Greetings from EMC World 2013! Another record year with nearly 15,000 people from 80 countries.   There is no shortage of news from the show including:

• The headline news from EMC World 2013 is the introduction of EMC ViPR, Software-Defined Storage.
• From my area of interest, we introduced the EMC Data Protection Suite, changing the way customers consume EMC backup and archive capabilities.
• There’s also news from Isilon, Syncplicity Continue Reading

Lady Backup generally doesn’t shamelessly promote EMC products.  But there are always exceptions.  And this is one of them as we recognize the 10^th anniversary of EMC Data Domain.

Thinking back to 2009, the bidding war for Data Domain added a bit of drama and excitement  While interesting to watch, at the time I didn’t understand why our executives were so keen on acquiring Data Domain.   To me it seemed to be just another storage device – and EMC already had plenty of those.

In reality, the Data Domain appliance revolutionized backup technology.  I’ve come to appreciate the innovation of Data Domain and its many “firsts” in the market, which today Continue Reading

HSM or Archiving?  From the Backup Guy

Looking back in my working life I have spent well over 20 years in the backup arena. From installing, upgrading, monitoring, and finally selling and marketing all types and sizes of backup solutions. Until recently, only once in this 20+ year history have I touched on archiving and it was not even archiving by name, as then it was an HSM or Hierarchical Storage Management project that I was involved in. Continue Reading

Lady Backup has been quiet lately.  It’s not that I don’t have things to say – of course I have lots of thoughts and opinions to share.

But I can’t seem to climb out from under my “list of things to do.”  I always have the best intentions to think more strategically and address my job with new ideas.  But intention without action is just a bunch of hot air.

This isn’t a unique story.  Everyone I know is in the same situation – the pace of our business life seems to get faster and faster.

However, when it comes to a backup and recovery strategy, looking in the rear view mirror can have devastating consequences such as lost customer loyalty and giving business to your competitors.

It is only after a significant disruption that many companies look at their backup strategies.

Today we introduce findings from the Disaster Recovery Survey 2013: South Africa.  Similar to the survey we ran in both Europe and the Middle East, 74% companies in South Africa are not very confident that they can fully recover after a significant disruption.  More than half respond after a disruption by reviewing their procedures and nearly 40% increase their spending on backup and recovery after the fact.

The survey EMC commissioned over the last year provides a rear view mirror of what’s happened across 13 countries and 3,000 IT decision makers.  My hope is that the survey findings will cause companies in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa to proactively review their backup and disaster recovery strategy.

Don’t add this to your list of things to do.  Take a look now – before the next disruption interrupts your business.

Here is a link to the EMC Disaster Recovery 2013 survey infographic.

LB

Big Data, Big Backup, Big Problem?

We all know data volumes are not shrinking, quite the opposite data’s growing and more is expected from it. We are analysing it, replicating it, encrypting it, protecting it, storing it, and archiving it. In fact anything but deleting it. Continue Reading

In the 3^rd party of this series, it should be understood that Lady Backup does not consider a backup an archive.   As my colleagues know, I will strongly argue with anyone who considers backup tapes to be an archive.

Now that you understand that, what are the main things you should think about with an archiving solution?  I’ll frame the discussion in the context of the 3 key benefits of archiving I discussed in the last blog posts (Part 1/Part 2).

Benefit 1: Archiving increases operational efficiency.

A key benefit to archiving is to keep the production environment lean.   You will want an archiving solution that can provide a phased approach.   Take an example from email…. Continue Reading

Picking up from last week, Lady Backup asserts that there is a key enabler in IT transformation that we haven’t paid enough attention to: archiving.

Archiving has a key value to play in lower your IT costs, improving your user experience and managing risk for your organization.

Let’s look at the 3 key benefits of archiving in more detail:

Benefit 1: Archiving increases operational efficiency.

How old are the emails stored in your email system? Continue Reading

Welcome 2013! Lady Backup is not one for predictions or resolutions, so don’t worry I’m not looking into my crystal ball. 

Rather, I thought we would start the year by looking at an element of IT transformation that we didn’t talk about in 2012. 

It is an enabler of IT transformation – contributing to your infrastructure transition from physical to virtual servers and in moving mission critical applications to the cloud.  Continue Reading

Lady Backup is pleased to announce that EMC is the winner for the 2^nd year in the V3 Technology Awards.

While EMC was nominated in several categories, readers voted EMC best in “ disaster recovery and business continuity ” solutions.    Also of note is that VFCache was a finalist in the best product of the year.

Check out this video interview with Kelly Brown, filmed from the awards ceremony.   As a small side note, Ms. Brown at times Continue Reading

Like many many proud parents I am sure the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will treasure their first picture of their unborn baby. Medical images such as these are stored across the globe by hospitals as part of the ever growing patient record databases. You will regularly read blogs about the use of data deduplication to reduce the amount of data stored and transmitted, however patient records is one area where deduplication seldom helps. As an example and in no connection to the Duke and Duchess except by name, the Cambridge University Hospital in the UK has been using EMC Centera for a number of years to store such data.

Many hospitals now find that storing this data can be a major obstacle  while EMC Centera can store this data perfectly well, few hospitals have the data centre space to dedicate to such arrays. ESG research in 2011 indicated in North America that total storage Continue Reading