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

Sitting in London looking at the television pictures of the storm that is hitting the East Coast of America, makes me realise just how vulnerable we all are to situations we may find ourselves in where we have absolutely no control over the outcome. Floods, fire, power cuts and building damage will take weeks if not months to repair. Then I start to wonder just how many data centers have been affected. A quick “google” tells me that there are at least half a dozen major websites down because of the lost of two major data centres due to power outages and flood. So if we cannot control the weather what can we control?

Data is probably the most valuable asset in a data centre, it’s invisible, contained on thousands of spinning spindles and constantly changing. Power may be restored in days, restoring data may take weeks if at all. However I am suggesting you can control you backups, and you should be able to recover all your lost data.

A recent survey run in Europe and the Middle East however found that three out of four IT administrators did not trust they could recover after a disaster. Technologies such as tape certainly do not help with the levels of confidence, with 80% of these users stating

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Richard Gordon from EMC’s Flash Storage Business Unit, shares some thoughts surrounding the future of flash technologies in data centers during the next decade. Come and watch Richard’s session live at EMC Forum London on September the 11′th.

Register today!

It seems now as a consumer you are presented with a vast array of solutions in which to store your data. Pat Gelsinger spoke this week of a desire for VMware to become the “Apple of the data centre”, running all your applications and databases in a virtualised environment. This could be either in your own data centre or one of the many hosted now available for use by any size of organisation. And what about all this data, according to IDC data volumes will continue to double every two years, giving you possibly, a  Continue Reading

Now, where was I……?  Oh yes, I was listing the many benefits of archiving email  when I got yanked off stage!  Hmmm, where did I leave off……?  Ah yes…IT and one of the many benefits….

1. Reduces IT call centre traffic.  How many times in a month does IT receive a call to increase quotas or retrieve deleted email?  As I said in my previous point, quotas become a thing of the past with SourceOne, so no calls Continue Reading

This week I was invited to attend a multi-supplier strategy workshop with one of our clients.  The purpose of the workshop was to look at their future storage strategy and all the major industry vendors  were there to present. This style of workshop provides clients the ability to see consistencies and opinions from each supplier. When it was my turn to present , I decided to push things a bit and discuss how sourcing storage and technology would change in the next 5 years.  I started by suggesting that come 2017 the major vendors will not be selling hardware. This may seem a bit of a ridical theory, but by how much? If you follow my reasoning to come perhaps this statement Continue Reading

Lady Backup is back!  I had a lovely Christmas break that included a short visit to northern Sweden to visit the ICEHOTEL.  WOW – talk about an experience!  If you are looking for something completely unique, I would highly recommend it.  And if you are wondering, yes we did sleep on a bed of ice.  All things considered, I would call it just another regular night’s sleep. 

It’s been tough getting back in the swing of work.  My brain is sluggish and my motivation is about as strong as the weak daylight we have this time of year.  But I’m glad to find that in spite of my long winter nap, my colleagues still have their eye on the ball.     

Today, in fact EMC delivered a press release to promote a new IDC study about the backup appliance market.  According to IDC, during the first half of 2011, EMC commanded a 62% share Continue Reading

In my last posting, I talked about our propensity for keeping all electronic data; commonly referred to as ESI or Electronically Stored Information.  I also talked about having to change our habits that we cannot go on this way forever and ever as there is too much data being created.  Ok, fine.  What do we do about it and why should we?  We have great technology today that virtualizes, shrinks, and de-dups data.  Lady Backup talks a great game in convincing everyone that they need a great backup strategy and talks about very, very impressive technology to achieve this.  And yes, we do all need a good backup strategy.  However, the story as told, still is, “go ahead, keep everything.”  No.  We need a different story.  The amount of data growth is outpacing the rate at which the cost of hardware and technology is reduced each year.  It is also outpacing the rate at which we can use clever technology to reduce the net data size and foot print within the data centre and the environment.  Again I reference Lady Backup and one of her postings as an example of the latter: Google consumed the same amount of power as 200,000 American homes last year to support their data centres.

Ok, not every company is a Google undoubtedly.  However, virtually all organisations are faced with similar challenges.  Organisations cannot continue to throw hardware at this data problem.  They need to throw 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

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