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EMC's Avamar 5.0 and HP's DPNE bring backup with dedupe to laptops and desktops, but they each take a very different approach to backing up PCs.

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In a relatively brief period, VMware has gone from a small company to 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion. At VMworld in San Francisco, I got a sense of how that rapid growth leads to growing pains. For one thing, some of your best customers prefer your little competitors to you.

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In yet another chapter in our continuing series bringing further embarrassment to poor souls that were foolish enough to not have a viable backup plan, we have the sad tale of blog hosting firm JournalSpace. It managed to survive six years using RAID as a substitute for backups. But then data corruption struck and business failure soon followed.

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White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing yesterday that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 this morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.

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Sometimes it's the tiniest things that thrill me. In the middle of the gigantic TVs and the booming sound systems and the magic acts and the private suites and the thrumming parties was Ctera, an 18-employee company headquartered in Israel. When they showed me their device, I literally did a double-take (luckily off camera; very awkward). The CloudPlug is a tiny plug with a processor inside, an Ethernet jack, and a USB port, with which you can turn any USB device into a NAS and back up your data to Ctera's cloud-based service. And it's so damned cute.

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While online backup vendors like SpiderOak are offering discounts for displaced Xdrive users and AOL lists Dropbox, Carbonite and Box.net along with Elephant Drive as replacements for Xdrive users I agree with Matt K Olsen who commented on my last blog post on this issue the Elephant Drive was the best replacement for Xdrive users.

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Welcome to the silly season, when marketers decide their company's products make great holiday gifts. As InformationWeek's Master of Disaster, I get e-mail from all sorts of folks who think I should say nice things about their products in this here blog. Sometimes they try just a little too hard to make their products topical.

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At least the T-shirts they're giving away at backthefup.net do. As the site says, "Screw Klondike® Bars, What Would You Do For A Back The F:\ Up T-Shirt?" Turns out what you have to do is something that promotes EMC's Mozy backup service, like writing a blog entry.

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It's no surprise to readers of this here blog that the online backup market is hot. Even so, AOL has managed to fail at it and will be closing the pioneering Xdrive, founded in 1999 and acquired by AOL in 2005 for a reported $30 million. It will be shut down on Jan. 12, 2009.

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The merger of Brocade, the clear leader in enterprise Fibre Channel switching, with Foundry Networks, one of the group with Extreme and Force10 that keeps Cisco honest at the high end of the Ethernet switching market, seemed like a good match back in August. With Cisco and the HBA vendors (Emulex and QLogic) pushing FCoE as the best thing since Fibre Channel itself (iSCSI's just for kids, you know) Brocade had to team up with an Ethernet switch vendor to try selling FC/FCoE switches that users plugged into Cisco Ethernet gear down the line.

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CEO Jim Whitehurst says Red Hat will perform robustly through a recession. Is that true or is he engaged in wishful thinking? InformationWeek's cover story this week, "The Open Source Enterprise," concludes that open source code gets taken more seriously in a time of IT budget cutbacks. Will that help Red Hat?

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Riding the coattails of Microsoft's announcement of its hosted Exchange service Exchange Online, Cemaphore Systems announced that its MailShadowX product will sync Exchange Online mailboxes with mailboxes on an organization's in-house Exchange server.

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As SharePoint nears $1 billion in revenue, third-party software vendors are joining the party with tools and add-ons.

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Between the shift to disk backup and the economy rolling downhill, times are tough for tape library vendors. While IBM and Sun can shift their sales from tape libraries the size of a small Winnebago to their home-built VTL, the makers of midrange tape libraries are having a tougher time as much of their sales came through OEM deals with EMC, HP, or HDS and those vendors' VTLs don't pay Quantum or Overland's rent. Even media vendor Imation is hurting.

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The anti-spam vendor buys into the cloud with acquisition of an online backup company.

