Well folks, if I take a look at my trusty countdown clock that I keep on my desk here in the office we have just about 11 days, 280 hours, 16831 minutes, or 1009886..5..4..3 seconds until EMC World. Now I am keeping such a close eye on the time for two reasons, excitement and nervous ...

“I’d like the ‘Meat on a Hot Stone,’ please.” Some words cannot be unsaid, some actions cannot be undone and some ideas cannot be eliminated. Unfortunately, as I learned one night, all the next day, and most of the following night – some food can be uneaten. Over and over and over again. During my ...

Before a crowd of media, analysts, partners and customers in San Francisco on Friday, EMC CMO Jeremy Burton ended speculation about the teaser that had been running on the emc.com home page for the past couple of weeks: What starts with “v” and ends with “x”? And, no, the answer wasn’t vortex, vertex or (thankfully) ...

In a previous post I have highlighted and demonstrated EMC’s robust and flexible feature set for protecting Microsoft Exchange 2010. Since that post, I wanted to share with The Backup Window readers a new EMC Solutions Group whitepaper. The paper details a Virtualized Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint solution utilizing both EMC Shared VNX Storage ...

I’m new here at EMC, so perhaps it is easy, if not essential, for me to work to get to the basics of what we offer in order to be able to break it down, understand it, and ultimately, get excited about it and promote it.  And I gotta tell you, I’m very excited about ...

Have heard from a lot of partners wondering about PEX and the EMC plan…  First of all – VMware Partner Exchange is the event of the year for VMware partners – and when it comes to what’s going on in the channel/integrator/partner community, that’s pretty well the center of the universe   It’s Feb 11-16 ...

According to a new IDC report a whole lot of you do. In fact, you’re deploying purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) far faster than market researchers had forecast and industry pundits ever thought you would. And the numbers are impressive indeed – even to those of us in the business. Just look at IDC’s latest data: ...

It’s that time of year again, and, no, I’m not talking about the time to make resolutions. You should have already done that. (And if you’re surprised that it’s 2012, put down the DLT IV tape cartridge, turn off the Chumbawamba CD and walk outside.) It’s the time of year when bloggers use the “reflections ...

I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with New Years. I love it because we’re given a blank slate (of sorts). I hate it because with the blank slate comes certain expectations. And from a professional standpoint, since the timing of New Year’s doesn’t necessarily align with the start of the ...

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 ...

Wow. There are surprisingly few good “big studies” of VMware and storage. Most tend to be very general (the big analysts) or very specific (and connected to a vendor in some way). For fun, every year – I run a Virtual Geek study. I’m always amazed that ANYONE would respond, but respond they do (thank ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...