Many businesses have net utilization rates of less than 30-percent. But that’s not the only problem they face… unstructured data, inefficient reporting tools, aging systems, disparate protocols. I could go on. The question is, “How do you fix your storage system to handle current data loads?” I answer this in “Salvage Your Storage,” an article [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

FLASH is fast! That’s the banner everyone’s been waving for a while. We’ve all bought into it. I sure have. My shiny new MacBook Air with SSD feels much faster than anything I’ve ever had. As my teenager says, “it’s crazy fast.” Applications load essentially instantly. The same has to be true for the fancier [...]

Last week, I sat in on the kickoff of an exciting new Datalink labs project at our headquarters in Chanhassen, MN: a team of NetApp ninjas working with our guys to build a four-node ONTAP 8.1 beta V-series cluster running a combination of NetApp and non-NetApp disk storage under the covers. If you’ve been away [...]

We’ve all received messages from our IT departments stating that our mailboxes are approaching the company-defined quotas, and that we must “clean” our mailboxes to reduce their size. So what do we do? We can selectively delete messages that we “think” we don’t need, then of course Murphy’s Law kicks in and we need to [...]

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 [...]

All tech becomes obsolete at some point. I’ve had the pleasure of discussing IT with CIOs across a number of industries for many years. Surprisingly, only a few of them have told me that they worry about exit strategies for their technology. As simple as it might sound, at some point, all technology becomes obsolete. [...]