For the past couple of weeks now, my colleagues and I have been talking about the past, present and future of backup. A good deal of this conversation has centered on the lightning-fast adoption of purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) worldwide. And while there’s no question PBBA isn’t your grandmother’s backup and recovery, is it really ...

According to a new IDC report a whole lot of you do. In fact, you’re deploying purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) far faster than market researchers had forecast and industry pundits ever thought you would. And the numbers are impressive indeed – even to those of us in the business. Just look at IDC’s latest data: ...

I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with New Years. I love it because we’re given a blank slate (of sorts). I hate it because with the blank slate comes certain expectations. And from a professional standpoint, since the timing of New Year’s doesn’t necessarily align with the start of the ...

If you were following us (@EMCBackup) on Twitter last week, you know we were at Gartner’s annual Data Center Conference in Vegas.  It was my first time attending this particular event and my first non-vendor-sponsored event of the year.  A nice change of pace for sure! As I’ve mentioned, as a former analyst, one of ...

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 ...

One of the things I miss living abroad is the connection with American politics. In particular, I miss the State of the Union address. I’m not exactly sure why, but I find it reassuring to have the President address Congress and give his views on the state of our Union. Not that I’m comparing myself ...

It’s the time of year regular gym-goers dread; the proverbial lull before the storm. In just a few short weeks, droves of well-intentioned New Year’s “Resolutioners” will hit the gym en masse, and for several weeks, gym life as we know it will change. Parking spaces, gym equipment and floor space will all become highly ...

Greetings from Europe! I had a bit of an unusual experience the other day.  I was the first one into a conference room and on one of the chairs was a life jacket. No explanation – just sitting there. Of course, I found it a funny commentary on some of the meetings we have at ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

My three- year-old daughter Sophia has difficulty making decisions about what clothes to wear. Sunday morning, before church, she cycled through four fancy dresses in 10 minutes. As we slid from “fashionably late” to “in danger of missing post-mass donuts,” I injected some male leadership. “Pick anything. You’ll look beautiful. We have to go. The ...

“Everybody keeps telling me about the huge changes that are taking place in the backup market, but it feels like I’m doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way as I was 10 years ago. Where’s the revolution?” When a backup administrator first said this to me, I was floored. After all, in ...

A recent market analysis report from IDC shines a bright spotlight on the rapidly growing PBBA market. And while PBBA doesn’t roll off the tongue like PB&J quite yet, it has all the signs of becoming just as much a popular favorite – well, at least among IT folks. Just consider the IDC stats/projections about ...

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 ...