The 2011 Brisbane floods were a wakeup call for Thiess: The engineering services firm's legacy storage system required a complete shutdown to migrate data, which had to be done within 24 hours in order to minimise any interruption to its business.
There's a dirty little secret in the disaster recovery
industry, according to Dave Simpson, who tracks the storage market for the 451
Research Group. Usually, customers require less recovery than industry vendors
make them believe, he says. But vendors charge customers based on how much data
they back up, when in reality it's rare for an organization to require a
complete recovery of all its backed up data.
If deployed correctly, encryption does not need to be a headache. Instead, encryption can be an enabler to achieve the flexibility, compliance and data privacy that is required in today's business environments.
Deduplication, a fresh idea only a few years ago, has become a commodity, with organizations of all sizes deploying deduplication as just another feature in their data protection and backup solutions. This is progress. More data centers can eliminate the redundant data in their backup and storage systems to save money and increase efficiency. However, the job is not done. With deduplication in place, IT leaders can move on to adopting intelligent capabilities to ensure data is properly stored and protected. In 2013 data center managers will push for global deduplication that provides flexibility, scalability, performance and high availability of data.
Online and offline, in IT departments and across organizations, the bring your own device (BYOD) debate is raging.
Robert wants to know if Windows 7's built-in backup program is worth using.
Peter's motherboard died. How can he retrieve the data on his hard drive?
Nag, nag, nag is what I feel like sometimes when talking about backups, but I'm compelled to help people in spite of themselves. The bottom line is simple: lose data, lose dollars. When you talk about some type of disaster, such as fire or theft of your computer hardware, the survival rate for stricken companies without disaster recovery tools and good backups drops into the “hope and prayer” realm of IT management. So lets talk about ways to insulate your company from disaster by playing like the Boy Scouts and being prepared.
Mention Shakespeare and everyone spouts "To be or not to be." Mention backup, and the question becomes, "To tape or not to tape?" Is tape dead, or do tape-based backup systems still have a place in the modern small business?
It can be a storage nightmare: Given expanding regulatory requirements and the key role that electronic records now play in lawsuits, some enterprises are saving every bit of data they have, just to be safe. As a gauge of storage demand, IDC says the total amount of disk storage shipped last year grew 40.5 percent from 2007.
Interest in modular data centers is growing, fueled by high-profile endorsements from Microsoft and Google. But the model raises new management concerns, and efficiency claims may be exaggerated.