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 [...]

Back to “serious business” after my belated April Fool’s Day flight of fancy. “Depends” is a word with multiple relevant meanings in IT. Thanks for opening that can of worms, Juan. As technology architects designing systems, we all live and die based on the ability to correctly identify, qualify and quantify need, and then build [...]

Data deduplication vendors constantly tout two big data deduplication selling points:  higher reliability and faster restores (compared to tape).  No doubt about it, these are important. And, we’ve seen some exceptional results with data deduplication practice in production environments of large and mid-size enterprises. However, vendors are missing the biggest bang for the buck especially [...]