From my conversations with customers it is evident that CIO’s are continuing to strive to be at the heart of value creation. Generally speaking the top three goals for CIO’s in 2013 are: -

1. Protecting corporate data
2. Improving business productivity  – and giving business stakeholders transparency as to the cost of the IT services they are consuming
3. Lowering the cost to serve of IT services – and moving spend from CAPEX to OPEX

With Cloud Computing firmly ticking numbers two and three on the CIO “to do” list, is it just fear of failure around the first point that is preventing much wider cloud adoption than is currently occurring? Inevitably, as with all things “IT”, it isn’t quite that straight forward. Clearly, having confidence as to the protection afforded a corporations most precious asset (its data) is a potential barrier 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

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

Washing clothes is one of those tasks made a lot easier by the use of a washing machine. A piece of equipment that has been purposely designed to the task in hand, in other words an appliance. Now I am sure you could make your own washing machine, what would you need? A drum or bucket to hold all the clothes, a motor to spin the drum, and a pump to get the water in and out. But how many of us would do that? There are many brands of supplier, all offering us such appliances, Hotpoint, Bosch, Neff, Hoover and Zanussi are the ones for me that spring to mind.

So when considering kitchen appliances what are their main advantages? Well, they have been specifically designed to accomplish a task, they often reduce the amount of our time involved in that task, they offer value for money, they are modular Continue Reading

Paul Tempest-Mitchell, Sales Development Manager for UK&I on being at the EMC Forum in Dublin 2012.

It seems whatever industry you are in nowadays we are obliged to shorten or abbreviate our words. Having just spent a few days discussing product roadmaps with our Champion Backup Partners, it seemed every slide we showed used some form of product abbreviation. I do now wonder if our Product Managers are creating new abbreviations so the roadmaps are only understandable with a code book.

So shortening words is not new I hear you say, true. What about then the shortening of the Continue Reading

Lady Backup is a bit of a strategist.  I like to look forward, to anticipate moves.  For this reason, I adore chess – the ability to process a series of “what if” scenarios to make the best decision on your next move.

To all of my fellow strategists in the IT world, this idea of anticipating the next move applies to backup.   Backup is a means to an end, where the end state is a business that is confident you can restore applications and recover individual files quickly.   While you might be in love with your Continue Reading

I was recently invited by Drapers magazine – the retail fashion industry bible – to comment on what UK fashion retailers are doing with mobile technology. To be honest, I struggled to think of genuinely innovative activity that put customers – not the product, brand or retailer –  first, certainly in the UK. If you check out the Neiman Marcus ‘Service’ app   you will see something that genuinely helps customers and staff, delivering a better customer service experience. Let me know if you have seen any ambitious use of mobile technology in current UK fashion retail that actually puts customer need first – all comments welcome”. Please see my article below.

Drapers Mobile Fashion article

 Lady Backup is a stickler for tidy work, both grammar and formatting.  My employees can vouch for the amount of corrections and comments I make to everything that passes my desk.  So of course dotting every “i” is critical…

But in the case of retailer Arcadia Group, they removed tape in the backup of their IBM i environments.  These systems run the supply chain applications, along with other mission critical applications – in other words they supply the lifeblood data.

Acardia’s IT staff was finding that their tape-based backup Continue Reading

I came across this really interesting post this morning. For those of you looking to virtualise your Oracle environment, and looking to get actual insight on Before and After, look no further than EMC’s own journey to virtualisation.

In his post, Darryl Smith gives you detailed information what improvements and efficiencies to expect from going through that journey.

Read the full blog post now: Running Oracle on Virtual Infrastructure Really Pays Off: Save Big on Capital, Operating and License Costs.

If you’re looking to virtualise Oracle and are based in the UK & Ireland, get in touch and take the next step to virtualisation.