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 started this series by highlighting a Webcast that provided 3 steps to backup transformation.  If you missed it, you can watch it on demand here.

But I  think that still might not be enough to convince you to take action.  Being a frugal lady myself, the second part to making backup transformation real is the financial benefits.  It’s possible to quantify both your operational costs savings as well as soft costs in management time (people time) associated with your current backup infrastructure. 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

Greetings from a hot Las Vegas!  Lady Backup traveled thousands of miles and many time zones to join 15,000 of my closest friends for EMC World 2012.

This is my 7^th EMC World and in the time I’ve attended, the show has gone through lots of change.  It’s not just the number of attendees – which is 10x more today compared with the first EMC World 11 years ago.  There is also a feeling that people are looking for change.  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

Lady Backup is a bit of a “to do” list-keeper.  If it’s not on my list of things to do then it doesn’t get done.  And any time I’m feeling very stressed, I put together a list of things to do.  Sadly, this approach includes both my personal and professional life.   There is also a sense of accomplishment, at least to me, from crossing things off the list.

 I am conscious that at times I’m so focused on crossing things off my list do that I sometimes miss the bigger picture – especially at times of uncertainty or change.  I get comfort from the list, knowing that I can still control some things. 

I wonder if my “list of things to do” sounds familiar to a backup administrator.  Crossing off – the list backup jobs completed or that day’s media management tasks.  Adding to the list – failed recoveries or backups jobs that need to be restarted.  The list can get quite long – so much so that it might be hard to take your eyes off the list of things to do.  

In this context, backup transformation sounds like a nice thing to have but doesn’t eliminate the list of things to do.  The balance between tactical (i.e. getting things done) and strategic (i.e. how to better get things done) is a universal challenge that transcends industries and job functions.  Likewise how to back up more data faster and to Continue Reading

Lady Backup grew up in the Boston area but spent a lot of time as a kid in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brits and Europeans might not know where Pittsburgh is but it is a great city in the middle of the country.

Both my mom and dad were raised in Pittsburgh and their families all worked in the steel mills. At its height, the steel mills in Pittsburgh produced more than half of the American steel and as much as one-third of the world’s steel supply. It was an industry started in the late 1800s that employed tens of thousands of people either directly or indirectly – many of the workers were European immigrants as my family was.

I’m not looking to give a history lesson. What I am looking to do is raise the need for forward-looking thinking into today’s manufacturing environment. I first started thinking about this because of a webcast yesterday done by the analysts of the IDC Manufacturing Insight group. They reported findings from a survey Continue Reading