Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability

In 2013 I undertook the endeavour to revisit some of the topics from my first book, “Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate…

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Virtualised servers and storage nodes

A little over 5 years ago now, I wrote an article titled, Things not to virtualise: backup servers and storage nodes. It’s long…

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Testing (and debugging) an emergency restore

A few days ago I had some spare time up my sleeve, and I decided to test out the Emergency…

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Spy vs Agent

Since VMware entered the server space, a simple problem has plagued backup administrators: Backup via a clientĀ installed in the VM?Ā or…

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The problem with VADP

Virtualisation. It’s a fantastic blade to wield through a datacentre. Sweeping and scything, whole racks of equipment are reduced to…

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Technology is not the solution

Earlier in the year, I wrote a post, “Technology is rarely the issue“. In that post, I said: As techos…

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Survey – Virtual Backup Servers

I have to admit, I have great personal reservations towards virtualising backup servers. There’s a simple, fundamental reason for this:…

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Virtualisation and testing

Once upon a time, if you said to someone “do you have a test environment?” there was at least a…

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What’s missing with thin provisioning?

I’m stepping out of my normal NetWorker zone here to briefly discuss what I think is a fundamental flaw with…

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First thoughts – VMware Fusion 3 vs Parallels Desktop v5

As an employee of an EMC partner, I periodically get access to nifty demos as VMs. Unfortunately these are usually…

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