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....

We have seen some bombastic marketing over the last several months in the data protection space.  One vendor stuffed 26 women in a Mini Cooper, and Veeam called platform proliferation “the next big thing” when they announced intentions to deliver Hyper-V support in December of 2011 – despite it being available for the past three years from Symantec. Let’s cut through noise and look at some of the underlying facts.

Innovative, Established and Proven

•                Over 15,000 companies already leverage Symantec’s Backup Exec for Hyper-V support. What Veeam has announced has been in the market for 3 years with Symantec Backup Exec. 

•                Backup Exec protects over 75,000 virtual hosts (approx 60,...

If you are using barcode labels and a HP tape library, you might be interested in the attached document from HP.   In particular, on page 11, there is a table which specify which suffix denotes which kind of tape.

Symantec Vision here in Las Vegas is a fitting place for the announcement of V-Ray, our ability to provide unique insight into virtual environments for both storage and security.  Virtualization, like Vegas, is both new and old.  The old side of virtualization, as an attendee at Vegas reminded me, dates back to the mainframe days. I remember those days. And the new side, links to our world of open-systems.  Similarly, Vegas surprises you in its ability to take old material and create something new. So how does Symantec V-Ray bridge old and new together? In a word, it’s about enabling greater visibility into virtual environments so that customers can not only move virtualize more quickly, but maximize their new environments.

With a legacy of intellectual property around file systems, security, and storage, Symantec is uniquely positioned to help customers not only bridge the gap between old and new, between physical and virtual, but enable them to more...