Some people are competitive. I’m not. Sure, I taunted my 62-year-old father after dunking on him… on a 6-foot hoop… at my son’s 6th birthday party. Yes, I cheat at Candyland to beat my 4-year-old daughter. And I have been known to race cars on my way to work – on my bicycle. Sometimes, though, ...

When I was younger, I believed chronicling the past was far simpler than predicting the future. Little did I know that “history” means “incessant squabbling over what really happened in the past” (did you know there are multiple active magazines about the American Civil War?). On the other hand, people very rarely check on the ...

It’s that time of year again, and, no, I’m not talking about the time to make resolutions. You should have already done that. (And if you’re surprised that it’s 2012, put down the DLT IV tape cartridge, turn off the Chumbawamba CD and walk outside.) It’s the time of year when bloggers use the “reflections ...

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 ...

“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 ...

I had the opportunity this week to attend the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) convention in Chicago. Now, you might think this is an odd place for EMC – much less a backup guy – to show up at, and, well, in some respects it is. However, when you consider the rapid growth rate ...

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 was doing a little reading this weekend – catching up on the virtual stack of assorted articles, papers, industry research and news articles that had accumulated in my inbox over the past few weeks – when I came across an interesting InfoWorld post: 7 IT Superheroes – and Their Fatal Flaws. Given The Backup ...

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 ...

I had the opportunity to sit in on Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Now, I was fully expecting to hear a continuation of the Cloud and Big Data messages Joe and Pat have been delivering for the past year, and I did. But what I wasn’t expecting was ...

If there’s one thing about which industry experts seem to agree, it’s that when it comes to virtualization and its transformational effects on IT, “we ain’t seen nothing yet!” Consider the following data points from a recent ESG Research Report.* While 61% of the organizations ESG surveyed had deployed server virtualization in a production or ...

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 ...

If your life is anything like mine, it’s a whirl of activity, and weekends are no exceptions. My Saturdays are consumed with yard and house-related chores, leaving Sundays to menu planning, food shopping and meal prepping (okay, to be fair, I don’t do as much “prepping” as I do “planning”). So, when I see the ...

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 ...

Well, I’m just back from VMworld 2011, and I know I can’t stop thinking and talking about all that I heard, saw and experienced in Vegas this week. And I think it would be almost criminal if we – all 19,000+ show attendees – kept all this good stuff to ourselves. (Not that we could ...

For most of IT, riding technology curves is like jumping on a kid’s trampoline: dangerous, sure, but oh-so exhilarating (note: ignore trampoline manufacturer’s “weight limits” at your own peril). Faster processors, larger disk capacities, flash storage and higher-performance networking enable new applications, drive server and storage virtualization and allow businesses to generate and analyze data ...

Yes, folks, we’ve reached an inflection point!  Maybe it was sparked by Apple’s iCloud announcement earlier this summer or the more predictable or natural effect of technology adoption as explained by Roger’s diffusion of innovations theory, or a combination thereof. It doesn’t really matter.  The important thing is we are starting to think and talk ...

Over the last little while, we have become used to seeing discussions of data and storage for Big Data. As if Big Data possesses a unique set of challenges around the acquisition, management, replication, and protection of the data. And so it does. For now. Because after reviewing the latest set of statistics from the ...