It feels good to open up the blogging again to new topics, especially ones I am intimately familiar with. (But have no fear, there will be references to primary storage optimization / compression.)

This weekend I had an interesting conversation with my Dad. We were discussing backup. My dad basically runs IT for the State of Maine. The State of Maine uses CommVault backup software. So I posed the question to him, “What would it… Read more »

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 »

Business Critical Applications

The tip of the triangle focuses on the applications (or data) that drives your business. It is these applications within your business that, should they go down for any length of time, cost you money. The recovery of this information, in the event of a ‘disaster’, needs to be very fast (RTO in minutes) and the data can’t be very ‘old’ when it is recovered (short RPO, less than 24 hours). Typically… Read more »

One of the more thoughtful analysts in the industry, in my opinion is George Crump from Storage Switzerland. (I like the name and George is as independent as you can get in

this business.) Yesterday I had the pleasure of briefing George on EMC's Data Protection Vision. I like talking with George for a couple of reasons. First, he gets it. What does that mean. Read his material. He is genuinely trying to educate IT… Read more »