Basics – Sizing NetWorker Indices
If you’re a longer term NetWorker user, you’re used to a particular number: 160. The NetWorker performance tuning and optimization guide (included with the standard NetWorker documentation set) tells...
View ArticleThe 15 Minute Rule
I still remember a conversation I had with a customer circa 2001 when we were planning their updated backup environment. Customer: “For those hosts we only need to backup one file?” Me: “One file?”...
View ArticleThe Perfect Cloud Environment is the Perfect Headache for Data Protection
It practically goes without saying that the smartest way to move workloads to a public cloud is to have them completely refactored to run as a SaaS based application. At that point you’re paying for...
View ArticleDisaster Movies: A Model for Data Protection
So, the other night, my husband and I finally got around to watching San Andreas, the 2015 movie featuring Dwayne Johnson. I’d heard at best average reviews for it, but it had two things going for it:...
View ArticleThe Four Horsemen of the Appocalypse
“And lo, as the skies darkened and the earth trembled, I saw them riding their pale steeds — The Four Horsemen of the Appocalypse: Apathy, Procrastination, Budget and Emulation.” Etched onto the...
View ArticleRansomware News
I’ve been tracking news on ransomware for a while now, and there’s been a few events of late that warrant greater attention. Data protection is an umbrella term: for some it refers to security, for...
View ArticlePowerProtect Data Manager Quick Glance
PowerProtect (the Data Manager software, and the storage platform) — the next generation data protection platform from Dell EMC, became generally available in the last couple of days, and while my...
View ArticleThe Changing Face of Computers On Screen
Note: I originally wrote this in 2012, on my ‘unsane.info’ blog. I’m winding that blog down, but wanted to preserve this post. Introduction When I first joined BHP IT Newcastle in 1996, I recall one of...
View ArticleCloudy, with a chance of data-loss?
How confident are you that the data you have in cloud is protected? That’s one of the questions I asked in the cloud data protection survey I ran as part of a book giveaway competition in June-July. In...
View ArticleBasics: Handling a Failed Backup
Ideally, our backups work all the time without an issue. That’s an ideal situation. Then again, in an ideal situation, we don’t need to recover — or at least, don’t need to recover due to data loss...
View ArticleTwo Things Apple Get Wrong Still With iOS
I’m a two-phone person. I carry a phone for work, and my personal phone. Actually, both phones are mine because I like to have control over the work phone I use – currently I’m using a Nokia 9 PureView...
View ArticlePowerProtect DD. Unleash the Beast
This week, Dell EMC announced a new suite of products in the Data Domain product family: the PowerProtect DD systems. These aren’t just a bump in maximum usable capacity — they represent a significant...
View ArticleBasics: Why Deduplication Block Size is Important
Here’s a topic that comes up from time to time: block size in deduplication. (Note here I’m using the term ‘block’ interchangeably with ‘segment’ to keep things generic.) If you’re used to Data Domain...
View ArticlePowerProtect Data Manager 19.2
It’s been a busy few weeks for Dell EMC on Data Protection product releases – you’d have thought the new PowerProtect Data Domain systems with hardware accelerated compression would be enough for the...
View ArticleYou want easy upgrades? Check out PowerProtect Data Manager
PowerProtect Data Manager (PPDM) 19.2 came out a couple of weeks ago, and last week I blogged about some of the new features in it. I did that blog while I was in Singapore for some training, and...
View ArticleBasics – Architecture Matters
Here’s a typical sort of challenge: you’ve got a workload running in public cloud, but there’s a strong desire to get a copy of the workload on-premises. Maybe it’s something like an Oracle or SQL RDS...
View ArticleLearning! From! The! Yahoo! Groups! Dumpster! Fire!
I have to admit, whenever there’s a news article about Yahoo!, my first thought is “they still exist?” This week was no different when suddenly they mentioned quietly on a support document that they...
View Article6 Reasons why Data Domain provides Unparalleled Ransomware Protection
Ransomware is practically a fact of life. Criminals, script kiddies and other malfeasant individuals make a living from Ransomware. Businesses are routinely crippled from the effects of this...
View ArticlePowerProtect with Kubernetes
If you’re looking for the current virtualisation buzzword, you’d be hard-pressed to go past containers at the moment. Fast, scalable and svelte, there are untold numbers of developers and businesses...
View ArticleBasics: Diving into NetWorker Virtual Machine Backup Details
When you perform an agent-based backup, mminfo will give you a saveset-by-saveset breakdown of what was protected. For filesystem backups, that’ll be a list of the different filesystems protected: /,...
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