It seems that every week there is another story in the press regarding what can only be described as disturbing cases of data loss.  This week’s story concerns a report completed by Big Brother Watch of 1,035 cases where data has been either lost or stolen from local councils throughout the UK between 2008 – 2011. This can only be a case of unforgivable incompetence on their behalf when handling citizens data seemingly protected under UK law.

So why don’t we just sack everyone that had anything to do with this embarrassment so we can all sleep well at night, safe in the knowledge that our data is now protected by sensible, responsible professionals.

Sounds good and reading some articles in the press this is the typical response. However, I wouldn’t be so quick to condemn anyone just yet.  While these figures are certainly alarming, even more so when looking at the types of data loss involved there is still a lot of information which is unknown.  For instance, one particular case involves a lost mobile Continue Reading

OK, so I know that sounds like a strange title for an IT Transformation post but hopefully it caught your eye and I want to use it as an analogy to illustrate a scenario I encountered this week.

A customer couldn’t understand why they were suffering performance issues on some arrays and even some outages of key applications.  The EMC team were somewhat confused not only by the outages themselves but also by some of the statements the customers was making about provisioning being so labour intensive and moves of data taking ages and recovery being onerous. The automated tiering capability, thin provisioning and the virtualisation integration of the tools supplied to the customer should have meant that manual moves weren’t required. It was at this point that the bombshell came………. “oh we haven’t enabled any of that functionality as we haven’t tested it or seen the details of your algorithms so we can Continue Reading

Lady Backup is a bit of a worrier.    I always think about the “what if” –what if I lock myself out of my flat when my other half is traveling and I can’t get in?  What if I am injured and I don’t have any identification on me?  What wakes me in the middle of the night are all of these scenarios I think up with regards to my passport.  And etc…. I really can’t share the full insanity in my brain.

The thing is that it is easier to plan if you have an idea about what might be the most likely “what if” scenarios.  Otherwise, you can worry yourself sick and may not really be prepared for the thing that really goes wrong.   And things will always go wrong even in the best run organizations.

Good news:  EMC published a report today that can help you narrow your worries a bit to better prepare for the “what if.” The report, European Disaster Recovery Survey 2011: Data Today Gone Tomorrow, How Well Companies Are Poised For IT Recovery is the result of a survey of 1,750 IT decision makers across Europe and looks at backup spending trends, incidents that disrupt the business, and existing backup and DR practices.

What the survey show is that it’s not an Act of God or something criminal that is mostly likely your next problem that will disrupt your IT infrastructure.  Rather it’s not sexy headline-making stuff:  61% of organizations cited hardware failure as the root cause of their data loss or systems downtime, followed by loss of power and software failure.

Another interesting tidbit:  after a disaster 27% of organizations increased their spending on backup and recovery.  If you’ve been following my blogs then you know my opinion: there are lots of dated backup environments stuck in a time warp designed for a time before electronic information was as critical as it is today.  Who doesn’t love to sing out loud to “I Will Survive” from Gloria Gaynor?  But if your backup infrastructure is as dated as the song (1979 just in case you wanted to know), the answer is maybe you won’t.  There are some scary analyst data out there that says that majority of businesses will actually fail if they suffer a major outage for more than 24 hours.

Take a look at the survey data.  Look at the experiences of your peers and then ask within your own company: How would you survive?  And do you know what to plan against to ensure you survive?

Lady Backup took a brief journey to Manchester to attend the Manufacturer of the Year Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner.  I was one of about 600 people gathered for a black tie event at the Lancashire County Cricket Club.

I won’t spoil the winners – you’ll have to see for yourself which UK manufacturers won top honors.   I really appreciated the intense pride that people demonstrated for their companies even at just being nominated for an award.  The other thing I really liked about the evening was the focus on young people who are getting started with their careers.  There was a “Young Manufacturer of the Year” award and the candidates were all extremely impressive, regardless of their age. It is very smart to both invest in and recognize younger workers.

The other thing fascinating thing that evening was to see a car go 1,000 mph.  Haven’t seen it?  Check out Continue Reading

Now of course if I were to answer yes to that question then this might possibly be the worlds shortest blog post……But, the answer isn’t a straightforward no either.

