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

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 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 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 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

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

As a Product Marketing Manager, it’s very hard sometimes to give each product in a portfolio equal airtime. Different products whether software or hardware develop at different paces. Why am I saying this? Well it’s sort of what has happened to EMC Networker.

For many quarters EMC have quietly been taking share in the Data Protection Market as a whole, and a big part of this is our software solutions and how they provide the glue around our well established hardware offerings. Networker, for instance, has for a long time been providing the policy management for directing backups in the world largest organisations to a second level of storage or tape. It is now however driving backup redesign Continue Reading