Alex Truax

While mobile and cloud platforms are relatively new, data centers have been under the watchful eye of IT professionals for decades; so why is backup not solved yet? There are at least two primary reasons that even data center data protection continues to challenge IT: Changes in workload recovery requirements and workload protection mechanisms. The … Read more

Each year, Enterprise Strategy Group publishes its annual IT Spending Intentions Survey, and for the past three years, “improving data backup and recovery” and “increased use of server virtualization” have been among the top three stated IT priorities. While their positions bounce around within the top echelon, they are always adjacent in the overall and … Read more

Disaster recovery as a service, or cloud-based disaster recovery (DR), makes testing a DR plan too easy to overlook — the opposite of traditional self-managed BC/DR facilities. One of the primary deterrents to most business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans is that recurring testing must occur to ensure preparedness for when calamity strikes as well as … Read more

We’re well past the notion that backup and archive aren’t the same thing, explains columnist Jason Buffington, but they may still leverage the same technologies. We’re in what I believe is the third-wave of understanding the relationships between backups and archives. In a blog post I wrote last year, I suggested data protection as the appropriate … Read more

There aren’t many reasons not to virtualize servers in your storage environment, but there are plenty of compelling data protection reasons to go ahead and virtualize them all.  Most people have known me as a “backup dude” for more than 23 years, but if I wasn’t a backup dude, I’d be a virtualization guy because … Read more