Storage backup

Simpana jumps to the front

42 man years of work and 18 months of development. That’s the amount of time and effort that CommVault put into its  Simpana 7.0 Software Suite announced on June 10th, according to Dave West, CommVault’s VP of Marketing and Business Development.

While it is encouraging to note that...

Symantec got my juices going

There are few announcements by major storage vendors that really get my juices flowing, and the ones that reveal major new industry or products trends are the ones I find the most thought provoking. Symantec’s recent NetBackup 6.5 announcement in mid-June at Symantec Visions was exactly that...

Shameful disclosure

Word of tapes "falling off the back of trucks" is almost a once-a-month event these days, but the way companies handle the disclosure of these albeit embarrassing incidents is shameful. A coworker at TechTarget told me this morning that he had just recevied a letter from IBM informing him that...

DPM software: Makeover or coverup?

Arun Taneja and I have focused on the topic of data protection management (DPM) in recent posts. He sees what I also see – DPM software is undergoing a significant transition in purpose. While DPM software is not new and companies like APTARE, AGITE Software, Bocada, Tek-Tools, ServerGraph and...

Cross correlation engines reaching into primary storage

You have seen my writings on (and may even have heard me speak about) Cross Correlation (CC) analytics engine as a necessary part of a Data Protection Management (DPM) product. DPM products make your backup and restore environment work more efficiently. Recently, I have seen the application of CC...

Straight out of the 80s

Why is it still acceptable to the majority of us to protect and recover our data like we did in the 1980s? Obviously, backup software has evolved in the last 20 years to perform differentials, incrementals and synthetics, integrate with most major databases, take advantage of array-based snapshots...

“VTL” does not mean “PNP”

If you think data protection management (DPM) tools that monitor and report on backup successes and failures are going to disappear with the introduction of virtual tape libraries (VTLs), think again. It is easy to view DPM tools only in the context of an all-tape environment, since that is where...

Is your data on fire?

Is your data on fire? In this case, I am not talking about how frequently your data is accessed or how great the information is contained in your data? I am talking about literally on fire. Why do I ask? This week I am attending the PRISM International conference (

At the brink of the data deduplication wars

OK folks, the data deduplication war has begun. In the center of the war are vendors such as Data Domain, Diligent Technologies, ExaGrid, FalconStor, Quantum and SEPATON. It is only a question of time...

Square pegs in round holes

Do all companies fit neatly into the emerging corporate data protection architecture? The predominant model that most enterprise data protection products are pegging corporate users into is backing up data at their remote offices and then sending a copy of that backed up data to a central data...