Greetings, earthlings. I’ve been enjoying some much-needed R&R off the grid for the first time since beginning our U.S. tour last October.

A thrilling trip to Las Vegas in December left my circuits fried, but our most recent jaunt to the 3rd Annual Red Hat Partner Conference North America was enough to put me into a post-failover coma. While in San Diego Jan. 14 through 16, our team marveled conference attendees with the fruits of our Silver Sponsor collaboration with Red Hat.

Meet the super friends

Director of Product Management Tom Harwood delivered a keynote session on the first day, explaining how employing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux data center basically enables you to create your own virtual Justice League.

Stick with me on this one: Let’s say that your business is Batman, Symantec is Flash, Oracle is Green Lantern, Veritas Cluster Server is Wonder...

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...

Disasters happen.  In fact, according to the Munchener Ruckversicherungs-Gesellschaft, Geo Risks Research, 355 events, from floods to tornados to tsunamis and earthquakes occurred in 2011.  IT organizations need protection from such horrific events, but also those that are more common place, for instance power outages and equipment failures.  

Here are a few interesting statistics from the latest Symantec State of the Data Center report (available later this year):

• 70% of organizations experience downtime from power failure (11.3 hours per outage)
• 63% experience cyber attacks (52.7 hours per outage)
• 26% conducted a power outage and failure impact assessment
• Median downtime per outage in the last 12 months was 5 hours
• Organizations experienced an average of 4 downtime incidents in the past 12 months

When most people hear the term "Disaster Recovery", they immediately think of data...

Many organizations believe that they have a solid and ready to execute business continuity plan in case of a disaster.  However, according to a 2010 Forrester survey*, “many organizations have lulled themselves into a false sense of security” when it comes to how they value their preparedness.  The survey also revealed that proper plans of planning, testing, and maintenance are not actively tested as often as they should be.  This lack of preparedness is a costly strategy in terms of revenue, employee productivity, reputation, among  other factors.  Specifically, the survey found that an average recovery took 18.5 hours with 4.8 hours of data loss.  In addition, according to a StorageCraft blog, in 2011, disasters cost $52B versus $10B in 2010.  These numbers clearly indicate that organizations must evaluate their business continuity...