Blog Archives

The Future of Backup is an Architecture Not an Application

While the applications that protect data have vastly improved over the last 20 years, they still often struggle to keep up with the technical challenges of data growth, shrinking backup and recovery windows and demands for greater disaster resilience. At

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EMC’s Backup Journey to the Future

The recent EMC Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) product launch covered a dizzying array of interesting BRS product announcements. Amongst these announcements was the unveiling of the final phase of the total hardware and software integration of their market leading Avamar

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What Does EMC Want With ScaleIO?

Storage Switzerland just received confirmation from one of our more trusted sources that EMC is actively in discussions to acquire ScaleIO. This makes some sense; EMC has a tendency to buy early stage Israeli based companies (XtremeIO and Kashya) and

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A Decade of Data Domain

A decade has passed since Data Domain began selling its first appliance and started evangelizing the virtues of data deduplication as an enabling technology to reduce the torrents of backup data in data center environments. The term “deduplication” was not

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Does ViPR Eliminate Vendor Lock In?

In a recent entry we covered a quick analysis of EMC’s first big announcement at EMC World 2013; ViPR. As we discussed this is EMC’s official entry into the software defined storage market. Potentially the biggest claim is EMC’s statement

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Analyzing EMC’s Software Defined Storage

Yesterday at EMC World 2013 EMC announced ViPR, their software defined storage product which abstracts the storage controller and the data services from the physical storage. Unlike other software defined storage it does not totally replace the data services available

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The Value of Real Time Backup Health Assessment

Change is good…or is it? The sheer volume and velocity of changes taking place in IT environments today is staggering. While change may be good for business needs, if left unchecked, improperly managed changes within the backup environment could deal

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VM Recovery In Place vs. Changed Block Recovery

One of the benefits of virtualization has been the ability to recover applications and servers more rapidly. Recently some backup software vendors have added the ability to recover a virtual machine directly from the backup image. A technique commonly called

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Faster VMAX and Isilon Performance

Another key theme coming out of EMC World Day 1 was a focus on providing a performance boost to EMC’s core storage platforms, beyond just adding solid state disk. The EMC Symmetrix family, the EMC VMAX, and their scale out NAS offering,

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Two horses in the Cloud race

The final theme to come out of EMC World Day 1 was EMC’s attention to the cloud. Cloud providers typically need one of two things from their storage. Cloud Compute Providers are often more concerned about scalable performance and Cloud Storage Providers

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