A reality check is going on in enterprises when it comes to cloud backup. While the vast majority recognize its value and are aggressively adopting it at many levels, the intangible issues of recovery and support tend to rear their head and preclude these enterprises from to date adopting a core cloud offering: cloud backup. It is these concerns that IBM and Symantec are teaming up to tackle so that enterprises may confidently do more than backup to the cloud - they can recover their data once it is in the cloud with a process that is supported end-to-end. (read more)

Using cluster file system software on virtual machines (VMs) in VMware environments has always been a bit problematic at best. While it could be done with techniques like Raw Disk Mappings (RDMs) and 3rd party cluster file system software, organizations need to sacrifice "desirable" virtualization features like vMotion to achieve it. (read more)

Virtualizing applications such that it results in the use of fewer servers makes great sense. Applications are centralized. Hardware is more efficiently used. Data center floor space is freed up. Virtual machine (VM) loads may be more efficiently and non-disruptively redistributed between physical systems. But then the realization hits. You have put all of your proverbial eggs in one basket and unless you have a real or near real-time copy of this data off-site, should a major disaster hit, your goose is cooked. The question then becomes, "What is the best way to get this data off-site?" (read more)

Everyone hates to deal with clutter and perhaps nowhere is this truer than when it comes to managing data. Knowingly or otherwise, enterprises tend to sweep data management tasks under the proverbial rug since they rarely see its true cost or feel its impact. That perception changed significantly in 2012 as more organizations are starting to feel the sting of being unable to find the information they need simply because they have too much data in too many places to effectively search it. (read more)

Everyone anecdotally knows that solid state disks (SSDs) are fast - like really fast when compared to hard disk drives (HDDs). It is just that the number of proof points coming from independent sources that conclusively demonstrate their performance advantage have been in short supply. Now proof points appearing on the SPECsfs website are confirming what people already suspect to be true: the performance of SSD-based systems is smoking fast with off-the-shelf SSD-based storage systems leaving their enterprise counterparts in the dust. (read more)

It was just a few years ago that "mobile devices" and the "the cloud" were blips on corporate radar screens. Fast forward to today and those blips are fast taking shape as major forces for which enterprises must account. As this occurs, organizations need to re-think the steps they take to control and manage information sprawl going forward. (read more)

It is no secret that almost any enterprise with performance intensive applications wants to host them on flash memory storage sooner rather than later. Yet what precludes some enterprises from hosting these applications on flash memory storage are concerns about flash memory's cost, application disruption and even how the data is protected once it is placed there. Using Symantec Storage Foundation in conjunction with flash memory solutions such as the Fusion ioDrive helps to put these concerns to rest. (read more)

Delivering high availability (HA) to applications classified as "business critical" in recent years has been as much a technical obstacle as a financial one that organizations have struggled to overcome. The latest version of Symantec's Veritas Cluster Server addresses these concerns. Now any application running on either a physical or virtual machine may recover almost immediately to a virtual machine (VM) giving enterprises the high availability (HA) they have sought without the hardware costs or VM reboot wait times. (read more)

In the last few years VMware has added a number of features to its core vSphere platform to address organizational concerns about the availability and uptime of their virtualized applications, to include High Availability (HA), vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vMotion. Yet there are still other aspects of delivering on the uptime requirements of mission critical applications that enterprises want that VMware does not offer. It is these gaps that Symantec's upcoming release of Veritas Cluster Server fills. (read more)

The ramifications of organizations not getting data under control are significant. Recent analyst studies find that structured data stores may grow by as much as 60% annually and unstructured data stores by as much as 80% annually. Aggravating this situation, once all of this data is consolidated, the hardware costs associated with scaling the storage infrastructure to accommodate this data growth may be a factor of up to 10x of what it costs prior to consolidation. (read more)