Archive for the ‘Backup’ Category

Lessons learned from the COPAN acquisition

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

The rumors of the demise of COPAN were rampant in late 2009. There was broad speculation that general operations had wound down and that the company was maintaining a skeletal staff. It was clear that COPAN's end was near and the management team was scrambling for an exit strategy. Most ...

Protecting personal data

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

This blog primarily focuses on protecting corporate data, but I recently received a call from my father that reminded me of the criticality of protecting personal data. My father called expressing frustration that his laptop hard drive had failed and corrupted his data. Fortunately, he had backup copies of his ...

Tale of the Tape: Musings on IBM’s 35TB Tape Announcement

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

A recent tweet by Chris Mellor from The Register caught my eye. He highlighted IBM’s recent development of a 35TB tape. Here are four articles on the topic: Engadget FUJIFILM Announcement The Register Article A blog post by Robin Harris at ZDnet My thoughts It is interesting to see IBM/Fuji driving tape development. With this ...

Lessons from the Sidekick debacle

Monday, October 12th, 2009

The latest scary backup story comes from a firm called Danger that makes the Sidekick PDA/phone. The Sidekick stores the majority of its data in a central data center and the data is loaded each time to the phone is restarted. The idea is that the data center provides ...

Streaming LTO-5

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Chris Mellor (twitter:@Chris_Mellor) recently posted an article over at The Register about LTO-5 entitled Is LTO-5 the last harrah for tape?.  He makes an interesting point about the future of LTO and whether LTO-5 will be the last generation of the technology.  Most of the comments on the article disagree ...

The Cloud, Company Size and Data Protection

Friday, May 15th, 2009

StorageMojo recently wrote a blog post discussing the results of a study by twinstrata comparing the costs and availability of Google apps and Microsoft Office/Exchange. The study showed that the Google apps were cheaper than MS Office/Exchange for a 20 person firm and the options were similar for a ...

War Stories: Diligent

Friday, May 1st, 2009

As I have posted before, IBM/Diligent requires Fibre Channel drives due to the highly I/O intensive nature of their deduplication algorithm. I recently came across a situation that provides an interesting lesson and an important data point for anyone considering IBM/Diligent technology. A customer was backing up about 25 TB ...

SEPATON Versus Data Domain

Friday, April 17th, 2009

One of the questions I often get asked is “how do your products compare to Data Domain’s?” In my opinion, we really don’t compare because we play in different market segments. Data Domain’s strength is in the low-end of the market, think SMB/SME while SEPATON plays in the ...

W. Curtis Preston on physical tape

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

W. Curtis Preston recently wrote an article on the state of physical tape for SearchDataBackup. He talks about the technologies that backup software vendors have created technology to more effectively stream tape drives. As I posted before, if you cannot stream your tape drives, their performance will decline ...

SEPATON Performance — Again

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Scott from EMC has challenged SEPATON’s advertised performance for backup, deduplication, and restore. As industry analyst, W. Curtis Preston so succinctly put it, “do you really want to start a ‘we have better performance than you’ blog war with one of the products that has clustered dedupe?” However, I wanted ...