Category: General

General category for posts

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Should techies or business owners decide on technology (or both)?

It’s no secret that, in most companies, the technology folks are primarily the ones deciding on which new technologies to adopt – after all, they are the ones that understand the technology, right? Business owners explain the business problem to the technologists, and the techies take it from there – and ultimately present 2-3 different solutions that will work and the business picks the cheapest (and/or the vendor that employs the rep that provides the most golf outings).

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Is EMC under-sizing RecoverPoint and Avamar deals to win business?

It’s been a while since I wrote anything – unlike some, I actually have a day job and don’t use ghostwriters! Well, at least that’s my excuse.

My admiration for RecoverPoint is well known (see older post, which is referenced internally within EMC as a great pro-RecoverPoint article). It really is a good product and, next to VMware, my favorite EMC acquisition.

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Should your backups to disk consume more disk than you use for production? Seriously?

So, let’s talk about this not-so-hypothetical customer… They have:

  • A few sites
  • A lot of data per site
  • Much of the data is DBs and Multimedia
  • No replication currently
  • Can’t back up everything currently
  • No proper DR
  • Fairly significant rate of change
  • Not the fastest pipes between sites

They asked me to propose a solution that will back everything up and cross-replicate the backups between the sites. They want to move as far away from tape as possible.

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Ease Of Use, Backup and Recovery And Efficiency in Modern Disk Arrays – What Questions Should You Really Be Asking the Vendors?

It’s interesting how many storage vendors claim their products are easy to use and, indeed, show nice canned demos full of wizards and elves and whatnot that seem to impress most. There are also grandiose claims of magically reliable hardware and other pixie dust. Ultimately, the reality is that:

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About the Data Domain acquisition – and is EMC really the best place for Data Domain?

Much has already been written about this imminent acquisition of Data Domain by either NetApp or EMC and, since opinions are like you-know-what, and I have one, here it is… if I ramble, forgive me. I have too much to say and I’m trying to be PC… I wrote and subsequently erased all kinds of stuff that could probably get me in trouble (the more you work with a company the more dirt you uncover, and I have several earth movers’ worth).

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