There is a lot of discussion around data deduplication for backup these days. (I wish I could deduplicate all the turkey I ate last week.) In fact, Gartner claims that “…by 2012, deduplication will be applied to 75% of backups.” And when asked “Why?” the response was “…deduplication is too compelling to ignore.” But I say “prove it”. So I put together some backup capacity numbers for storing data on tape (non-compressed and compressed) versus… Read more »

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 »

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 »

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 »