| Backup Software news |
The SSD Backup Roadmap - new article coming soon
Editor:-
February 1, 2010 - in the next 7 days StorageSearch.com will publish a
new article which describes the roadmap for the barely nascent SSD
Backup Market to replace the enterprise
hard disk backup market by
the close of this decade.
There will be many technology and
marketing challenges along the way. It will require entirely new types
of SSD products and new ways of thinking about what the purpose of
backup really is. You
may be thinking - "SSD backup... This can't be serious! Is it April 1st
already? " You too will be serious - and may add it to your own roadmap -
after you read the new article.
New Image for Cloud Storage
Editor:- January 13, 2010
- a new article on
PCWorld.com
discusses on-low cost and no-cost cloud storage offerings from Google.
The
author David Coursey (and his commenting readers) make some interesting
comparisons with Microsoft 's SkyDrive.
Personally
I loathe the term "Cloud Storage". But I have to admit we're stuck
with it. So today I changed the graphic on the
online backup and storage
page.
The old one - with the tag about "Spellerbyte was
cooking up a new business plan which involved online web backup" - was
appropriate when it was first published 10 years ago - but no longer fits this
market's image today. (I resisted the temptation to use an image compatible with
the business metaphor of "sad losers" or "big black hole for
VC investors."
State of North Carolina chooses NearPoint to archive 1 million
daily emails
Editor:- December 16, 2009 - Mimosa Systems
today
announced that the State of North Carolina has selected Mimosa
NearPoint
to archive emails for 41,000 state employees.
Mimosa was selected as
the archiving vendor of choice from a pool of 29 other archiving vendors who
responded to an open state bid.
Symantec Adds SSDs to Storage Migration Classes
Editor:-
December 7, 2009 - Symantec
announced an upgrade to its Storage Foundation management software which
enables it to
automatically
discover SSDs from leading vendors and optimize data placement on SSD
devices transparently.
Editor's comments:- this is a tool within the context of a
complex and expensive
data
migration service - rather than an auto-tuning SSD acceleration tool. You'll
still need the SSD Hot Spot Engineer to tell you where to migrate those files
to. As we head into 2010 - Year of the SSD Market Bubble - you're going to see
the word "SSD"
appearing in a lot of press releases from
software vendors as a
way of making their products sound sexier.
Another Last Call for Tape Backup - from Storage Guardian
Editor:-
October 28, 2009 - Storage
Guardian has launched a 'Dust-Off Your Tapes'
campaign to promote its
tape to online
backup migration service.
"We've seen tapes stacked in
basements and hidden in dusty storage closets, and it makes you wonder what will
happen when someone needs to restore that information," says Dave Minns,
client services manager at Storage Guardian. "What we're telling
small-business owners, and the resellers and managed service companies that work
with them, is that the time is right to migrate that information from those
dodgy tapes to the safety of
online backup."
History of
Migration from Tape to Disk Backup
Editor's comments:- In the
decade that I relied on tape backup I lost data due to various causes including
- tape snapping due to optical sensor failing to stop rewind, tape submerged by
water, tape chewed up, and data drop-out due to bad media or dirty heads. In the
2 decades since I switched away from tape - I've learned that every other type
of backup also has its own peculiar problems and vulnerabilities too. The key
to data survival is diversity in media types and backup software. Any single
critical point can fail - and then fail again.
HDS will Remarket InMage's Appshot
Editor:- September
1, 2009 - Hitachi Data
Systems will co-brand and resell InMage's
Appshot
replication technology the 2 companies
announced
today.
InMage supports rapid, reliable recovery for various key
enterprise applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint as well
as Oracle, MySQL, BlackBerry Server, SAP, and any Windows, Linux or UNIX file
system.
New Disk Backup Article
Editor:- July 14, 2009 - a
new article is published today on StorageSearch.com
called - "Aspects
of Disk Backup".
Written by Andrew Brewerton -
Technical Director (Europe) - BakBone Software - the
new article comprehensively reviews the why? how? and where?
of today's modern enterprise disk backup techniques.
StorageSearch.com has had a decade
long affinity with enterprise
disk backup - tracking changes in the market since the concept 1st began.
This overview article brings that coverage right up to date - from the
perspective of a leading company in the
backup software market.
...read the
article
Editor Disaster Recovery
Editor:- July 10, 2009 - the
stereotype articles on our backup
and data recovery
pages are about dozy sys admins who hit the wrong button and delete all their
critical files.
