It used to be good enough to have your Monday tape and your Tuesday tape and what you did was … hmm, not working so well in today’s media rich business environment. VPN has meant I can work through my business network anywhere in the world - and WiFi more or less anywhere cable free and create stuff that isn’t necessarily in the right place to be backed up onto my Monday tape, or Tuesday tape. The only place I may struggle to work is on an aeroplane (which may also be a barrier that’s coming down) … and yet I’m writing this at 37,000 feet somewhere North-West of Munich.

Given that the messaging infrastructure and business file and print servers still seems to be separated by the red sea, a PDA to give me email may be good enough. Where a few years back more of our important business information resided centrally and less on laptops or desktops, or at remote offices, this now means that the chances are you are likely to be still totally...

Keep your business up and running - by discovering backup and storage management inefficiencies you can cut costs, while making sure that your data is fully protected. Highly beneficial at a time when budgets are under strain.

It is really useful to go through the process of trying to find out:

• How well your data is protected

 

• If you are missing backing up critical data
• How prepared you are for increasing data volumes
• Whether your strategy supports business growth or lowers performance
• If you are taking advantage of the most cost-effective solutions available

It never ceases to amaze me how well we don’t know ourselves. To quote Polonius, “unto thine own self be true”; the more honest you are with yourself the more accurate and the more useful the results will be. We know our business, don’t we? We know that we are doing the best we can, aren’t we? It...

If you are not on Backup Exec 12.5 you really should think about upgrading, if not for the new comprehensive recovery of virtual and physical systems, or enhanced granular data recovery, or the fact that Backup Exec is now integrated with the Symantec ThreatConTM system to automatically manage continuous data protection functionality in an increased threat cycle, but for the fact that the new version of Backup Exec enhances the management capabilities around managing disk and tape based backup - across the board.

The great thing about upgrading is its simplicity. Now you can run the Backup Exec Environment Check on the computer on which you want to install Backup Exec, before you actually install Backup Exec for real. This makes sure that the installation process can complete. If there are any configuration issues the environment check kicks out warnings that tell you if there are configuration issues that can be fixed or that will prevent the BE installation.

I would...

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that a backup redesign is sweeping through IT departments. I think everyone is aware that backup has been identified as a primary IT pain point. And the reason is pretty simple actually – disk. There is so much of it. You know that most companies approach the protection of their data in a very dated manner. Although backup and recovery has been around for years, data protection solutions of old are failing to keep pace with today’s overwhelming data growth and complexity.

Although many companies have started to deploy disk-based data protection in the form of virtual tape libraries (VTLs), much of the thinking in data centres and by vendors is still tape-centric. But not just tap-centric but, more to the point, NOT application centric, NOT site centric, NOT virtual machine centric. Protection is getting harder because data centres and remote offices have evolved. Server consolidation through virtualisation technologies...