So what is a Cloud Reference Architecture?

When you consume services from a Public Cloud Provider do you really care or want to understand what the underlying architecture looks like? Probably not.

However if you wanted to build your own Private or Community Cloud with Public Cloud Compatibility (Hybrid Cloud) then you would want to have a cloud reference architecture that you could use to align with strategy, to deliver quick wins, and ensure that each tactical decision was made with a full understanding of the knock-on implications. You would also want this architecture to support all of your base Operating System needs, UNIX, Linux, Microsoft, so creating a generic Cloud Reference Architecture that could be leveraged to deliver true business benefit. Continue Reading

Ealier this month, EMC organised a get together event between EMC executives and customers and partners at the swanky Soho Hotel in London.

As I listened to the presentation from Mark Thurmond, SVP Worldwide Sales at RSA, on APT (Advanced Persistent Threats), I could not help but notice jaws dropping one after the other in the audience. Mark has a very punchy delivery style, which could have explained this reaction… but on the serious note, I think his revelations about the engineering of the attack on RSA and how today’s organisation are ill-prepared, created a sense Continue Reading

Lady Backup grew up in the Boston area but spent a lot of time as a kid in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brits and Europeans might not know where Pittsburgh is but it is a great city in the middle of the country.

Both my mom and dad were raised in Pittsburgh and their families all worked in the steel mills. At its height, the steel mills in Pittsburgh produced more than half of the American steel and as much as one-third of the world’s steel supply. It was an industry started in the late 1800s that employed tens of thousands of people either directly or indirectly – many of the workers were European immigrants as my family was.

I’m not looking to give a history lesson. What I am looking to do is raise the need for forward-looking thinking into today’s manufacturing environment. I first started thinking about this because of a webcast yesterday done by the analysts of the IDC Manufacturing Insight group. They reported findings from a survey Continue Reading

So, I have been at EMC for 9 months now (where has that gone!), after 15 years in IT on the other side of the fence as a consumer and customer, but have I really gone from being a gamekeeper to becoming a poacher? Not really. IT vendors are commercial organisations just as their customers are – they strive to increase revenues and deliver growth to their shareholders just like their customers do. IT vendors are all facing the same economic challenges as their customers; the need to do more with less, year on year budget reductions, and of course the demand for better use of technology to make staff more productive. Life isn’t that radically different in the technology provider camp. Granted I don’t have millions of dollars of budgetary responsibility and hundreds of staff but that makes a pleasant change after many years of management responsibility!

So if life isn’t all that different on the other side of the fence what am I doing here? Continue Reading

Before I start this set of posts I feel the need to qualify my background. I spent my first 5 years in IT as a Mainframe operator before progressing to Open Systems, in particular IBM AIX (POWER) and HP HP-UX (PA-RISC) based systems. My first real foray into x86 (Intel) based processing came with the advent of Linux and in particular SuSE (now SLES).

I was often lambasted for being anti-Microsoft by colleagues, although they never seemed to realise that I had no real dislike of the Microsoft organisation, rather I could perform most of the ‘services’ each of the 30-40 W-Intel servers provided from a single UNIX, in my case AIX, server. I never understood the rationale of one ‘service’ one ‘server’ that seemed to be prevalent within the Microsoft W-Intel team.

So it isn’t as a W-Intel advocate that I write these posts, rather as a mature Mainframe/Open Systems Enterprise Architect who can recognise a business benefit when he sees it.

So what is the benefit I can see? Continue Reading

In light of another NHS trust being found to have broken the Data Protection Act (DPA), as a senior manager in the public sector, you may be concerned about how your body can avoid the same fate.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has revealed that Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust accidentally destroyed 10,000 records that were supposed to be archived.

Such documents should have been kept in a special storage area, but they were instead put in a disposal room and destroyed at the end of December 2010.

And while this would appear to be the opposite problem of losing personal details in the public realm, it still breaches the DPA because Continue Reading

Facebook's storage management could come under intense scrutiny, as the Data Protection Commissioner has launched an investigation into the website's handling of personal details.

Concerns have been raised about how much information the social networking site collates through functions such as the "Like" feature.

It is thought that Facebook – which has 800 million subscribers worldwide – can utilise this to track a person's movements on the internet.

Another issue that has been highlighted is the deleting of photographs, as some users Continue Reading

Lady Backup loves Copenhagen. I am lucky that we had locals explain the rules for eating traditional Danish cuisine – particularly smørrebrød. And of course Copehagen is a great place for shopping – check out this hat I bought while there last winter.

I’m thinking about Copehagen this week because I’ve been spending time at VMWorld Europe. To mark the occasion, EMC worked with three of our European customers to illustrate their benefits with EMC backup solutions for their virtualized environment.

So, what do a major bank in Poland, a city IT department in Finland and a college in the UK have in common? Click here to read more.

For my English readers, you’ll probably be interested in the Derby College story we captured, where Ian McCormick, IT Infrastructure Manager said backup as gone to Continue Reading

Are you an independent financial advisor (IFA)? If so, are you 100 per cent certain that you follow data security measures put in place by the Financial Services Authority (FSA)?

Even if you try your hardest to follow the rules, you could accidentally be leaving gaps in your information compliance procedures.

That is because according to a new study published in the Financial Times Adviser, 80 per cent of IFAs do not meet the FSA's criteria.

Less than a fifth of those questioned encrypted backed-up data to the FSA standard.

Are you guilty of falling into this percentage?

Meanwhile, data has been lost by 11 per cent of IFAs, while three per cent admitted to never backing up their data, the Durell Software poll reveals.

Of those who do back up, three per Continue Reading

Are you one of the 65 per cent of organisations that regularly experience lost data in a virtual environment?

According to a new survey by Kroll Ontrack, this is not the end of it, because out of the 53 per cent of the 369 IT professionals questioned, more than half have witnessed five incidents over the last year.

Meanwhile, 12 per cent of individuals admitted that in the past 12 months, more than five data losses have occurred.

If this has happened to you, it should give you cause for concern, as data loss is not something you want to be regularly entertaining.

It could be time for a data disaster recovery overhaul!

The 65 per cent figure uncovered by the organisation is 140 per cent higher than the result of last year's study, so it would appear that something is amiss.

Let's have a think about where your data management could be going wrong – perhaps it is simply human error, or a virtual disk corruption? Maybe corrupt files are being stored within your virtualised environments?

"Virtualisation contracts often claim no liability for data corruption, deletion, destruction or loss. As a result, Continue Reading