Archive for October, 2008

NetApp Dedupe: The Worst of Inline and Post-process Deduplication

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

NetApp finally entered the world of deduplication in data protection. While they have supported a flavor of the technology in their filers since May 2007, they have never launched the technology for their VTL. Why? Because their VTL does not use any of the core filer IP. ...

Deduplication: It’s About Performance

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

I have recently been thinking about the real benefits of deduplication. Although the technology is all about capacity, when you analyze the cost and benefits in the real world, the thing that jumps out at you is performance. Performance is the key driver in sizing and assessing the number of ...

Tradeshow giveaway gone bad: the video

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Tradeshow marketers spend hours trying to scheme up new and unique programs to drive booth traffic and these often include free giveaways. Ironically, the simplest things such as t-shirts or bags can be good traffic generators, and it is amazing that people can get so excited about tchotchkes that ...

HIFN – Commoditizing hash-based deduplication?

Friday, October 17th, 2008

HIFN recently announced a card that accelerates hash-based deduplication. For those unfamiliar with HIFN, they provide infrastructure components that accelerate CPU intensive processes such as compression, encryption and now deduplication. The products are primarily embedded inside appliances, and you may be using one of their products today. The interesting ...

How a lack of innovation put Overland under water

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

I wanted to post a quick commentary on Overland Data. I recently ran across this post over at The Register that discusses the fact that Overland Data is at risk of being delisted from the NASDAQ due to a stock price below $1. (Ticker: OVRL, currently $.45) In a past life, I ...

Blog commenting

Friday, October 10th, 2008

W. Curtis Preston the author of the Mr. Backup Blog recently voiced his frustration with certain bloggers censoring visitor comments. He was annoyed that some folks from EMC configured their blogs for comment moderation (all comments must be approved before they appear on the site) and used the ...

Inline Deduplication: What Your Mother Never Told You

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

I was recently attending a show and enjoyed speaking with a variety of end users with different levels of interest and knowledge. One of the things that I found was that attendees were obsessed with the question of inline vs post process vs concurrent process deduplication. Literally, people ...

Tradeshow perspectives

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

I spent last week at a tradeshow in New York. These events are interesting because of the various end user perspectives. Those of us in the industry often get embroiled in the minutiae of products and features, and so it is very useful to understand the views of the ...

AboutRestore.com recognition

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

W. Curtis Preston the author of the Mr. Backup Blog recently posted an article about the blogs that he frequents. I was honored that he recognized AboutRestore.com along with blogs from other major vendors. Curtis mentioned his frustration with the comment filtering policies on some blogs and I wanted to ...