A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my laptop with an SSD primary disk – and along the way, I discovered the magic that is Acronis. It was supposed to be a trivial upgrade.  Especially for a guy who does backup & recovery for a living, right?  My awesome Lenovo T420s allows for not [...]

Today, Symantec held live events covering the upcoming BackupExec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 releases.  According to Symantec, “Backup is broken” (I tend to agree).  And they intend to be the fix. Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO, started by offering “Every year, I stand up and talk about how data is growing … and every year we [...]

This week, ESG Lab published its Lab Report on the new Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite. It was a privilege to work with two ESG Lab Engineers, Tony Palmer and Ajen Johan, to do some hands-on with the new Riverbed technologies. To me, the really cool part of Granite is how it changes some presumptions [...]

Today, CommVault is holding a virtual event to announce some of its latest innovations for the Simpana 9.0 product. I had the opportunity to do some early hands-on testing of a few of the new capabilities during an ESG Lab Review — including its new “OnePass” technology and its ability to integrate with Scale-out NAS. [...]

Yesterday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of its AWS Storage Gateway, which acts as an iSCSI target, delivered as a virtual appliance.  On-premise servers can connect to the iSCSI device and store their data locally, with snapshots being stored in the Amazon S3 cloud-storage environment. This announcement coincides with the publishing of ESG’s [...]

Mozy has announced the public beta of its new Stash offering.  The public beta is available to existing Mozy Backup customers, as an add-on capability that takes advantage of customers’ existing accounts, subscribed storage capacity, etc. In other words, it’s a great example of the convergence between backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and Online-File-Storage (OLFS). ESG recently published [...]

Data protection processes and technologies are vital to ensuring an organization’s operational, regulatory, and financial health. As a result, data protection infrastructure is included in every IT budget and is top of mind for data center staff. However, due to the complexity and often high cost of backup, restore, and disaster recovery, many organizations are [...]

Tuesday, January 17 — Microsoft held a webcast on their Private Cloud offerings and announced the Release Candidate of their System Center 2012 management tools. Thursday, January 19 – the System Center Universe 2012 community-driven event will be going through many of the technologies in that release. Am very excited to be speaking about data [...]

With twenty years of backup experience, you might presume that my own personal backups might be flawless and in triplicate.   And for my professional workstation, it actually is.  But admittedly, for the rest of my data, such as those invaluable family photos, personal data and other stuff – it admittedly isn’t as well or frequently [...]