Transformation is about fundamentally changing what you do, both in terms of the delivery model, processes and underlying technology.  Continuous improvement, as the title suggests, is about improving the performance of your delivery model. If your goal is to transform then you will absolutely need to implement continuous improvements, as the new delivery model will always take time to bed down and require fine-tuning.

But what about using continuous improvement as a spring board for transformation?

Actually it is a very effective approach and I often work with customers in the aftermath of some form of crisis they have suffered to do exactly that.  Many organisations cannot afford to throw all their energy and resources into a significant IT transformation effort that looks like it is trying to “boil the ocean”. They need to keep doing the day job but Continue Reading

In the physical world, we write a note to ourselves and eventually bin it. Back in the day, we created physical drafts of documents.  These drafts would eventually get binned as well.   If we stockpiled all the notes and drafts, we would run out of space to store them.  However, in the digital world, we inexorably keep everything—regardless of its significance or worth.  We have applications that can automatically retain every version of every document in its system.  And if we don’t have an application to do it for us, we have our own cunning and adroit ways of accomplishing such tasks: “budget_2012 – v1.xlsx”, “budget_2012 — (Michaels Version).xlsx”, “budget_2012 — finaldonoteverdelete.xlsx”, etc. etc.  In my previous posting, I gave an example of this with my “Birth of a Presentation.”  This practice or pension of keeping every scrap of electronic data along with man’s drive to invent new ways and places for us to create data is causing unprecedented explosion of data in our digital world.

Why have we become a society of digital pack-rats (hoarders?)  Do you realise that I still have my email box from the company I left in 2000?!   Earlier this year I was going through security at the Vienna airport and sent my backpack through the x-ray machine.  I got held up and asked to re-scan my backpack because I had “too much electronics” – I had over 2TB of storage in the form of various thumb drives and USB drives and it took me three trips Continue Reading

It’s only been a month of shipping the new Data Domain DD160 (see the blog post written by Lady Backup on the launch day), but already many different customers have spoken to me on how they are considering using one in their data centre. Of course many just want to use the appliance behind their backup server to replace tape, and with the option of a VTL emulation this is simple. However it’s the other solutions that have started to get me thinking.

I was speaking to a small customer who needs to save a large amount of data in archive for their business, they have been using plain disk for this up to now. The data has been tested and it would deduplicate really well. But when the customer realised they could Continue Reading

As a Product Marketing Manager, it’s very hard sometimes to give each product in a portfolio equal airtime. Different products whether software or hardware develop at different paces. Why am I saying this? Well it’s sort of what has happened to EMC Networker.

For many quarters EMC have quietly been taking share in the Data Protection Market as a whole, and a big part of this is our software solutions and how they provide the glue around our well established hardware offerings. Networker, for instance, has for a long time been providing the policy management for directing backups in the world largest organisations to a second level of storage or tape. It is now however driving backup redesign Continue Reading

By now most of us have heard about the explosion of digital information in our world. It is difficult to grasp when you hear large numbers and words like “zettabyte.”

Zettabyte?! Eek, sounds scary. However, let’s see if I can put this into context for you by giving you an example of fairly common scenario. I call this, “Birth of a Presentation.”

- Email sent to Michael from marketing asking if he can do a presentation at a conference. The email contains an attachment with presentation template to start from.
[Copies of presentation: 2]
- Michael saves template to local drive
[Copies of presentation: 3]
- Email response from Michael to marketing confirming he will do it and immediately Continue Reading

Lady Backup’s favorite book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Published in 1957, this is a deep piece of work – both literally and figuratively. At 1,168 pages, it’s little wonder that there are so many different interpretations across political, social, and religious spectrums. I promise this won’t become a full book report, but I want to share a dialog that resonates with me:

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?”

“I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

This passage reinforces for me the ideals Rand writes about regarding the uncompromising pursuit of innovation and the intense drive to be competitive.

But if the weight of antiquated systems, process and technology weigh you down, then it’s impossible to look forward. It’s impossible to do better than you are doing today if the weight of today’s world is pressing down on you.

What has me thinking about this is a new analyst study documenting cost savings generated from backup transformation. Not surprising, Continue Reading