From nursery rhymes (The Three Little Pigs), to multiple Biblical references, to modern day architects, there are numerous references to building a solid foundation before building a solid and sturdy structure, which should be build on a rock, not on sand. One can take these concepts and apply them to disaster recovery (DR) in today’s [...]
Hi, I’m Patrick Dunn, a new member of Datalink and a recruit to the blogging team. Here at Datalink, my primary focus is on helping companies develop and implement disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. For my first post, I’d like to explore suggestions that will help you determine whether your data center is prepared to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Recently, Mike Spindler and I had a conversation, and he brought up an interesting point. When we design storage architectures, it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re going to build the SAN/NAS solution to be redundant across everything we can: dual HBAs, redundant fabrics, high-availability (HA) storage solutions, etc. However, when we build backup solutions, that’s [...]
Recently, a customer asked me for further clarification on a proposed storage assessment. Wisely, they’d asked third parties to give them perspective on the value of a storage assessment. The third party, an industry analyst, came back with four major areas to address: Properly provision storage Maximize ROI by devising a data lifecycle tiering strategy [...]
In a different life, I managed a team of professional services consultants. Part of my responsibility was recruiting these folks. For a while, I was moderately famous for my interview questionnaire, which featured stuff about megabytes this or tape speed that. I used this process to weed out resume packers. You know, the people who [...]
One of the questions we’re asked all the time is whether customers should implement software or hardware dedupe in their data protection environments. It’s a good question, and as with most good questions, the answer is simple: it depends. “Gee, thanks!” You say. Well, the truth is that it really does. It’s even worse than [...]
We never seem to have enough space. I keep talking about the good old days when I did this or that, and it’s starting to make me feel like an old codger. But, there’re lessons to be learned in what we did before. So, let me tell you another story. Back in the day, disk [...]
Data deduplication continues to be a hot topic with many of the IT shops I’ve been to as of late – especially when it comes to sorting through technology options and optimizing deduplication performance in production backup environments. Check out my related white paper, “Using Deduplication: Five Steps to Backup Efficiencies.” This vendor-neutral white paper provides [...]