Well - about 10 minutes ago that was me.
I
launched a delete from inside an application I shouldn't have - and my aim was
wrong.
I watched in horror as my html editor, ftp package (and all
its settings for all my sites) and web stats analyzer disappeared without trace.
It's the 1st time I've done such a silly thing in many years. But no
doubt I will have flashbacks - and my finger will hover over the mouse button
whenever I do such a deadly delete.
It took 5 minutes to fetch a
backup disk and reload the apps. It's only when I restored the 1st app that I
found the others needed to be restored too. How to avoid doing this again? More
cups of tea and coffee at more regular intervals. Water may be healthy but
doesn't have the same effect.
Cleveland Indians Fix Baseball Backup Headaches
Editor:-
June 23, 2009 -
CommVault Systems
today published a
case study which describes how the
Cleveland Indians migrated to
their backup software due to problems with Symantec.
The
Cleveland Indians were among one of the first teams in Major League Baseball to
develop a state-of-the-art video system to capture nearly 2,600 games
played by all teams throughout the season for use in training and advanced
scouting. According to the team it now takes less than 5 minutes to restore a
video clip that once took more than an hour to locate and retrieve. And admin
overhead has been cut from 45 minutes a day to less than 30 minutes a week.
Vembu Aims at US Online Backup Market
Editor:- May
28, 2009 - Vembu
Technologies today announced the appointment of Randy J. Whitehead
as VP of Strategic Business Development.
Reporting to Vembu's
President, Lakshmanan Narayan,
Randy will primarily be responsible for growing Vembu's business in the US and
Canada, with a focus on channel partnerships.
"Our StoreGrid
software solution powers the
online backup services
business of more than 1,250 service providers worldwide, and more than 850 of
these service providers are based in North America," said Sekar Vembu, CEO
of Vembu Technologies. "Randy's deep experience in operations and sales,
coupled with his years of experience in the online backup market, will help to
further catalyze our rapid growth in the service provider market."
Prior to Vembu, Randy was co-founder and COO of
Arsenal Digital Solutions.
Randy has more than 20 years experience in outsourcing solutions and operations,
system integration and business development. He was also at
StorageTek, where he
was responsible for the industry's first implementation of a storage utility
solution and the structuring of large outsourcing/utility deals, as well as the
operation and delivery of managed storage services. He has also held senior
positions with IBM, BT, Data General and AT&T. Storage People
Microsoft and Double-Take Collaborate to Avert Data Loss in
Virtual Servers
Editor:- May 11, 2009 - Double-Take Software and
Microsoft
have
collaborated
on a disaster recovery solution for virtual workloads.
"Tough
economic times are prompting IT organizations to reduce costs through smart
virtualization solutions," said Dai Vu at Microsoft Corp. "The remote
site recovery solution from Double-Take Software and Microsoft is a smart
virtualization solution because it eliminates
SAN complexity and cost
making it easier to deliver
high availability
and disaster recovery for virtualized environments."
BakBone Acquires Effective Assets of Asempra
Editor:-
May 4, 2009 - BakBone
Software has
acquired
certain assets from Asempra
Technologies.
Under the terms of the agreement, BakBone has
agreed to issue 3,846,154 common shares and to pay cash consideration of
approximately $350,000, plus accrued royalties.
Editor's comments:- an article in
TheRegister
speculates that Asempr's VCs
(having already invested $29 million) pulled the plug on the cash draining
Asempra. This brings the gone-away
storage companies list to 491.
Storage Guardian Offers VARs White-Labeled Online Backup
Toronto,
Canada - March 17, 2009 - Storage Guardian
has just launched a
VAR/MSP
program so that resellers can offer its enterprise-grade online data backup
service to small and midsized businesses.
While there's no shortage of
online backup solutions
available, many of them are designed for modest amounts of data and do not offer
bare-metal
restores, backup lifecycle management, and handle >80GB data.
Storage
Guardian's solution is
compatible
with server-based services/apps such as Exchange, Small Business Server,
SharePoint Server, and Active Directory. A 30-day no-charge trial is available,
and itcan also be white-labeled and sold as a branded solution by resellers.
Editor's comments:- If banks can fail - then why should you
trust ANY online backup provider with your data? - I discuss that in a new
article published today - Looking
back at the online backup and storage market
Idealstor Releases VMware Virtual Center Backup
GAITHERSBURG, MD -
January 29, 2009 - Idealstor today the release of iBac VIP for VMware
Virtual Center (suggested retail price $5,495).
