Storage's 2010 Hottest Technology

Each year there tends to be one technology that stands out in the storage space. In 2009 it was data deduplication. At the end of 2008 EMC made an acquisition of a source based deduplicaiton solution called Avamar. Later, in 2009, they announced a strategic partnership with Quantum for data deduplication at the target. Then in 2009 EMC made a bid against NetApp for Data Domain and won. In addition, NetApp had data deduplication announcements… Read more »

Comprehensive Capacity Optimization - Deduplication 2.0

Technology is great isn't it? When someone thinks they have a new idea on the same old technology foundation they call it "X 2.0". I have been watching the banter between analysts and vendors (specifically NTAP’s Dr. Dedupe and Permabit’s CEO Tom Cook) on the topic of Deduplication 2.0 and it is my belief that the proverbial boat is being missed (since we are using water analogies). I have been watching these guys hash it… Read more »

A Data Protection Reference Architecture - The Final Chapter

The Architecture

This ‘architecture’ diagram, as you can see, is not a typical architecture diagram, but hopefully it can be used to align your business and business objectives with the technologies that are available and can best be applied to solve your issues helping to balance, cost, complexity and compliance.

This diagram can also be used to do a couple of other things. It can help you begin to classify your data and align your… Read more »

A Data Protection Reference Architecture - Part 1

This blog will have multiple parts. I will introduce my view of a data protection reference architecture and the next few blog posts will talk to components of that architecture.

The other day I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague of mine in Australia. He was looking for a data protection reference architecture that he could use to speak to his customer. As you can imagine having this conversation over the phone could… Read more »

What Happened in Vegas, Stayed in Vegas

Well, until now. This is an interesting story about archiving and how it could have, but didn't help a friend of mine.

Often, when speaking with customers, I talk to them about the 4 fundamental principals with regard to data protection:

AssessArchiveBackupManage

The assessment phase is a multi-dimensional phase. It's about people, process and technology. Like with most things, the technology piece is the easy piece. EMC has tools that allow us to scan file… Read more »