In a coupe of days time I will have been looking after Backup Exec in some shape or form at Symantec for eleven years. Sales, pre-sales, regional technical leader and now as Subject Matter Expert. In that time I've known software and that's it, really. Certainly, like any pre-sales guy I could make the hardware do useful stuff but it was software driven.

So what's with backup appliances? Software and hardware in one go. Some time ago Symantec launched the first NetBackup appliance and with a series of appliances now available it seems that the business is going from strength to strength. But It's not like e-mailing a license key or buying boxed product software. There are incredibly slick processes being running in the background managing the logistics and I'm in awe of the people who make it happen. I'm lucky enough to call some of them friends. They do the hard work so you don't have to; but more of that later.

Lauren Whitehouse at ESG had an interesting blog post a couple of weeks ago about the battle between two vendors in the virtual backup space and their childish twittering about who ruled more. It got me thinking about the mad rush by all vendors to capitalize on the virtualization movement. Somehow in the race to rule VMworld someone forgot to inform the real world that there can't be 4 #1 vendors in the same space. Unpossible! 

So Lauren, thank you for bringing a reasoned voice to the conversation. It is Twitter wars like the one that triggered your blog that have created a need for organizations to investigate social media archiving, something we added to the new release of Enterprise Vault 10 and covered in a recent survey. Putting all of the good...

Symantec wants to hear from you!  Were you a part of the decision making team to purchase one or more Symantec products, such as Backup Exec and Symantec System Recovery? Or, where you a part of the decision making team to vote against purchasing a Symantec product? If so, we’d like to hear why. This is a quick process (as little as 20-30 minutes), and for your valuable input, you’ll be entered into an exclusive raffle to win a 16 GB Wi-Fi enabled Apple iPad!

If you responded previously but didn’t hear from Symantec, we would still like to hear from you. Due to the overwhelming, but fantastic response we were unable to respond to everyone. So please do get in touch and tell us your story.

To participate, simply send an email  to schedule a short call at a time convenient for you. This call...

I noticed an interesting tweet today from Rachel Dines @Forester. It quoted Carl Meadows @SungardAS. 

"Common misconception: cloud solves our sys admin problems. Wrong! Cloud requires more skilled sys admins." 

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I drive down 101 to Mountain View from SF.  Each day someone gets in a fender bender and traffic continues around them. Sure, life is disrupted but it's par for the course. Sometimes car accidents happen. As I drive south I also pass under SFO. Each day 100s of planes take off. The expectation is that these planes will almost never have an accident. They are piloted by highly trained pilot while the car on 101 is piloted by someone like you and me. 

Cars are like servers.  Planes are like Clouds. 

• When a plane crashes the media shows up at the scene, the bloggers speculate....