Setting the Record Straight on Backup

Or should I say, ‘Setting the Record Straight on Backing Up Optimized Data’? Carter discusses on this blog they myriad of ways to perform backups on optimized data. (His blog actually reads more like a white paper explaining how backup needs to be configured to work with his product.) One of the ways Carter describes to do backup is via NDMP and says “… is the most complicated.” The funny thing is that this is… Read more »

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 »

The Myths about Compression and Data Deduplication

How many of you have heard that compression and deduplication just don’t belong together? Like oil and water. I know from experience, when I worked for EMC, the Avamar sales reps and the Data Domain sales reps would tell their customers that the best thing to do if they had encrypted or compressed primary data, that they uncompress it to get the savings in their backups that deduplication promises.

This is wrong on a number… Read more »

Betamax Redux

I often joke w/ customers that when my friends were growing up they would dream of being a professional baseball player or a rock star and I used to dream of becoming a data protection technologist. Recently I read something very profound in Chuck Hollis’s internal EMC blog. Chuck said, "Decide what you're passionate about ...and write about it... it is hard to write about stuff you don't care about." I am passionate about data… Read more »