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 ...

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Changed Block Tracking (CBT) can improve the efficiency of VMware backup, but what is it all about really? How does CBT differ from deduplication? Are the two technologies complementary? Do I need both? A quick definition… Let’s start with a quick definition. CBT is a new ...

For those of you who don’t know me and haven’t had a chance yet to skim through the bios on this site, I came to EMC by way of HDS, the Enterprise Strategy Group and InfoStor. And while life on the vendor side (endearingly referred to as the “dark side” by many of my analyst ...

It goes without saying that virtualization has become the new standard and foundation for delivering IT applications. So, if your organization hasn’t gone through this type of paradigm shift yet, consider this fair warning. Organizations of all sizes from SMBs to large enterprises are looking to cut IT-related OPEX costs while at the same time ...

One of the things I truly love about my job is the interaction I get to have with customers. Whether it’s at a hands-on lab at industry events like VMworld, an EMC Executive Briefing Center or some other locale, being able to talk with customers about their environments — hearing firsthand what’s working and what’s ...