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

Replication has become key to most data protection strategies. We see most organisations in the Open System space using replication and deduplication to get data off site. This gives these companies an advantage when it comes to Recovery Time Objective (RTO), as the need for tape and a manual recovery process is alleviated. However the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) will only be as good as the last time a backup was run, which in the open system space in usually Continue Reading

Lady Backup is a contingency planner.  Truth be told, I have a bit of an obsession with “what if” scenarios.  I keep backups of my data – and then backups of the backups stored on different devices.  I keep photocopies of all of my identification documents….   I know bad things are going to happen – it’s just a matter of being prepared for them.

But what you don’t want to do is build a contingency plan for your backup application.  This is why the selection of the backup application is a key decision in redesigning your Continue Reading

Lady Backup didn’t place any bets during Euro 2012, which is probably a good thing because I would have lost on my prediction for the finals.   One of the things I really admire about European football is the country loyalty.   But as everyone other than Spain found out, loyal fans aren’t enough to win.  You need the right ingredient of skill and teamwork – all of which Spain handily demonstrated.

Luckily when it comes to selecting your backup vendor, you don’t have to take chances on guessing who the winning team is.   The clear winner is EMC, according to IDC’s latest market share report on Continue Reading

Lady Backup has spent the last 3 weeks in 3 different desert regions.  It’s been glorious – sunny and 38C or hotter.

Here in Las Vegas for EMC World, the analogy was made to rain water in the desert and backup capacity.  Rainwater vaporizes almost instantly when it hits scorching pavement, never really quenching the Earth.  Similarly, no matter how much backup capacity added it is dwarfed by ever-growing data volumes.  I wish I could take credit for the analogy (as you know I love analogies… the crazier the better.  For example, see yesterday’s blog post).  No, this analogy came from Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products.

We can’t do much to help the rainfall situation in the desert but we have good news for parched data centers around the world.  First, we introduced the new Data Domain DD990.  This new high-end purpose built backup appliance is 6x faster and offers 3x more capacity than the competition.

While speed and capacity matter to keep up with the vastness of the digital universe, we’ve made some other enhancements with the DD990.  For example, we’ve made enhancements with the Data Integrity Architecture, which gives you peace of mind by Continue Reading

Lady Backup is a fan of tattoos.  Sure some can be tacky, but on the whole they are amazing works of art.  Check out this tattoo (temporary) that I got at EMC World this week… it takes up most of my forearm.

In real life, any good tattoo artist will draw the tattoo on paper to create a stencil.  Then he or she will use a pen to draw the design on your body before getting out the needle and ink.  This way you know what it looks Continue Reading

Lady Backup has a thing for cars.  The faster the better.  I am not as much of a motorcycle girl.  I probably would have a different view had I not badly burned my leg on a motorcycle when I was a teenager.

But it doesn’t really matter – no chance I will win the Harley Davidson motorcycle give away at the EMC Backup and Recovery stand here at EMC World.   Continue Reading

This week EMC announced the findings of its research into the state of Disaster Recovery readiness amongst businesses in a number of countries in the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco.

The study reveals a significant disconnect between the ‘suffering’ that businesses in the region are currently enduring and the strategies they have adopted to alleviate the pain. Almost two-thirds of all organisations surveyed (64%) have experienced data loss and/or systems downtime in the Continue Reading

Lady Backup has a massive collection of music from all genres.  I have music from the Fabulous 50s through to 2012.  Blues, swing, country, classical, hip-hop, movie soundtracks … you name it and I own it.  But what I don’t own any more is any CDs. 

Before I moved from the US, I ripped every CD that I owned and threw them away.  Many of them were scratched and a few were broken.  The minute I got my MP-3 player (pre-iPod), I couldn’t wait to bin my CD Continue Reading

You should know that Lady Backup is a big fan of cartoon series on TV. Growing up, my favorite hours were Saturday mornings where kids from across America would be glued to the TV watching super heroes fight evil. At the time, there were a lot less channels to choose from (those dark days before cable TV) so kids stayed on one channel or walked over to the TV to actually change the channel (oh how remote controls have made life better!).
One of my favorite cartoons was called “Super Friends” which was a collection of super heroes operating as the Justice League of America. These heroes – Aquaman, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman – battled villains banded together under the “Legion of Doom.” In later years, I became a big fan of the X-Men and more recently of the Powerpuff Girls – who says girls can’t save the world?

However, this week Lady Backup came across another cartoon that has quickly become my favorites “Your Path to Recovery.” It’s just about a minute long but it’s a must see drama about the perils facing backup administrators. The basic question is – how confident are you that your current backup approach will enable you to recover? This is a tricky question because what are you recovering from? There are the unforeseen events like fire and flood or the more routine like loss of power. Or the downright annoying hardware failure or data corruption.

We don’t need the Justice League or the X-Men to have heroes. Our modern day heroes are those backup administrators who save the day every day by securing our most valuable information. The question is whether they are moving mountains and parting seas to actually recover data or whether they are using next generation backup technology to make the process faster and more reliable. Lady Backup’s mission is to help those backup administrators out there to lose the stress and still be heroes. Want to know how? Check out Your Path to Recovery.