Our field engineers get asked some tough questions. A common one is: “how do I change my backup product from vendor X to vendor Y?” This is a surprisingly rich topic of discussion. It turns out that making this change is definitely possible, but it’s not easy. There are a few reasons why: We tend [...]

Congrats to Datalink for being the first NetApp partner to achieve its Data Center – FlexPod specialization. This was no small feat for field and corporate-based teams that are beyond busy doing their normal gigs. The press release has the full details. But in a nutshell, we’re the first of NetApp’s top partners to meet [...]

I spend the bulk of my days talking to mid- and large-size enterprises about the virtues of data center virtualization. Migration paths often vary from company to company. Like anything that is transformational, barriers exist. Internal barriers fall into two groups: politics and culture, and new ways to think about IT. Virtualization also requires new [...]

As I continue to work with customers, the discussion around data center cloud strategies is definitely heating up. Many organizations are well on their way to creating a cloud / virtual data center strategy while many others are realizing an urgent need to define and execute a strategy. One thing I’ve noticed is that most organizations [...]

More than 300 employees just wrapped up Datalink’s Tech Summit event in Las Vegas last week. It was a grueling (albeit interesting) schedule. Three days were filled with a host of general sessions and more than 60 breakout sessions about data center trends, innovations, and best practices. Primarily led by practice managers (like me) and [...]

One of Datalink’s best traditions is our annual Tech Summit. We put our executive, sales, and engineering teams together for several days to learn from each other. Our vendor partners take the opportunity to educate us on their major initiatives and strategies for the year. We, in turn, take our folks and have them learn [...]

December isn’t the best time to visit Minnesota[1], but I’ll give the geography this kudo: it’s flat. And for some reason they make a good buffalo wing out there, even though it’s across the lakes from Buffalo, NY. Many miles away. I was out there last week with [[UnnamedCustomerWhoWillNotBeNamed]], supporting some Lab work to help [...]

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll no doubt have noticed that I’m a nerd thinly disguised as a semi-eloquent submitter of prose. Nothing should drive that point closer to home than the inspiration for this article. Today, while reading my daily torrent of RSS feeds, I came across a link to this [...]

As I work with companies to evaluate how to leverage archiving, email is top of mind. Many go on to research, choose and implement an email archiving and journaling solution. They enable the ediscovery functionality, and their legal counsels are using the tools. No doubt, email archiving provides a number of compelling benefits, including active [...]

Last month, Juan wrote a blog on the five fingers of backup administration. One of those fingers was storage. Storage means several things when it comes to data protection: the backup of the client’s disk, the disk being utilized by the master server to hold the metadata (catalog), the place you’re holding your backups (disk [...]