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This has nothing to do with backups, but I just finished watching the first episode of Carrier on PBS and I'm feeling proud... Click Read More to find out why.
I keep running into a particular problem at customers and I'm curious if any backup software products have addressed it. Do any backup products load-balance their use of tape drives across multiple Fibre Channel ports? Click Read more to see more details.
A CNET review of Mozy's online backup software, entitled "Everyone likes Mozy, Except Me." makes one or two good points, but IMHO misses the boat and makes no sense to me, a backup person. If you want to know what he said and why I disagree with it, read on.
If you're encrypting the data on your hard drive using OS-level software encryption (e.g. Windows EFS, Vista BitBlocker, MacOS FileVault, Linux DM-Crypt, or TrueCrypt ), then a research study at Princeton University, partially funded by the Department of Homeland Security, has figured out how to read that data without your password. Well, that's just great.
I kept reading stories like this one that said that Quantum's dedupe is inline. Then I would hear from those "in the know" that said it was post-process. Different people at Quantum would say different things. Some would say that they run the dedupe at the same time as the ingest, so they considered it inline, although data is hitting disk before it's deduped. They say since it only hits disk for a few seconds, it's really inline. I said, "No it's not." So what's the scoop? Read on to see.
Odd title, you say? It was inspired by a Cybernetics whitepaper that I read this morning entitled "The Risks of a Disk-Only Backup Strategy." You can read the whitepaper yourself by following this link. While I actually have a fond place in my heart for Cybernetics, I think this paper isn't worth the paper I didn't print it on. Click "Read More" to see why.
Some of you may read this title and say, "No duh!" but I think it's worth talking about. From email to pictures to storage, if you're storing your data on somebody else's servers, it probably isn't getting backed up. Let's talk about that.
Tech Target and GlassHouse have agreed on the cities and dates for 2008, so I thought I'd share them with you as soon as possible. Maybe I'll be speaking at a city near you!
I've received a lot of questions about the different tape drives are doing encryption, so I thought I'd get some details and get back to you. This is the first of a few posts on this topic, and it concentrates on Sun's T10000 tape drive. There will also be a post on IBM's TS1120 and their LTO-4 drive.
Did you know that over 8 billion dollars in gift cards will go unused this year? They get lost; you forgot you had them; you don't have them when you need them; you get the idea. Don't let that happen to you by backing up your gift cards.
After hanging up on the 50th phone call where I recommend personal computer stuff to friends and family, I figured I'd do the same for my backupcentral friends. This blog entry will highlight what I think you should do at home to ensure a nice smooth computing experience -- and yes -- to make sure it's all backed up. I'll also mention a few things I don't think you should do.
According to a recent post on the NetWorker discussion list, EMC messed up a long standing default behavior of NetWorker. I didn't believe it, and it turns out I was right. ;)
Customers and audience members often ask about the maturity of deduplication. Is it mature? Are all products mature? Should you buy it now or wait? I thought that would make a nice blog entry.
Back in August, I posted a blog entry that 10 GbE is a lie, as no one who I had talked to had ever gotten more than 400 MB/s (3200 Mb/s), and I asked anyone who had done better to write. Well, they wrote.
A lot of FUD has been passed around lately about the probability of a hash collision when using a hash-only de-duplication system. What is a hash-only de-dupe system? What is the real probability of a hash collision in such a system? Read on to find out.
According to a story on Linux.com, Symantec's lawyers sent Michael D. Setzer II, the leader of the open-source project formerly known as Ghost for Linux (G4L), an email "requesting" that he change the name of the project (which has been called simply "G4L" for some time) to something else. Although the only references to Ghost or Symantec on his website was saying that it had relationship to Symantec or its product, that apparently wasn't good enough for Symantec. What do I think? Read on.
I did this podcast a few months ago, but it's now available on searchstorage.com. It's always interesting to hear what I said a few months ago to see if I still agree with it.
Data Domain has just announced that it is entering the nearline market with its latest OS release optimized for storing smaller files. What does this mean for the big CAS players on the block?
When speaking about de-dupe to general audiences, a very common question is, "Can TSM customers benefit from de-dupe?" The short answer is yes, but not to the same degree as customers of other backup products.
SysAdmin magazine was the first magazine to publish an article of mine, and they have closed their doors. (They've even notified their subscribers that they can get a refund on their 5-year subscriptions.)
In-line and post-process de-duplication are features -- not benefits. And I think that arguing about which one is better is like trying to argue which is better: synchronous or asynchronous replication. The both have benefits and drawbacks. What matters is whether or not the one you buy meets your requirements, right? I'll try my best to present both sides of the argument, and dispel a lot of what I believe to be misconceptions about this issue.
I know it may sound like an obvious statement, but I think all your backups should fit in one night. Not just 24 hours, but 12 hours or less. Besides the obvious RTO/RPO problems, it just messes up so many parts other parts of the design when backups go over 24 hours. A related issue is that I think it's a bad idea to push all your full backups to the weekend.
Live Free Die Hard is a good movie and a lot of fun, but I don't think I'll design my backups around it. (Spoiler alert: Don't click Read more if you haven't seen the movie.)
