Can smarter backup accelerate transformation?
Over the past year, Stephen Manley, the EMCBackup team and I have channeled our energy (and writing efforts) into answering this question for our readers. Collectively, we’ve posted more than 125 blogs on the broad topic of backup transformation, and we’ve done so from a variety of view points – product, business, market, and user. That’s an enormous amount of content to sift through and distill. And my guess is you may have missed a post or two?
So, in celebration of our birthday at the end of the month, over the next two weeks we’ll unveil the top 5 Backup Window posts every organization needs to read about backup transformation but may have missed during the year. Oh, and by the way, they aren’t just our favorites, the data says they were our vistors too!
Moore’s Law (Backup Administrator’s Version): Every 18 Months My Pain Will Double
Bigger storage capacities don’t just seem to make backup windows feel smaller, they actually do make them smaller. Server virtualization squeezes the resources available for the backup. Just imagine trying to drink the Pacific Ocean through a straw (ignore the whole “salt water” thing and focus on the amount of water), and that’s the backup challenge created by the technology curves powering the rest of IT… How will we meet backup windows in highly virtualized production environments or in the world of big data? Click here to read the full post.
Making the Right Backup Choices… Don’t Get Caught with Your Pants on the Ground
In this multi-part series, Stephen Manley explains why choices do matter when it comes to backup transformation. Stephen kicks off the series with a look at the all-important question of how to best back up VM environments, then explores the topics of versioned replication and VMware Changed Block Tracking before wrapping it up with three hard-hitting customer deployment stories. A must-read! Click here to start the series.
Do You Know What Your IT Priorities Are?
Well, do you? Sounds simple enough, but in practice, identifying IT priorities and then adhering to them, is challenging for most organizations – and knowing your priorities for backup can be even more daunting. Where does backup fit in? How does it stack up against virtualization priorities? Data center consolidation? Application roll-out initiatives? Cloud projects? IT Transformation? Big Data? This blog, as well as my follow-on post The Top Five Resolutions Every Organization Should Make Around Backup and Recovery, will help guide you. (Psst… Knowing your “Time To” is crtical to the process.)
Houston, We Have a Tape Problem
It’s farcical to keep pretending that tape is a relevant of any backup – let alone IT transformation – discussion, yet the “tape vs disk” debate is still a frequent topic of debate. In fact, a Google search for the keywords “tape is dead” unearthed more than 117,000 results over a 10-year period. Crazy? Definitely. Be sure to check out the full post, and after you’ve done be sure to read Stephen Manley’s follow-on post “Ground Hog Day in Backup,” in which he speaks to the three disappearing use cases for tape.
What Does A Transformed Backup Environment Look Like?
This is the million-dollar question, right? Well, wonder no more. Backup transformation isn’t defined by any specific technology or workflow, and it isn’t achieved by deploying ORACLE RMAN backups directly to Data Domain, by leveraging VMware Changed Block Tracking for Avamar backups or even by going tapeless. Stephen Manley explains what it is about in this quick post. Oh, and while you’re there, click on “Why It’s More Than Okay to Say ‘No’.” It may have not made this Top 5, but it’s a must-read in my book!
