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, ...

“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 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 ...

EMC backup and recovery has had an exciting year of announcements and we’re not done yet. In January, we delivered Data Domain systems that established new performance benchmarks that remain standing today.  In April, IDC released a study that shows the Purpose Built Backup Appliance market is growing at 16.6% CAGR and that EMC is ...

In my last post, we took a look at the results of running Data Domain Boost on an application server versus on a storage node in a 2TB Exchange 2010 mailbox environment. The results painted a very pretty backup picture, showing a significant reduction in the backup window (i.e., the time it took to complete the ...

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 a recent post, EMC product marketing manager Caitlin Moore highlighted the important benefits of Data Domain’s integration with EMC Avamar and EMC NetWorker. But if you’re like me words are great, but demos are even better! You see, I’m a numbers kind of guy. So, with this in mind, I want to share some ...

In Heidi’s recent post PBBA — A New Twist on a Popular Backup Approach, she highlights IDC’s observation that integration is one of three key factors fueling the backup appliance market.  A great example of this type of end-to-end integration is EMC Data Domain Boost software, which is tightly integrated with Avamar, NetWorker and third-party ...

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 ...

Today EMC is announcing a new version of EMC Avamar software and hardware. With the latest release come a ton of new features, bigger, better, faster hardware, and support for integrating Avamar with Data Domain. So, without further preamble, let’s jump into what is new in Avamar v6.0: On the hardware side, the new release ...

EMC is hosting a webcast next week on the topic of simplifying long term retention of backups and archives. This webcast is available ondemand.  [Original airdate: Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 GMT.] Register now  For fast and reliable long-term retention, integrate EMC Data Domain Archiver into ...

Today EMC introduced the industry’s fastest deduplication storage systems. And they are fast. Big and fast. Impressively so, and even more impressively if you have been involved with backup systems for a while—in a “look how far we have come” sort of way.  But to focus on just the speed and scale would be to ...