When I first heard about cloud storage I wondered just what exactly it was trying to solve. There are many storage problems within the IT shop nowadays days, cloud storage can solve a few of them but introduces more and leaves a few unsolved.
Storage problems solved by cloud storage

Dynamic capacity – storage capacity is [...]

In a previous post I discussed what it would take to store 1YB of data in 2015 for the National Security Agency (NSA). Due to length, that post did not discuss many other aspects of the 1YB archive such as ingest, index, data protection, etc. Thus, I will attempt to cover each of these [...]

In my past life, I worked for a dominant tape vendor. Over the years, we had heard a number of times that tape was dead. But it never happened. BTW, it’s also not happening today.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was at SNW and vendor friend of mine asked if I knew [...]

I believe I have covered this ground before but apparently it needs reiterating. Cloud storage without backup cannot be considered a viable solution. Replication only works well if you never delete or logically erase data from a primary copy. Once that’s done the data is also lost in all replica locations soon afterwards.
I am [...]

My recent post on an exabyte-a-day generated a comment that got me thinking. What we need in the world today is a universal deduped archive. Such an archive would be a repository for all information generated by the world, nation, state, etc. and would automatically deduplicate the data and back it up.
Such an [...]

If backup didn’t exist and you had to start over to protect your data how would you do it today?
I think four things are important to protect data in today’s data center:

Any data ever created in the data center or on-the-road needs to be protected,
Data restores must be under end-user control,
Data needs to [...]

I was talking with a cloud storage vendor the other day and they made an interesting comment, cloud storage doesn’t need to backup data?! They told me that they and most cloud storage providers replicate customer file data so that there is always at least two (or more) copies of customer data residing in [...]

Quantum announced today that they are OEMing esXpress software (from PHD Virtual) to better support VMware VM backups (see press release) . This software schedules VMware snapshots of VMs and can then transfer the VM snapshot (backup) data directly to a Quantum DXI storage device.
One free “Professional” esXpress license will ship with each DXI [...]