For the last few years many IT organizations have been moving some workloads to the cloud but in my experience, most enterprises have a “no cloud” policy still.  That policy is, of course, not quite enforced and they have some cloud services being consumed due to shadow IT or Software-as-a-Service.  Most analysis today are predicting in the next few years the “no cloud” policy will be nearly extinct.  The problem many IT operations folks have with this is that you can’t outsource responsibility.  Now, what exactly does that mean? My favorite example of this has to do with what cloud providers think backup is versus what an enterprise thinks a backup is.  A cloud service provider things backup is a way to protect itself from failures they cause, but an IT operations person sees backup as a way to protect the organization against any conceivable.  The last thing they want is some VP calling and yelling atRead More →

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In my twenty years of enterprise infrastructure experience, I’ve noticed a few things that are universal to every organization.  One of the most universally time-consuming things about working IT is usually disaster recovery testing. We all know that business continuity is extremely important, but that doesn’t make testing and executing recovery plans any less expensive.  It takes compute power to takes full and incremental copies of the data and, of course, storage to house the backups.Organizations also spend weeks and weeks of people’s time planning, documenting, executing, and remediating disaster recovery plans.  Until needed business resiliency often seems like a waste of money and time – but that all changes when you need it. When finally needed everyone remembers what a great investment data protection is, but what about all the rest of time?  Can’t data resilience be more than a one-trick pony? The simple answer is “yes” it is possible to use all the data copiesRead More →

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At Mega Launch this year EMC announce a product called ProtectPoint which stands ready to change the way we think about backups in the datacenter.  With modern data protection solutions we struggle to maintain a delicate balance between backup performance, data protection, and recoverability. This balance has left us with host intrusive and backend intensive data protection processes on complex and costly backup infrastructure.  Many companies have looked to snapshots technologies to help improve the speed at which they meet stringent protection requirements, but snapshots are not backups unless the data is copied to a secondary media.  A snapshot depends on the original data existing and being functional. That means if the primary storage were to become unavailable so does the snapshot.  That is a huge gap in recoverability. EMC ProtectPoint will help you bridge the gap between snapshot technologies and backup storage media by combining the performance of snapshots with the functionality of backups.  ProtectPoint accomplishedRead More →

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Today EMC has released more information about something shown at EMC World called EMC ProtectPoint.  This new data protection offering brings direct backup from the VMAX3 to DataDomain.  In today’s work when a backup is kicked started data has to slow from the storage array to the application server.  This data then flows to the backup servers before being written to its final backup target.    Wouldn’t it be nice to cut out this middle man and write directly from the VMAX to DataDomain?   EMC ProtectPoint does just that.  This new offering will have native support for Oracle at GA, but I’m expecting this to grow quickly.  This will allow an Oracle DBA to use an RMAN directed backup to provide an extremely rapid and non-impactful backup.  The database will be put into hot backup mode.  Once complete, the VMAX data services layer will create SnapVX copies of the data LUNs.  After that completed the DB isRead More →

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