How do you build an organic community?  And…pushing that question in a little more philosophical direction, if you work to build a community, is it still organic?  Stick with me on this because I am building to a relevant point.

Backup Exec is celebrating its Pearl Anniversary this year, (I just learned that 30 years = Pearl) and is about to add its 2,000,000th customer, not user, not individual but organization.  That is a long time and lot of people all over the world.  You would think a user base that broad for a product with that kind of history would have a large, well connected community of users and acknowledged experts.  Well.  It does but they exist in pockets, in cities and communities all around the world.  Where they don’t exist is online.

VMware has a pretty cool group of all-stars known as vExperts and this group shares their expertise and knowledge well beyond their local community or town.  According...

“I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years,” – Steve Wozniak

It is awfully cloudy at vmWorld 2012.  I had an interesting conversation with a partner we’ll refer to as CK.  Cloud storage was one of his top of mind thoughts for his customers.  For this particular partner, his three largest customers offer an intriguing mix of strategies for data storage

• Large law firm
• Hospital
• Graphic arts college

Each presents different challenges regarding storage, archiving and compliance.  CK is not interested in putting any primary application data in the cloud, but wants to make sure that there is redundant data available for his clients.  He is not particularly interested in putting his clients’ information into Big Clouds like Amazon or AT&T, but with nearly a petabyte of data from just...

Andrew Carnegie built US Steel using vertical integration to maximize efficiency and sideline competition. President Theodore Roosevelt concluded that Wall Street financiers and industry titans (like Carnegie) were more interested in serving themselves than their customers, and worked tirelessly to "bust" up these corporations. A century later we're still hearing the echoes.

In Singapore this week I've been talking with the APAC team and some of our top channel partners. My last blog was about a unified future, where backup is delivered as a platform and not a point product, and the feedback from this trip ties in.

This week EMC let slip plans to integrate Avamar deduplication and backup technology into VMware, raising concerns about vertical integration and vendor lock-in....

For those of you that may have been looking for a blog post last week that didn’t arrive my apologies; I’m sure you all have day jobs that can sometimes prevent you from doing the things you want to do as was the case for me last week. Moving on…there are a variety of new features in Hyper-V 2012 that I want to talk about and today I’ve selected virtual machine replication. There are a number of solutions available today that offer Hyper-V VM replication and I’m sorry to say that currently Backup Exec is not one of them. Truly, all data protection solutions are going to have to transition to thinking virtual first and physical second otherwise there’s going to be no market for them to survive; virtualization is the platform of the here and now even though there will always be some physical asset presence. The Hyper-V sessions at Tech Ed NA covered the Hyper-V Replica topic quite well from a presentation of the feature to a demo. In its basic...