Knowing what is driving your DR plan helps you to be grounded in reality and take a pragmatic approach that fulfills the desires of the sponsoring bodies. Without this grounding you could embark on a quixotic quest to provide far more than the sponsors ever envisaged with consequent shock and awe as...

The fragile economy has driven a heightened need for IT departments to control capital outlays and operational expenditures and to provide cost transparency to the consumers of IT services. This cost containment and transparency are best pursued with two things: first a clear understanding of the baseline...

Since this is my first blog entry relating to VDI, it makes sense to me that I should go over the basics and talk about what VDI is. This is especially important if you’ve never heard of VDI before, and for those of you who are not new to it, this can serve as a review. Let’s start with a definition...

I’m a proponent of tape elimination solutions that entirely remove tape from the data protection design or at least eliminate the tape export and transport to offsite storage. There are several solution paths you can go down like deduplication with replication or online backup service to name a few. What...

For the dedicated technologist, DR planning can be fun. New technologies, new approaches, vendor presentations, free lunches, new skill sets, and the opportunity to demonstrate once again just how much the business units really need IT (and you). It is all very exciting in an otherwise dull world of...

I wrote an article recently on opportunities for storage teams in a down economy. It was published as a byline by ECT. http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/it-management/66672.html One of the central themes of the articles was getting into a “doing more with less” mind frame. A key part of...

In the big picture, deduplication is a feature, not a function, of disk technology. Nonetheless, it is a really disruptive gateway feature because it means you can store a lot more logical data on disk than you ever could before. The implications for backup data storage are tremendous, the implications...

Everyday brings a deluge of cloud-related press releases, articles, analyst opinion, and,   somewhere among the confusion, some honest-to-goodness useful information. While there is always some hyperbole with any new technology direction, there is more to the concept of cloud computing than vapor...