Over the past couple of years, one of the key themes for NetWorker has been to make it easier to maintain and license. Included in this has been the consolidation of database and application modules. Previously, NetWorker depended on a lot of different modules for various database and application protection and many vendors still do ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

  Greetings from Europe!  In my first posting, I wanted to add to The Backup Window conversation by highlighting some recent customer experiences in Europe. Like other parts of the world, customers from Europe, the Middle East and Africa trust EMC for backup, recovery and disaster recovery for data and applications.  It’s one thing for ...

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 ...

Once you have decided that your traditional tape infrastructure is not serving your business needs for backup and recovery particularly well, and that your TSM infrastructure requires some updating, what’s next? As I discussed last time out, having the ability to “fix” TSM by dramatically improving the daily schedule, free up TSM server cycles, and ...

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 ...

The issue isn’t how fast your tape drives are, but how fast you can get to the data when you need it. Tape has always provided the most inexpensive, yet accessible, storage available for batch backups, disaster recovery, and long-term archives, but it has had its limitations (e.g., issues with mechanical components wearing down over ...

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 ...

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 ...

Another day and another VMworld gone by – well, almost. And what a week it’s been. I have the good fortune of spending most (okay, pretty much all) of my time in the Hands-On Labs (HOLs). It’s been quite the experience, to say the least. What we have been able to put together and demonstrate ...

I spend a lot of time talking to people about Avamar. I think it is a great application that pretty radically reinvents backup architectures. It does so many things well, and has consistently been ahead of the curve in terms of delivering advanced backup technologies. For example, Avamar was one of the first to market ...

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 ...

As any good wife would do, my wife has been dragging me to yoga classes over the last year and a half. Of course, she is doing this because she is concerned about my health and well-being like any good wife would be.  At first I was okay with this. I mean, how bad it ...

I have been spending a lot of time with TSM accounts lately, so I thought I would take the opportunity to discuss some of the gotchas and lessons learned from these environments, as they moved from a tape-centric backup environment to a disk based backup environment using EMC Data Domain technology.   The first and ...