Blog categories

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

My blog posts and tweets are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of my current employer (ESG), my previous employers or any other party.

I do not do paid endorsements, so if I am appear to be a fan of something, it is based on my personal experience with it.

If I am not talking about your stuff, it is either because I haven't worked with it enough or because my mom taught me "if you can't say something nice ... "

The day I discovered Acronis

A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my laptop with an SSD primary disk – and along the way, I discovered the magic that is Acronis.

It was supposed to be a trivial upgrade.  Especially for a guy who does backup & recovery for a living, right?  My awesome Lenovo T420s allows for not [...]

Symantec offers Better Backup for All

Today, Symantec held live events covering the upcoming BackupExec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 releases.  According to Symantec, “Backup is broken” (I agree).  And they intend to be the fix.

Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO, started by offering “Every year, I stand up and talk about how data is growing … and every year we underestimate it.” [...]

Riverbed Granite extends iSCSI in a very cool way

This week, ESG Lab published its Lab Report on the new Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite.

It was a privilege to work with two ESG Lab Engineers, Tony Palmer and Ajen Johan, to do some hands-on with the new Riverbed technologies.

To me, the really cool part of Granite is how it changes some presumptions [...]

CommVault Simpana now offering "One Pass"

Today, CommVault is holding a virtual event to announce some of its latest innovations for the Simpana 9.0 product. I had the opportunity to do some early hands-on testing of a few of the new capabilities during an ESG Lab Review — including its new "OnePass" technology and its ability to integrate with Scale-out NAS.

[...]

A Look at the Amazon AWS Storage Gateway

Yesterday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of its AWS Storage Gateway, which acts as an iSCSI target, delivered as a virtual appliance.  On-premise servers can connect to the iSCSI device and store their data locally, with snapshots being stored in the Amazon S3 cloud-storage environment.

This announcement coincides with the publishing of ESG’s [...]

Mozy announces Stash beta

Mozy has announced the public beta of its new Stash offering.  The public beta is available to existing Mozy Backup customers, as an add-on capability that takes advantage of customers’ existing accounts, subscribed storage capacity, etc. In other words, it’s a great example of the convergence between backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and Online-File-Storage (OLFS).

ESG recently published [...]

Microsoft Ups its Backup Game in System Center 2012

[Cross-posted from my ESG blog – Technical Optimist .com]

Data protection processes and technologies are vital to ensuring an organization’s operational, regulatory, and financial health. As a result, data protection infrastructure is included in every IT budget and is top of mind for data center staff. However, due to the complexity and often high cost [...]

Video Blog on Dell Compellent Storage Center Thin Provisioning

Last month, ESG Lab released its Lab Report on Dell Compellent Storage Center 5.4.

Click here to read the ESG Lab Report on Dell Compellent Storage Center 5.4.

This project was interesting to me not only because of the technology itself, but because it was the first ESG Lab project that I had the opportunity [...]

Your Replication is not my Disaster Recovery

[originally posted on my ESG blog – TechnicalOptimist.com]

It wasn’t that many years ago that ‘Disaster Recovery’ was a key buzz word for IT.  Somewhere along the way, it became ‘Business Continuity’.   Now days, it is simply a feature of your backup or storage solution.  Or is it?

First, let’s talk through the layers from [...]

Stop Shipping Tapes – please!

Last week, I saw the latest disclosure on what is still too common – “backup tapes are lost and the amount of disclosure is under investigation” .

This time, it was 4.9 million military clinic and hospital patients – click to read original article.  The slightly abridged version is:

The lost data was stored on [...]