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 [...]
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 [...]
Giving away a $50 Amazon gift card for answering a trivia question that could have been easily Googled was nearly impossible – though it did eventually happen (to a colleague, who writes here as well), even if it took weeks longer than expected. But I’m not letting that deter me… in fact, I’m going to try [...]
The drumbeat around enterprise cloud computing continues to get louder. More and more organizations want to have a conversation about how cloud can impact their businesses. Some because they need a defensible position on cloud for c-level bosses. Others because they want to be proactive and apply the benefits of cloud computing to drive their [...]