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Dell's backup portfolio is still a bit thin at the high end, lacking both a virtual tape library and deduplication (no, the CommVault-provided single instance storage on the DL2000 doesn't count). Currently, Dell customers looking for deduplication can buy The Data Storage Group's ArchiveIQ source deduping backup software for Windows or an ExaGrid gateway to an EqualLogic array through Dell's reseller arrangements with those vendors.

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Overland Storage's new REO Compass appliances take a unique approach to the ROBO (remote office, branch office) backup problem using data deduplication, encryption and compression to replicate backup data to a central site. Unlike Quantum's DXi or Data Domain's appliances, the REO Compass doesn't actually serve as a backup target storing your data but instead replicates data, through a partner, Compass, from one real or virtual tape library to another.

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The Dallas Morning News reported that the state of Texas is fining IBM $900,000 for failing to make timely backups as part of an $863 million outsourcing contract. Gov. Rick Perry also suspended the transfer of additional state records into the IBM system, claiming the new system puts state agency data at risk.

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Last month I wrote about my general misgivings about selling used data tapes for reuse. My New Yorker's general skepticism left me dubious that the few dollars I got for sending a box of tapes via UPS or FedEx to Joe the used tape salesman was worth the risk that some of my data might make it to Christopher the identity thief. Today I got a press release from Imation reporting that they purchased around 100 "recertified" tapes from "leading recertifyers as found on Google" and found recoverable data on 30% of them.

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All the attention that storage punditry, including this humble reporter, has given data deduplication in the past few years has pushed that old, reliable data-reduction technology compression toward the dust bin of used up technology in the minds of many storage users. That's too bad, as loss-less compression is still an important data-reduction tool. One vendor, Storwize, has made a nice little business for itself making NAS compression appliances and now it's claiming each appliance can handle 600 MB/s of traffic and archive 15:1 compression.

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In a coincidence so large I'm sure Richard Belzer is starting a conspiracy theory about it, both the San Diego Chargers at Buffalo Bills game this Sunday and game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Saturday were knocked out by technology failures. What is the world coming to? If the proletariat isn't feed a constant stream of sports entertainment to take their minds off the events of the day, the workers will rise up to seize the means of production, or vote. That, and PR folks have experts to tell me how they would have prevented these events.

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A new Nevada law (NRS 597.970) effective Oct. 1 requires that businesses in Nevada encrypt personal information whenever it is electronically transmitted outside the business by any means other than fax. Predictably, I got a press release from an encryption software vendor that said "Even if a business never sends customer information via e-mail, the business will be at risk if a server, desktop, laptop, or electronic storage device is lost, stolen, or compromised." The real problem is the law is incredibly vague.

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Not so many years ago, optical storage looked like the future. While hard drives held 200MB, magneto-optical disks stored 650 MB and that could be WORM (Write Once Read Many), making optical jukeboxes the only storage medium that could meet the not deletable, not modifiable requirements of the regulations Wall Street broker dealers and other assorted deep-pocket customers had to comply with. Now it looks like optical disks may join head-per-track disks on the scrapheap of storage.

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Dell's new DL2000 backup appliances represent the company's first backup appliances aimed at the midmarket, providing those SMBs that view Dell as their primary technology vendor with a turnkey backup-to-disk solution. Dell is bundling a 2U server (that looks a lot like a PowerEdge 2900 to me) with its MD1000 SAS attached SAS/SATA JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) external cabinets and enhanced versions of either Symantec's Backup Exec or CommVault's Simpana backup.

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While, as the mutual fund ads always say, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, knowing your area's hurricane history can help you with your Disaster Recovery plan. NOAA's new historical hurricane tracking site displays hurricane and other major storm tracks for past 150 years

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I don't know if the it was the heat or just a lack of better things to do, but drop-testing drives seems to have replaced Vespa jousting as the geek sport of the month in August. First Popular Mechanics magazine ran a portable USB hard drive drop test, subjecting several drives to higher and higher drops until they failed. Video here. Then Samsung tossed one of its laptop SSDs off the roof of its building in sillycone valley and, wonder of wonders, it booted the laptop they screwed it into. Video here.

