“Makes you think!”

I’ve heard some pretty horrendous numbers relating to data growth including: data is growing at upwards of 100% year on year - at the current rate we will create upwards of 600 Exabytes this year. That equates to a pile of books from outside your window to the sun and back -6 times. Alternatively, if that blows your mind, if a byte is a grain of sand the number of bytes we will create, re-create, mirror, copy, replicate or duplicate in some form this year will exceed the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.

“Makes you think Part II - The Wrath of Data”

Even more worrying most of us are unaware where all this stuff is. Unstructured and semi-structured data is all over the place: on iPods, external hard drives, laptops, USB keys - you name it, we store it! Let’s call structured data anything that sits within an application or database and anything unstructured anything else - Semi-...

Symantec recently carried out a survey on DR habits and discovered that, on the whole, DR is possibly not as successful as it should be. Seems a bit weird when the same organisations surveyed said that DR has an impact on customers, sales, and revenue. Nearly one-third of organisations reported that DR will impact their customers, while over one-fifth admitted this could also impact their sales and revenue. Hmm, I smell a rat!
OK, it’s pretty simple for me to talk about, but implementing a DR strategy can be difficult. You don’t want to impact the end user or production systems, you also don’t want to make a mess of your infrastructure in the process of putting in the very system that is supposed to save your bacon. As a result approximately half of the organisations surveyed test their DR plans either only once a year or less.
Bottom line: Organisations are not testing frequently enough to improve their plans and are not using adequate tools to reduce...

We're very excited that Veritas Storage Foundation was selected as "Best Storage Virtualization" solution as part of Virtualization Journal's 2008 Readers' Choice Awards.

http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/921426

From their Web site it says that The Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Awards recognize the best tools, solutions, and platform offerings in 18 categories. Winners were selected through reader-submitted nominations, followed by online voting at the Virtualization Journal online magazine site.

We're also pleased to see that Veritas Virtual Infrastructure was selected as a finalist in the "Best Virtualization Management Tools" category and Veritas Cluster Server was a finalist in the "Best Virtualization Platforms High Availability" category.

Additional categories where Symantec scored high marks from readers...

Someone told me the other day that they thought that nowadays Backup Exec was pretty complicated and it struck me that it wasn’t so much that Backup Exec had become more complicated, so much as the infrastructure that had. I was routing through my desk draws not so long ago and came across a copy of NetBackup 3.2 a single CD which included Media Management, Clients and all Robotic Support - a single CD! It now takes a few more than that to ship a backup product. Backup has become largely distributed throughout most organisations in order to deal with the demands of modern business. But this does mean that we need new ways to automate the deployment, updates, upgrades, and licenses efficiently across the environment.

Many organisations run a mixed environment of many different versions of Backup Exec and at different patch levels. When managing a large Backup Exec installation, it may not be clear;

* Which versions of BE do I have and where are they?
* What...