As many of you may know, back in 2009 EMC’s archiving solution, EmailXtender, was replaced with a next generation archiving solution, EMC SourceOne, a generalized object platform that supports archiving for email as well as Microsoft SharePoint and file system data. And, as with any newly architected solution, customers move to the new platform by ...

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 ...

Not so fast! Before you trade in your backup solution for Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) plus some mix of VMware vMotion, High Availability (HA) or Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), think twice. While there’s no debating the value of DAGs for providing fault-tolerance and ensuring high availability of Exchange database volumes (DAGs allow for ...

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 ...

Every Moo Down in Moo-ville Liked tape backups a lot… But the Grinch, Who lived just north of Moo-ville, Did NOT! The Grinch hated tape backups! He considered it treason! Now, some might ask why. But there’s not just one reason. It could be that he hated working all through the night. It could be, ...

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 ...

“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 ...

You don’t know what you don’t know… I’d like to say that in the world of backup and recovery ignorance is bliss, but it’s not. What we don’t know about our backup environments today will – just as we can’t avoid the tax man – come back to bite us down the road. The problem ...

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 ...

What a fantastic week I’m having! First, I see a great IDC paper that highlights the OPEX benefits of EMC NetWorker, detailing how users are protecting 1TB of data with just a .5 (!) full time employee (FTE). Now, that’s awesome stuff! Talk about putting more money back in the IT coffers. Then, I need ...

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 ...

I thought I was done with TSM. And just when you think you are out, they pull you back in. Only in this case I am being pulled back in by some feedback from a colleague on my previous column. I didnt want to relegate his input to a comment where it wouldn’t get adequate ...

Although report cards can strike fear in the hearts of many, we got one this summer that went right on the fridge! CRN’s annual report card (ARC) came out in August and for the second year running, EMC has earned the industry’s highest marks in the backup and recovery software category. The award is just ...

I thought I would wrap up my thoughts on TSM, for now, by talking briefly about two things TSM users are typically concerned about: migrating TSM clients and getting off TSM. The first one of these is something we talked about just recently. And I think I covered off the easiest way to move to ...

VMware vSphere 5 is a major release that brings a wide range of improvements and new capabilities – ideal for virtualizing mission-critical applications. These include up to 32 virtual CPUs with 1 TB of RAM, VM high availability and better security. As you undergo your IT transformation, it’s time to evaluate current storage platforms and ...

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 ...

What would you rather do recover 2GB or 500GB? Recovery is the final end game – after all, it is the point of backing up. With Avamar, files can be recovered into a VM without the need for agents within the guest OS.  But this is not the revolution. The revolution is about “changed block ...

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 ...