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LeftHand Networks was one of the first vendors in the iSCSI market and has always had the best of the iSCSI solutions that runs on standard x86 server hardware. It has transitioned over the past couple of years from selling whitebox servers with its SAN/iQ software bundled in to primarily selling SAN/iQ as software, upping the ante this February by releasing SAN/iQ as a VMware virtual appliance.

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Anyone who's read this blog even occasionally knows that my mantra includes "Encrypt your tapes." At first glance, Brocade's announcement of a 32-port encrypting Fibre Channel switch and 16-port encrypting blade for its DCX directors provides a new option for storage admins looking for high-performance tape encryption. However, as I read the FAQ on Brocade's site I discovered that the initial release only supports encrypting data at rest on disk.

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Organizations that have adopted Macintoshes as their primary platform have long suffered when it comes to enterprise-class data management tools. Low market share, Apple's lack of enterprise focus, and a Mac system admins lack of knowledge of what they were missing have left this niche underserved. Seeing this opportunity, Atempo and BakBone Software ported their backup applications to OSX a couple of years ago and now Atempo's spread Macintosh support across its whole product line.

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Double-Take's eponymous flagship product was one of the first high-availability solutions for Windows providing asynchronous replication and failover even before Windows NT 4.0 hit the mainstream. Over the years, it has fine-tuned the data capture and replication core of the product while adding features to simplify the process of recovering common applications, making Double-Take Software the market leader for host-based replication.

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Symantec's SME backup software will be able to back up virtual machines from VMware and Microsoft.

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Now that we've all agreed that, while selling your used backup tapes on eBay or to a recycler may be good for the environment, it could also be hazardous to your employer and/or your career, the question remains: How do you dispose of old backup tapes? Do you just keep them squirreled away in storage, hoping to retire before you have to deal with it? Or do you just throw them in the trash, secure in the knowledge that the data is AES-encrypted?

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In the first announcement of new products since Dell acquired EqualLogic in January, EqualLogic's new PS5500E holds 48 SATA disk drives, boosting the maximum size of a single EqualLogic storage group to more than 500 TB. It also announced that it would release a software update for all EqualLogic arrays to support RAID-6 and software to offload the snapshot process from VMware Infrastructure hosts to the array.

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I got an e-mail today with the subject We Buy Used Tape Media, which got me thinking. In today's environment, where lost backup tapes get companies, and their storage administrators, in the newspaper, and possibly the unemployment line, who in their right mind would sell their old backup tapes?

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When NEC first briefed me on its Hydrastor product last year I loved the idea of a deduping backup target that used the RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) architecture based on standard Xeon servers. Now NEC's releasing new storage and accelerator nodes that boost capacity to 12 TB (raw) on each storage node and the data ingestion rate to 300 MBs for each acceleration node.

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Tape vendors have been having a hard time lately and nowhere worse than in the SMB market. In the 1990s, small businesses backed up to DDS/DAT tapes. But as the 20 GB (native) capacity of DDS4 became too small for even SMB full backups, no clear replacement emerged. ProStor System's proposing its RDX hard disk in a cartridge system as a good alternative and HP's jumped on the bandwagon, offering RDX docks in Proliant servers and XW workstations along with 160-GB and 320-GB HP-branded cartridges.

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With the biggest investment in disaster recovery and business continuity infrastructure since SunGard bought Comdisco's Availability Solutions business unit for $825 million in 2001, IBM has declared its intention to be a disaster recovery service provider worldwide. It is building 13 new "Business Resilience Centers" to expand its services beyond the mainframe-based services it is known for.

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Because it has just shipped the 20,000th unit of its midrange Scalar i500 tape library. Even with disk-based solutions, including Quantum's own DXi line, taking most of the mindshare for backup destinations, the fact that Quantum could sell 20,000 Scalar i500s in two and a half years is proof there's still some life in old-fashioned tape.

