If you thought in the storage blogosphere that this week had seen the second coming, you’d be right. Well, the second coming of Drobo, that is. With new connectivity options and capacity for more drives, Drobo has had so many reviews this week I’ve struggled to find non-Drobo things to read at times. (That being said, the new versions do look nifty, and with my power bills shortly to cutover to have high on-peak costs and high “not quite on-peak” costs, one or two Drobos may just do the trick as far as reducing the high number of external drives I have at any given point in time.)
Tearing myself away from non-Drobo news, over at Going Virtual, Brian has an excellent overview of NetWorker v7.6 Virtualisation Features. (I’m starting to think that the main reason why I don’t get into VCBs much though is the ongoing limited support for anything other than Windows.)
At The Backup Blog, Scott asks the perennial question, Do You Need Backup? The answer, unsurprisingly is yes – that was a given. What remains depressing is that backup consultants such as Scott and myself still need to answer that question!
StorageZilla has started Parting Shot, a fairly rapid fire mini-blogging area with frequent updates that are often great to read, so it’s worth bookmarking and returning to it frequently.
Over at PenguinPunk, Dan has been having such a hard time with Mozy that it’s making me question my continued use of them – particularly when bandwidth in Australia is often index-locked to the price of gold. [Edit: Make that has convinced me to cancel my use of them, particularly in light of a couple of recent glitches I’ve had myself with it.]
Palm continues to demonstrate why it’s a dead company walking with the latest mobile backup scare coming from their department. I’d have prepared a blog entry about it, but I don’t like blogging about dead things.
Grumpy Storage asks for comments and feedback on storage LUN sizings and standards. I think a lot of it is governed by the question “how long is a piece of string”, but there are some interesting points regarding procurement and performance that are useful to have stuck in your head next time you go to bind a LUN or plan a SAN.
Finally, the Buzzword Compliance (aka “Yawn”) award goes to this quote from Lauren Whitehouse of the “Enterprise Strategy Group” that got quoted on half a zillion websites covering EMC’s release of Avamar v5:
“Data deduplicated on tape can expire at different rates — CommVault and [IBM] TSM have a pretty good handle on that,” she said. “EMC Avamar positions the feature for very long retention, but as far as a long-term repository, it would seem to be easy for them to implement a cloud connection for EMC Avamar, given their other products like Mozy, rather than the whole dedupe-on-tape thing.”
(That Lauren quote, for the record, came from Search Storage – but it reads the same pretty much anywhere you find it.)
Honestly, Cloud Cloud Cloud. Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud. Look, there’s a product! Why doesn’t it have Cloud!? As you can tell, my Cloud Filter is getting a little strained these days.
Don’t even get me started on the crazy assumption that just because a company owns A and B they can merge A and B with the wave of a magic wand. Getting two disparate development teams to merge disparate code in a rush, rather than as a gradual evolution, is usually akin to seeing if you can merge a face and a brick together. Sure, it’ll work, but it won’t be pretty.