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News Analysis
Continuity Software Boosts Disaster Recovery IQ
All too often organizations conduct disaster recovery (DR) checkups annually, but in truth the periodic changes to an enterprise's software and hardware inventory demands that DR compatibility be conducted throughout the year. Today, Continuity Software is announcing their RecoverGuard 5.0, which lets organizations test their DR profile throughout the year to prevent possible outage and DR failures. The newest version of the software improves SLA management and adds extended cluster support along with a 200 GUI enhancement. It also plays better with today's IT management systems. However, missing from the mix is support for virtualization.
More News Analysis
- Cachengo Offers Premises/Cloud Backups For SMBs
- Backup Exec And NetBackup Bring Deduplication Without The Hardware
- Nexsan Greens Deduplication
- Verizon's New Mobile Internet Backup: Smart Enough
More News Analysis in Backup & Recovery Channel »
Architectures
Including Internet Load Balancing And Redundancy In DR Strategies
Town and Country, a Palo Alto-based SMB that has been doing business for over twenty years and provides premier placement services for nannies and home service workers. The company's thirty-five employees screen candidates and place them with clients. Much of this work is conducted by phone. Because telephony and strong network communications are vital, Town and Country wanted to ensure that calls were never dropped and that call quality was consistently high.
Reviews & Workshops
Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d: One Snazzy NAS
Feature-rich SMB and home office multi-terabyte storage products are falling below $1000, and these NAS devices support a variety of file protocols, are easy to install and manage, and now, don't cost an arm and a leg to run. The ix4-200d, which ships with 2, 4 or 8 TBytes, stacks up against storage NAS products like the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 or the QNAP TS-439, though the TS-439 has some more advanced features such as front removable drives and more RAID levels. After several months of testing and use, we can say Iomega delivers on its promise of a low-cost SMB NAS.
Blogs
We Still Need Storage Hardware Vendors
February 5, 2010 8:29 AM
Posted by George Crump
Let's face it, most storage hardware vendors are now really software vendors or at best integrators. They take their software stacks, buy storage hardware from an OEM and then integrate the two together. There are a few storage vendors that are adding additional value in custom ASICs, and some are customizing their software to take advantage of the hardware that they OEM. Most, though, are just loading their software on what is essentially an Intel server with external drive expansion capabilities.
See all blogs by George Crump
Deduplicating Replication - Atempo
February 4, 2010 11:00 AM
Posted by George Crump
Enterprise Backup Software manufacturer Atempo has entered the deduplication marketplace, as have a growing list of other software manufacturers. Hopefully, we can cover all or most of them in future entries. Atempo has integrated deduplication as part of its Time Navigator agent software that is installed on a server to be backed-up. Atempo deduplication is source-side, meaning not only does it reduce the amount of data stored on disk, it also reduces the amount of data transferred across the network. The agent that includes deduplication has been available for Linux, Macintosh, Windows, AIX and HP-UX operating systems. They recently added support for Solaris, Windows 2008 and Windows 7.
See all blogs by George Crump
NAS Commoditization
February 2, 2010 3:09 PM
Posted by George Crump
Does basic office productivity application data like spreadsheets, word processing and presentation files belong on a purpose-built NAS? Most NAS systems are now tuned to deliver high-performance storage I/O for applications like VMware, Oracle and large processing type of environments. Most are well worth the expense if the increased I/O can increase productivity or response time for customers but often are overkill for basic office productivity data.
See all blogs by George Crump
Is D2D2C The Next Big Thing In Backup?
February 2, 2010 9:30 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
Today CommVault announced that their Simpana integrated backup and archiving software can now use public cloud providers in addition to local disk and tape as a data store. I hope that CommVault is, as they were with deduplication, leading a new wave of disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C)backup and archive solutions. While I firmly believe that there's a lot of life left in tape, especially for long retention archives with relatively low access rates, 25 years of consulting to organizations has taught me that tape drives, like backhoes and other heavy equipment, should be left to trained professionals. Small and even mid-size organizations rarely handle tape properly, leaving them exposed to data loss.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
Dedupe Everywhere Changes Economics
February 1, 2010 9:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
With the new versions of Backup Exec and NetBackup due Monday, Symantec's finally joined CommVault, IBM, Atempo and most of their other backup software competitors by integrating data deduplication into their mainline backup software. Now that you can dedupe data your media server of your choice we have to ask the question "Where is the most cost effective place to dedupe backup data?"
See all blogs by Howard Marks
Opternity Knocks
January 29, 2010 11:00 AM
Posted by David Hill
You probably haven't heard of Opternity, a start-up company that promises a new "laser" tape technology for enterprise space that increases the capacity of a tape cartridge by nearly an order of magnitude, or 10 times, that of existing tape technology for the same media cost while at the same time dramatically increasing the tape's shelf life to fifty years. Why is this important? Consider first all the predictions about the continuing deluge of data. To paraphrase Mark Twain on the weather (and to exaggerate a bit), everyone talks about innovation, but nobody does anything about it. If Opternity misses its opportunity, we will all be missing an opportunity, but we won't know it.
See all blogs by David Hill
Best of the Web
Data deduplication: Declawing the clones
Data deduplication is emerging as a critically important new arrow in the storage administrator's quiver to answer hard questions about the increasing problem in storage growth costs.
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.
WAN Optimization Whitelists and Blacklists
Optimization is a fantastic way of saving money and creating really happy customers at the same time, but it doesn't work flawlessly for all applications.
WAN Optimization as a Managed Service: It's Not About the Cost
This insight examines how organizations outsourcing their WAN optimization initiatives to a third-party go about achieving their goals for application performance, reducing operational costs, and streamlining enterprise infrastructure.
