I was frankly a little shocked at how many people came to the session (401) – hope you all found it interesting! It discussed both the near term (state of the ...

We’re pleased that the inimitable Chad Sakac has climbed through The Backup Window; until now, our sitcom lacked a hyper-caffeinated neighbor. We recently posted Chad’s tech preview about the Avamar’s vCloud Protector. If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll wait. Ideally, I’d find a way to lambast Chad’s post, insult his ancestors, and mock his ...

In my last post, I walked through what VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) enables from a VM protection standpoint and how – at a high level – EMC Avamar takes advantage of the API. Now, let’s dig a little deeper and look at how backup software integrates with VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection. Remember, ...

  There’s an interesting phenomenon going on in IT environments today. The same virtualization initiatives that have saved us significant time, money and space across our data centers are now costing us confidence and sweat on the backup side of the house. Ensuring your vital business data is protected and available requires backup processes that ...

At VMworld 2011, session SPO3977 was called “Next-Generation Storage and Backup for Your Cloud”.   We discussed the current state of the art around backup and recovery in the VMware context – which is about vCenter integration, the vStorage APIs for Data Protection for agentless backup and single step file level restore, use of Changed Block ...

For a CIO and his/her implementation team on the journey to the private cloud, there is nothing more stress relieving (okay, except maybe for a week on a Caribbean island) than being able to meet or even exceed your SLAs without having to do all the heavy IT lifting yourself.  No need for you to ...

My last post began with my three-year old daughter trying to wear only a t-shirt and underwear to church, as I weighed the risk of excommunication vs. post-mass jelly donuts. Obviously, the story was a thinly veiled parable for Virtual Machine (VM) backup and recovery. In that post, I covered the traditional VM backup mechanisms ...