Most organizations simply do not like to think about their backup problems. To many their backup problems feel so overwhelming and the steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. (read more)

Exposed. That was the position that Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, found himself in more frequently in mid-2007 as he watched Herbalife's data growth explode and the backup software that he was using struggle to keep up. Much of Herbalife's new data growth was driven by its new corporate-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) software initiative that increased its production data stores from 32 TBs to 240 TBs of data. This growth plus new backup demands left Hansen uncertain as to if Herbalife could recover from data loss or application disruption should any type of outage occur - minor or major. (read more)

If one didn't know any better, one would think that deduplicating backup data is going to solve all of IT's backup pains. The current train of thought goes something along the lines of "Plug in a deduplicating appliance, point the backup software at the new appliance and, Voila!, the backup problems are solved." The only problem with that viewpoint is that deduplicating appliances alone do not solve equally pressing corporate data management problems and may even create new backup and data management challenges along the way. (read more)

Last Friday, May 8, 2009, the latest unemployment figures were released by the US Bureau of Labor and it was not a pretty sight with US unemployment rates reaching 8.9% in April 2009. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Granted, a lot of individuals are now looking for work but I also speak to a lot of IT staff who are still employed that now need to get their job done plus do the jobs of the individuals who were let go. These individuals need more integrated solutions that require less time to manage, not more. In that vein, the announcement that the Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) 8.0 will continue to be powered by CommVault (now in more ways than one) should be welcomed by enterprise organizations that need a robust and integrated data management and protection solution that extends across both hardware and software platforms. (read more)

"Scalability is one of the biggest pitfalls that managed solution providers need to watch out for." That statement by ESG's Senior Channel Analyst, Paul Myerson, in a recent SearchITChannel podcast highlights one of the new difficulties that today's solutions providers are encountering, especially as they begin to implement solutions such as archiving and eDiscovery in all size customer accounts. Even though each customer's environment is different, customers still expect their reseller to quickly and cost-effectively deploy these increasingly complex solutions and then support them on an on-going basis. Yet finding a solution provider that has the skill sets and can cost-effectively scale to meet these new customer demands is still easier said than done. (read more)

Streamlining organizational data management, access and protection from a configuration, implementation and support perspective has been a key focus of CommVault over the past year. This topic was obviously on the forefront of the mind of Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, when he and I met last fall and discussed in a series of blogs how CommVault was evolving to address this common issue in customer environments. That conversation foreshadows the growing integration in CommVault® Services between its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions and how this integration could become the new template for what customers expect all vendors to deliver going forward. (read more)

Today's release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy. (read more)

I regularly write about the inner workings of current and new technologies and how they can benefit organizations from a technical and financial perspective. But when talking to individuals out in the field who are actually using these products, it provides me with an entirely different perspective as to what specific benefits they glean from using them. In fact, when I recently chatted with InfoReliance's John Chirhart, a consultant to the US Government, he said that after he completed his recent testing of CommVault's Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore, he had to re-examine what data protection strategy that he should recommend to his clients and how they should manage data protection going forward. (read more)

The data archiving landscape is undergoing a transformation and no where are these changes more evident than in how companies archive data found on their corporate file servers or in their Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SharePoint data stores. While the impetus for archiving this data in the past was driven by either operational (save storage space or performance improvements) or compliance concerns (satisfy legal concerns), today's companies must take both objectives into account when selecting an archiving solution. But to do so companies need software that can access these application data stores, move the appropriate data and archive it on various kinds of media (disk, optical or tape) and then later search, manage and retrieve this data when it is needed from this media. (read more)

Savvy technology managers of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) understand three things about the rapidly changing nature of technologies in today's world. First, they know running their core business consumes all of their time and the last thing that they have time to do is track every change in technology and which ones are relevant to their business and which ones are not. Second, they also understand that if they are not constantly updating their businesses with relevant, cost-effective technologies, they loose their competitive edge in the market place. Third, they know how important it is to partner with resellers that they trust will act in their best interests, guide them in their selection of technologies for their businesses need and who can then support them as they grow. (read more)