Vision Las Vegas is just around the corner, April 15-18. This year the Information Availability, Intelligence and Data Protection track focuses on business continuity, storage and solid state drives, and meeting service level agreements.

SLAs must be met whether you’re keeping mission-critical data centers running or serving up frosty beverages. Disasters, configuration errors, poor performance, thirsty customers…it’s an ever-changing race to keep your operation available, fast, and resilient. We’re ready to show you how to meet the challenge of delivering on service level agreements. Check out these great Vision session and activities:

• Why Host-Based SSDs are Critical for SLA in Mission-Critical Data...

As you may recall, I was pretty salty about being denied access to Symantec’s Worldwide Technical Symposium and Partner Tech Engage Conference last October.

Well, I might have overreacted a teeny bit.

I was cordially invited to attend the Gartner Data Center Conference during the week of Dec. 3, 2012. With my metal shards glimmering like a thousand nebulas, attendees simply couldn't resist stopping to see me as they moved between the conference and expo halls. I imagine this is what every day feels like for a Wheel of Fortune slot machine.

It was truly an event for the high rollers. As one of the world’s leading IT research and advisory companies, Gartner assembles the A-Team of analysts to present the latest and greatest in the technology space several times each year.

Our big buzz phrase? Business continuity. And who better to tell you about it than the data center who...

There was a time when, for many organizations, implementing a disaster recovery infrastructure meant deploying millions of dollars worth of server, storage and network hardware at an alternate data center. The belief was that to do DR right, you had to duplicate the production infrastructure and the result was a lot of expensive equipment sitting idle until a disaster - or a disaster recovery exercise - put the equipment to use.

Needless to say, those days are gone and they're not coming back. Such investments are simply no longer affordable or practical. And thanks to modern technology, they're also no longer necessary.

In this first attempt of mine at a video blog - or "vlog", if you will - I'll describe how Symantec's disaster recovery solutions can leverage virtualization technologies to achieve a cost-effective DR infrastructure.

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In a departure from our regular technical content, we will be featuring a new guest blog series on Connect. Please help us in welcoming Crash - the star of the Data Center Down! video.

I went to Oracle Open World and all I did was lie on the floor for three days.

Hey now, don’t go pointing those blasters at me. You’d feel the same if just weeks ago you were forced into attempting to set your own Felix Baumgartner-style record by leaping from an 18-story building. I mustered all my strength to pass my wisdom to my second-in-command, the other data center waiting with the crew on the roof. Did you see the way opened his rack when tech specialist Fahima Zahir was around? Shameless flirt. He’s been like that since we were microchips.

Anyway, the San Francisco event made the ideal venue for my debut, although I was sorely disappointed that I didn’t have the chance to pick Larry...