Well, it has been about 3 days or so since I have returned from VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) in Las Vegas, and to be honest, there still hasn’t been enough time to fully digest all of what I took in while at the conference. At the same time, I thought it would be a ...

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 ...

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 had the opportunity to sit in on Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Now, I was fully expecting to hear a continuation of the Cloud and Big Data messages Joe and Pat have been delivering for the past year, and I did. But what I wasn’t expecting was ...

If your life is anything like mine, it’s a whirl of activity, and weekends are no exceptions. My Saturdays are consumed with yard and house-related chores, leaving Sundays to menu planning, food shopping and meal prepping (okay, to be fair, I don’t do as much “prepping” as I do “planning”). So, when I see the ...

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 ...

My last post began with my three-year old daughter trying to wear only a t-shirt and underwear to church, as I weighed the risk of excommunication vs. post-mass jelly donuts. Obviously, the story was a thinly veiled parable for Virtual Machine (VM) backup and recovery. In that post, I covered the traditional VM backup mechanisms ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...