One day it was just an idea. Then it was a plan. Then it was a business. The next thing I knew, I was booking hotels, hiring support staff, making websites (and music videos!). Next Tuesday it all happens for real. The first Backup Central Live! will be held in Irvine, followed very quickly by…
Next month, BackupCentral.com will start coming to you. Backup Central Live! is a series of seminars coming to at least 20 US cities in 2011. Each seminar will feature independent content from W. Curtis Preston, as well as presentations from sponsoring vendors. These seminars will be free to qualified end-users. Topics covered will include the…
I hinted the other day on Twitter that I had some big news coming. I’m not announcing that news just yet, but I wanted to talk about the difference between building a company 10 years ago and building one now. The Way We Were February 23, 2001 I found myself summarily fired from the company…
Suppose a free event was in your town and someone was trying to entice as many people to attend it as possible. What giveaway trinket would most entice you to come? Please take a look at the poll on the left of the site and select which option you think is most appropriate. For example,…
Last year NexSan published a Buyer’s Guide on midrange disk arrays that was written by DCIG. NexSan got top honors in the guide. This week CommVault published a Buyer’s Guide on Virtualization Backup that was written by DCIG. CommVault was given top honors in this guide. The folks at Veeam objected to the Buyer’s Guide…
I keep reading all kinds of articles and tweets like this one from Robin Harris that predict or announce the death of parity-based RAID. (Not everyone agrees, of course.) The ultimate worry is that a second disk would fail while a RAID 5 group is rebuilding, or a third disk would die while a RAID…
In his Executive Keynote at Storage Decisions yesterday, Jon Toigo likened thin provisioning to the “Lane Assist” features of some new cars (the feature that warns you if you have drifted from your lane). He talked about a commercial that he had seen where people said things like, “I didn’t even realize that I had…
If you haven’t heard of Firesheep yet, read this blog article. It talks about a Firefox add-on that allows that use it to “sniff” the login credentials from other users logging into vulnerable websites. Once you see a user, you simply click the user in the list and Voila! You’re logged in as that user…
I’ve often stated that tape is still cheaper than disk, even after dedupe. I know that many dedupe salespeople try to tell customers that they’re going to save money by moving from tape to their wonderful deduped disk system; I just don’t see how that is possible. I’m absolutely convinced that tape is still cheaper,…
“My operations people want me to move off of VTLs as quickly as possible.” This was something someone said at a recent Dedupe School that I was speaking at in Seattle last week. The person who said this — I’ll call him Greg — happens to work for a very large company that uses well…