The rise of the hyperconverged administrator
Hyperconverged is a hot topic in enterprise IT these days, and deservedly so. The normal approach to enterprise IT infrastructure after all, is a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle over a few years....
View ArticleCloud Snapshot Manager
Recently at Amazon re:Invent, DellEMC announced Cloud Snapshot Manager (CSM), the first iteration of an enterprise grade data protection control portal for native cloud snapshots. What’s important...
View ArticleBasics – Prior Recovery Details
If you need to find out details about what has recently been recovered with a NetWorker server, there’s a few different ways to achieve it. NMC, of course, offers recovery reports. These are...
View Article2017 in Review
With just a few more days of 2017 left, I thought it opportune making the last post of the year to summarise some of what we’ve seen in the field of data protection in 2017. It’s been a big year, in a...
View ArticleData Domain Management Centre
Data Domain Management Centre (DDMC) is a free virtual appliance available for customers with Data Domain to provide a web interface for monitoring and managing multiple Data Domains from the same...
View ArticleThe Perils of Tape
In the 90s, if you wanted to define a “disaster recovery” policy for your datacentre, part of that policy revolved around tape. Back then, tape wasn’t just for operational recovery, but also for...
View ArticleBasics – What’s a virtual synthetic full?
When NetWorker and Data Domain are working together, some operations can be done as a virtual synthetic full. It sounds like a tautology – virtual synthetic. In this basics post, I want to explain the...
View ArticleBasics: Planning A Recovery Service
Introduction In Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability, I talk quite a lot about what you need to understand and plan as part of a data protection environment. I’m often reminded of the old saying...
View ArticleData Protection Central is Here
The world is changing, and data protection is changing with it. (OK, that sounds like an ad for Veridian Dynamics, but I promise I’m serious.) One of the areas in which data protection is changing is...
View Article3 Simple Questions
In late 2016, I wrote a post, Falling in love with the IRS. In that post, I provided a bit of an outline on how an Isolated Recovery Site works. In this post, I want to instead ask 3 simple questions...
View Article2017 NetWorker Usage Survey Report
Introduction The NetWorker Usage Survey for 2017 ran from December 1, 2017 through to January 31, 2018. Regretfully, participation rates were lower this year than in previous years; ideally the goal is...
View ArticleYour servers are replicated? Your backups should be, too
I’m revisiting an old conversation here that I used to have quite a bit around tape, when companies had production and disaster recovery datacentres. The argument back then was that if production...
View ArticleRacing Backups
On your marks I’m not all that interested in sport. I grew up in a sports-mad family and spent a disproportionate amount of time exposed to sports as a kid, and at 44 I’d like to think I’m still...
View ArticleArranging by policy
A week before easter, I was doing some Powerplate exercises, nothing I hadn’t done hundreds of times before, when stepping off, I fell backwards, slammed into some other exercise equipment, and twisted...
View ArticleI Never Doubted My Protection
Network Attached Storage – NAS. It’s such an interesting beast, because it provides an easy solution for file storage within an enterprise that can scale into the petabytes and beyond with relative...
View ArticleSandpits in enterprise data protection
“Practice makes perfect” is not just a common saying, it says in three short words how humans learn to do things. You could sit and read as many books as you want to on how to play the clarinet, but...
View ArticleWelcome to the Data Protection Hub
The NetWorker Blog was born in January 2009 not long after the publication of my first book, Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy. Since then, I’ve published over 700...
View ArticleWorried about vendor lock-in? What about being a data hostage?
Years ago, one of the most common terms I’d hear in IT was “vendor lock-in”. It was, to all intents and purposes, the IT world’s ghosts-by-the-campfire or monsters-under-the-bed story. Imagine a...
View ArticleNetWorker Server Disaster Recovery Options
What do you do in the event of a disaster, either across your environment, or within your backup environment? What do you do when the NetWorker server itself stops working? Maybe you ran a physical...
View ArticleWhat’s Cloud DR?
Not every business can afford a fully functional disaster recovery location, particularly if it’s a smaller environment with a tighter budget. (Indeed, I recall a company I worked for a long time ago...
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