I went to Fry’s today to buy something for the office, and was just about to pull out my personal MasterCard when I saw the AMEX logo!  Click Read More.
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Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Architect at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

I thought I’d do a series of posts over time about little known or unknown features of backup software.  First up is TSM and its storage agent feature.
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----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Architect at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

After sitting through four vendor presentations at Storage Decisions yesterday, I felt the urge to blog about it.  They ranged from mediocre to incredibly bad.  I’m certainly not the best presenter in the world, but I do all right, and I do think I’ve got a few tips to pass on.  So here I go.  (Click Read More.)
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----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Architect at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

I remember when I first started talking to Quantum about dedupe and they were trying to call their “immediate” deduplication “inline” because it’s happening at the same time as backup.  They eventually stopped referring to it as inline, as it does not meet the definition of inline dedupe that was around long before they came out with their product.  Unfortunately, now that EMC is now selling their Quantum-based product, they’re apparently trying to do the same thing – or at least one of their bloggers is. As usual, I’m drawing a very thick line between inline and post-process.  Click Read More to see why.

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----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Architect at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

I just posted a comment in Scott Waterhouse’s The Backup Blog that I didn’t agree that NetApp was the last major vendor to come out with dedupe.  Since that seems opposite to what seems to have happened, click Read More to see why I believe this, and why I think this is important.
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----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technical Architect at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.