Lady Backup’s career in IT dates back before the time when there were the Spice Girls. Starting first on the journalist side, she moved to become an industry analyst before moving to the vendor community. Employed by EMC, Lady Backup has years of experience in technology areas beyond backup including information governance, archiving and eDiscovery. American by birth, Lady Backup makes her home in the U.K.

Lady Backup brings you comments and observations on technology and business trends about backup and recovery. She is on a mission to get all of those IT managers out there with backup infrastructure that date back to the release of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (a song that changed the world ) to think about backup redesign. Hard to believe that was from 1984 – a great year for music. Bruce Springsteen released “Born in the U.S.A” (which for obvious reasons is near and dear to Lady Backup’s heart) and Prince released “Purple Rain.”

But while 1984 might be a great year for music – it isn’t a vintage year for backup technology. Now is the time for your backup make-over. Get with the times and move out that ancient backup tape. Just like the evolution from cassette to CD to MP-4 all made music sound better, so too will disk-based backup make your backup process better. Add deduplication and you can ditch that turntable for an iPod forever.

Think how far Madonna has come – from Like a Virgin to Hard Candy in 2008. Lady Backup thinks that the theme song for all backup administrators should be “4 Minutes.” Madonna and Timbaland sing about saving the world in 4 minutes. Maybe backup isn’t saving the world – but it can save your company. Time is waiting… no hesitation.

Come back and find out more about the mysterious LadyBackup very soon…

Hey partners, did you hear that EMC swept 3 categories in the CRN Annual Report Card?

Yep, EMC received a total of 12 awards. And we’re real proud of it too – click here to see the press release. For the 5th year running, EMC took the enterprise network storage and backup and recovery categories. And for the 1st time EMC was named the company of the year in the SMB NetWork Storage category, which is certainly a testament to the EMC VNXe storage appliance introduced in January.

Maybe you haven’t heard about the CRN Annual Report Card (ARC). CRN is a dedicated channel publication, looking after the interest of resellers, distributors and IT solution providers. The report card is intended to benchmark the relationship between technology vendors and channel partners.
There are several dimensions to the award – product innovation, support, quality of the partnership between the vendor and the channel. And there are several categories for various different types of IT solutions (storage, networking, virtualisation, peripherals etc.).

Partners and customers know EMC for our storage capabilities – this year taking the top award for both enterprise and SMB network storage categories in the CRN ARC. That is not to suggest that EMC is resting on its laurels, quite the opposite. There is a massive shift within the company led from our senior executives to become ever better in supporting our channel partners. So if you thought EMC was good, we are just going to keep getting better in our efforts to deliver the right products and programs to support our channel. EMC and our channel partners – we are like fish and chips – two great things that are better together.

But there’s more to EMC than a storage company. Continue Reading

Good news coverage has appeared today in Computerworld UK following EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani’s briefing with Anh Nguyen last month. The article, titled “Steering EMC into the cloud”, is an in-depth profile of Sanjay in which Anh focuses on EMC’s internal IT strategy for its journey to the cloud.

In this piece, Sanjay discusses EMC’s own strategy for migration to the cloud, commenting that, “We have 50,000 employees – 49,999 of them think they’re the CIO. They understand technology and understand what they need to do.”

In addition he talks about how acquiring multiple companies in recent years has made companywide virtualisation challenging because each business comes with its own infrastructure, Sanjay comments that, “Every time we do an acquisition, I have got another footprint. The goal is to get over 90 percent virtualisation and drive as much standardisation as we can. It’s aspirational. One of the promises of cloud is the standardisation of technology. The simplification of technology and processes means we can deliver more as a service because I have a company that is happy to consume things as a service.”

The full article here: Computerworld UK: Steering EMC into the cloud

EMC Consulting’s Elliott Young presented again at the Cloud Circle forum in July. In this interview, he goes through the key factors organisations need to bare in mind to move to Cloud computing (private, public or hybrid models) and IT-as-a-Service (Iaas):
Understand what is active in your environment (Blueprinting):

Understand the configurations
Understand the workloads of services
Understand the dependencies

Once you have an understanding of the blueprint of your environment, you can start associating a cost to the services offered.

Your decision to move to the cloud can then be based on technical difficulty, or value generated by the services, which enables the best ROI.

Another concept Elliott mentions is the concept of “Teleportation“… (don’t worry, you’re not about to travel from London to Hong Kong through fibre optics or wireless networks… how cool would that be though!!!)

With “Teleportation”, you can move services live to different physical and/or virtual locations without the need to transfer data. Find out more and hear about a customer use case by viewing the video.

Contact EMC Consulting to find out about the Cloud Advisory service and take the first steps towards the Cloud.