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Disk-to-disk backup appliance vendor Revinetix updated the RevOS software on its dedicated backup appliances to store just a single copy of a file or e-mail message across multiple locations and backup sessions. Their PR folks then sent out a press release saying they were adding data deduplication. The semanticist in me says "That's not deduplication, that's single-instance storage." I reserve the term deduplication for processes that reduce duplicate data contained in similar, not just identical, files or other objects.

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After a history of poor service and multiple cases of lost user data, the online backup vendor known as MediaMax and, finally, The Linkup went belly up this month, leaving users in the lurch. More important, how can you avoid losing your data when, or if, a storage service provider fails?

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Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the biggest electrical blackout in North American history. Some 50,000,000 people from Ohio to D.C. to Ontario (Canada, not California) were without power for up to four days. The mainstream media is covering the big picture and lessons the power industry can learn to make the grid more resistant to trees knocking down power lines. I wanted to take the opportunity to address the questions this event raises for IT.

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This morning VMware infrastructure users worldwide discovered that VMware's update 2 for ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 decided that their ESX licenses had expired when they attempted to start up virtual machines or use Infrastructure's Vmotion or DRS to move a VM from one ESX host to another. To put it bluntly, VMware customers had their VMware product stop working because VMware doesn't trust them and the copy protection code VMware built into its product did way more harm than any good it would ever do.

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Apparently there's some bad blood between Toronto-based Asigra and Robobak, based in Atlanta, as Asigra has filed suit against Robobak claiming that Robobak maliciously made false statements about Asigra and its products. While I'll stipulate that the releases did tweak Asigra's nose, I'm disappointed to see our Canadian cousins adopting the lawsuit.

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Introduced with Windows Server 2003, the volume shadow copy service (VSS) has vastly improved the lives of those of us whose lot in life includes backing up Windows machines. By providing a standard mechanism for creating and managing snapshots, VSS lets backup applications get data-consistent backups of complex data stores like Active Directory and Exchange or Oracle databases. Why isn't there an equivalent for Linux?

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Ever since its 2001 acquisition of Comdisco Availability Services SunGard has been the dominant player in the disaster recovery business offering a wide array of services, all based on physical hardware. Now, through partnerships wit VMWare and Double-Take, they're entering the twenty first century with a disaster recovery solution using virtual servers at the DR site to receive host based replication data.

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When I describe data deduplication to users for the first time, the first two questions they ask always are, "Is this for real?," sometimes rephrased as "You're kidding me, right?," followed quickly with "What kind of deduplication ratios can I expect?"

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It's not often that the geeks get to help put a bad guy in the slammer but as eWeek reports, the geeks at Seagate Recovery Services managed to recover the video of a rapist's confession that was badly burned in the transfer from the original camcorder tape. The poor DA didn't have the original tape and couldn't read the CD. Defense council claims the DVD has exculpatory evidence so the DA has to produce it.

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Every once in a while I see some analyst, usually talking about some backup to disk product, say "X% of all attempts to restore from tape fail" where X is some ridiculous number like 62.7. While I've been involved in my share of restore disasters from OnStream tapes and no OnStream drive to "We found tapes 1-3 and 5-8 do we really need tape 4 of that set" 95% were due to stupidity of some sort. So tell me folks what percentage of your restores fail? Good restore war stories also welcome.

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From the good news/bad news desk Sony has joined Packard-Bell (they still buy them in Europe) to bundle Spare Backup's agent and online backup service with every PC they sell. On the good news front this means more of the fashonistas that buy Sony PCs at retail will backup their data online.

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In an e-mail to Mozy resellers, EMC this week announced that it was dropping the price for server backups via MozyPro from the $1.75 per GB per month level they reached in February (see Previous Blog Entry) to 50 cents per GB per month, curiously the same amount it was charging before the price hike earlier this year. Server coverage is still $6.95 a month for each protected server, up from the $3.95 price that covered both servers and workstations in the distant past (2007).

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