Welcome 2013! Lady Backup is not one for predictions or resolutions, so don’t worry I’m not looking into my crystal ball. 

Rather, I thought we would start the year by looking at an element of IT transformation that we didn’t talk about in 2012. 

It is an enabler of IT transformation – contributing to your infrastructure transition from physical to virtual servers and in moving mission critical applications to the cloud.  Continue Reading

 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

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

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 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 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