Archive for September, 2008

Exchange deduplication ratio guarantee

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Scott over at EMC recently posted his thoughts about deduplication ratios and how they vary widely. I agree with his assessment that compression ratios, change rates and retention are key ingredients in deduplication ratios. However, he makes a global statement, “If you don't know those three things, you ...

The hidden cost of deduplicated replication

Friday, September 26th, 2008

On the surface, the idea of deduplicated replication is compelling. By replicating deltas, the technology sends data across a WAN and dramaically reduces the required bandwidth. Many customers are looking to this technology to allow them to move to a tapeless environment in the future. However, there ...

Data protection and natural disasters – Part 2

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

In part 1, I touched on four of the most common challenges with data restoration in a disaster scenario. In this post, I will review some other key considerations. These examples focus on the infrastructure required after a disaster has occurred. Related posts:Data protection and natural disasters – Part ...

Data protection and natural disasters – Part 1

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Hurricane Ike has been in the news lately and my sympathy goes out to all those affected. It is events like these that test IT resiliency. The damage can range from slight to severe and we invest in reliable and robust data protection processes to protect from disasters ...

A little bit off topic – deduplication and primary storage

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I am digressing slightly from my usual data protection focus, but I found a recent announcement from Riverbed very interesting. They are developing a deduplication solution for primary storage. As an employee of a vendor of deduplication solutions, I wanted to provide commentary. First some background, Riverbed makes a ...

InformationWeek on NEC HYDRAstor

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Howard Marks recently posted an interesting article about NEC’s HYDRAstor over on his blog at InformationWeek. He discusses the product and how the device is targeted at backup and archiving applications. He makes some interesting points and mentions SEPATON. I wanted to respond to some of the ...

IBM Storage Announcement

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

As previously posted, I was confused about the muted launch of IBM’s XIV disk platform. Well, the formal launch finally occurred at IBM Storage Symposium in Montpelier, France. Congratulations to IBM, although I am still left scratching my head why they informally announced the product a month ago! Another ...

Keeping it Factual

Friday, September 5th, 2008

I periodically peruse the blogosphere looking for interesting articles on storage, data protection and deduplication. As you can imagine, blog content varies from highly product centric (usually from vendors) to product agnostic (usually from analysts). I recently ran across a post over at the Data Domain blog, Dedupe ...

Industry analysts and conflicts

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Just last week I posted commentary on an analyst’s article on eWeek. Ironically, there is currently a hot discussion going on over at ByteandSwitch on another article from the same analyst. (I am purposely not linking to the article, if you want to read it visit B&S and look ...