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 posts mostly about NetWorker.
NetWorker has gone through some substantial changes during that time, too. Around the time I started publishing, NetWorker 7.3.x was the latest and greatest, and as of this post’s publication, we’re now onto the 9.2.1.x tree of this world class backup and recovery product. It’s also had a bit of a name change, too – it’s gone from EMC NetWorker to Dell EMC NetWorker.
Things have changed for me too. Back when I first started the blog, I was working for a systems integrator, and that ran until May 2014, when I looked at where things where headed there, and decided it was time to shake it up and resign with no idea of what would come next. That’s not something I’d normally do, but it well and truly paid off – I was able to land a contracting job for almost 12 months with EMC, and as that contracting job was winding down, I was able to apply for a pre-sales engineering role in the Data Protection Solutions division of EMC in Melbourne. (At the time, it almost seemed that my blog had been the longest job application of all time.) Since then I’ve gone from regular systems engineer, to senior systems engineer, and now, advisory systems engineer. Which seems pretty appropriate, given I’ve spent almost the two decades, and particularly the last 9 years, doing my best to advise people of the best way to look after their data.
I published my second book, Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability in 2017, going well beyond just talking about backup and recovery, looking instead at the broader data storage protection continuum. After all, backup is not the alpha and the omega – there’s no such thing when it comes to data protection; it must be a holistic combination of technology to meet the needs fo the business throughout the lifecycle of data.
Fast forward to today, and I’ve decided it’s time for another shake up.
That’s why, starting today, the NetWorker Hub has become the Data Protection Hub. It’s no longer just about backup and recovery, and I’ll be expanding the focus on the blog to be about all things data protection. There’ll still, without a doubt, be NetWorker articles; after all, NetWorker feels like part of my DNA, I’ve been using it – and writing about it – for so long. But this blog is going to be about more than NetWorker – there’ll be attention, moving forward, to the rest of the Dell EMC Data Protection family. That means Avamar, Data Domain (and more than Data Domain with NetWorker), Cloud Snapshot Manager, Cloud DR, all of them.
And where it’s appropriate, I’ll also touch on the other aspects of data protection as well – security and privacy. The focus will remain data storage protection, but there’s definitely scope even in data storage protection to touch on privacy and security from time to time.
So if you’ve come for the NetWorker articles, I’m inviting you to hang around for the next phase of the journey. It’s going to be fun!
Awesome Preston