It’s been 3 years since we launched EMC SourceOne and we’ve been delivering enhancements and additions to the program ever since. We’ve added SharePoint support, and file system support. We’ve updated our offline access capabilities and added mobile support for archived data. Our platform support continues to grow and device support is routinely enhanced. With ...

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 was recently reading an article pertaining to age and athletic ability.  The not so shocking news is that athletes of any level will see a decrease in performance with age.  So yes, age does matter. How does this apply to backup? As I was reading this article it occurred to me that people getting ...

  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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

If there’s one thing about which industry experts seem to agree, it’s that when it comes to virtualization and its transformational effects on IT, “we ain’t seen nothing yet!” Consider the following data points from a recent ESG Research Report.* While 61% of the organizations ESG surveyed had deployed server virtualization in a production or ...

This session was on the topic of what are the 2nd and 3rd order effects on backup and storage architectures that VMware is driving.  I was frankly a little shocked at how many people came to the session (401) – hope you all found it interesting! It discussed both the near term (state of the ...

We’re pleased that the inimitable Chad Sakac has climbed through The Backup Window; until now, our sitcom lacked a hyper-caffeinated neighbor. We recently posted Chad’s tech preview about the Avamar’s vCloud Protector. If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll wait. Ideally, I’d find a way to lambast Chad’s post, insult his ancestors, and mock his ...

In my last post, I walked through what VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) enables from a VM protection standpoint and how – at a high level – EMC Avamar takes advantage of the API. Now, let’s dig a little deeper and look at how backup software integrates with VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection. Remember, ...