It offers a
single license that backs up every virtual machine regardless of how many
ESX hosts have been
implemented.
"When we entered the VMware backup market we realized that most
backup vendors were ignoring the flexibility and cost savings that were inherent
to virtualization", said Nandan Arora, CTO at Idealstor. "Virtualization
offers a unique set of tools that enables companies to consolidate servers but
also to quickly provision new server instances as needed without having to incur
the costs of implementing a physical server. Most software companies on the
market today ignored this and released VMware backup solutions that are tied to
the number of virtual machines, physical processors or ESX hosts running on the
network.
" iBac VIP for Virtual Center was designed to turn this
licensing model upside down. VIP for Virtual Center lets you backup any number
of virtual machines regardless of the number of processors or ESX hosts being
run. The only limitation is that the backup proxy server will need to be able to
handle the load, but we feel that iBac VIP is affordable enough that if another
proxy server needs to be added to handle the load, we will still be far more
competitive than the existing players in the VMware backup space." ...Idealstor profile,
...Backup Software
Article Suggests - You Wash Backup Cares Right Out of Your Hair
Editor:- January 13, 2009 - AjaxWorld
magazine has published an article called - "Taking Backup and Recovery
Management off IT's To-Do List."
Author Bill Watson argues that outsourcing the responsibility for
recovering data is a better idea for many organizations than doing it in-house.
Coincidentally this is just the kind of service his company (Symantec
Managed Backup Services) sells.
See also the classic (2001)
article:-
Developing a Disaster
Recovery Procedure - by BakBone
Software which concluded "A Disaster Recovery Plan usually cannot be
written by the IT Deparment alone and should not be created for a given computer
or data center. Typically, effective Disaster Recovery plans are a long-term
project... "
A contra argument I suggest is that
backup and
data recovery are too
important to entrust to a single external service provider. In the interests
of data survivability you need diverse providers of this service (internal as
well as external) just as you need diverse backup locations and media types.
Where did my headline come from? - Listen to the song on
I'm gonna wash that man
right out of my hair | |
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| Squeak!
- the Fastest Growing Storage Companies |
This
is the 6th annual edition of this popular article, and is compiled from
analyzing the reported results from the top 1,000 storage companies.
The
top 3 companies had over 300% year on year revenue growth.
If
you're looking to team with successful storage companies or want to emulate
their success, this article will tell you who they are and the market segments
they are in. ...read
the article | |
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| Squeak!
- SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does the
fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It was
certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
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| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but
flash SSDs are
physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 412G in 2.5", 512G in
3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured
in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single
flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to
look interesting.
...read the
article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
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Sanitization
Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives - article by Intelligent Computer
Solutions
Removing the data on old unwanted disk drives has
become a concern for all users.
In 2005
Pointsec found that
they were able to read 7 out of 10 hard-drives bought over the Internet
at auctions such as eBay, for less than the cost of a McDonald's meal, all of
which had "supposedly" been "wiped-clean" or "re-formatted".
This article reviews the various methods available to sanitize hard disks along
with the advantages and disadvantages in each case....read the article,
...Intelligent Computer
Solutions profile,
disk sanitizers | |
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the
Dangers of Removable Storage Media - article by Pointsec
In the
early
James
Bond films of the 1960s, viewers were introduced to an array of implausible
(at the time) portable high tech spy gadgets. Nowadays we know from our own
everyday experience that something the size of a cigarette lighter can actually
be a video camera with its own wireless internet access.
The
proliferation of miniature high capacity storage devices creates a serious
problem for commercial and national security. This article provides an up to
date picture of the intrinsic dangers posed by current removable storage
technologies. ...read
the article, ...Pointsec
profile, Security,
Removable Storage | |
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Squeak! -
Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market
Animal
marketing metaphors are popular in service industries, but you'd be surprised
how many companies have used animals in their marketing of data storage
products and services.
The storage market was worth over $160 billion
in 2006, and as it gets bigger - more companies will turn to animal brands to
help differentiate their otherwise bland products and lend them artificial
(or deserving) characters and virtues.
The idea behind this type of
marketing is to suggest positive connotations so it's unlikely that anyone will
choose to associate their products with gremlins. But you may be surprised by
the population of the storage ark.
This reference articles lists all
known companies who have furry marketing brands, and also includes some which
are slimy, scaly and scary too. ...read the article,
Mice in storage |
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