GlassHouse Technologies Blog

Nowadays, the economic situation globally is not quite stable. Enterprises are looking for ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency – optimization technologies are considered to be the most important and significant. Enterprise industries are facing a two-sided challenge: store and manage increasing amounts of data while simultaneously reducing the carbon footprint — they are [...]

I’ve come across a number of customer sites that have only a single backup stream from each client running sequentially to a tape drive device.  While there is a concern that the time to recover increases if you have multiplexed data on a tape, there is also a need to properly [...]

And a few parting thoughts when considering a new backup solution, in general:
We strongly encourage customers to explore reference architecture design alternatives before choosing a specific product for deduplication. In most cases, backup architecture redesign is the best way to maximize re-use of existing backup assets and take full advantage of next generation backup technologies, [...]

Archiving
Should backup and archive be the same service? The GlassHouse general position is ‘no’, however every environment faces need for long term retention of data, and in lieu of a true enterprise archiving platform, backup data retention is the only option for many enterprises. In general, we see tape playing a valuable role for long [...]

Data replication and DR solutions
The impact of disk based replication of deduplicated data has a profound impact on backup architectures and their role in disaster recovery. The traditional backup environment today uses offsite vaulting for tape, and disk or host based replication for more aggressive disaster recovery capabilities. The role of backup in disaster recovery [...]

Data Deduplication

Data deduplication is one of the most disruptive technology features to affect enterprise backup. This technology feature makes disk economical for backup data storage, and opens up options for remote site and core data center replication, previously unavailable. Software and hardware based deduplication have distinct differences in terms of scale/performance/capacity, and should [...]

I’ve spent over 17 years working in the backup space starting out as an evening ‘Tape Jockey’ contracting for Digital Equipment Corporation.  I’ve heard over that time that the profession of administrating a backup environment was “the most important job that no one wants”.  This concept has held true for a long time and has [...]

Someone recently asked me why backups continue to fail on a nightly basis. His contention was that, with all the technology advances of the past 10 years, backup failures should be a thing of the past. That got me thinking – what are the reasons for backup failures…?
The most obvious and common causes for backup [...]

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 for primary storage are less [...]