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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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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