The race to virtualize everything has created a host of unintended consequences, not the least of which is how to meet the SLAs (service level agreements) for application backup. As we move into cloud alternatives this problem will only grow since your cloud provider will have to provide this to you on an application by application basis.

Every virtual machine is essentially a set of large files such as VMDKs in a VMware context. These large files are typically stored in storage arrays which can be connected via iSCSI or Fiber Channel or on NFS volumes. Traditional data protection techniques such as VMware’s VADP, or VMware VCB rely on an agent to protect VMDK files associated with virtual servers.

Consider the following statistics taken from the Disaster Recovery Journal (Winter 2011):
• A single incident of data loss can cost a company an average of $10,000.00
• 93 percent of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more, filed for bankruptcy within a year.
• 40 percent of businesses that suffer a loss of data, fail within 5 years.
And while most companies and organizations have taken Disaster Recovery seriously, they often fail to take a proper BIA or Business Impact Analysis and properly test their plan for appropriateness; often resulting in losses.
A BIA or a Business Impact Analysis is exactly what it sounds like; proper research to determine what the business impact would be if an application, website, database, HR document, etc… were not available for given sets of time. Perhaps if a database were not available for an hour there would be little impact, but if it were down for a day, it would be critical. It is important to do an accurate study to determine where those pain points are for all aspects of your organization and review them regularly for changes in criticality. While this sounds like the absolute foundation for all DR plans (and it is) I have regularly encountered both government and private industry that fail to do this most basic step. They either consider everything to be critical (it isn’t) or they only backup a few servers that they think contain their most important documents/data. Neither of these plans accomplishes suitable DR.

When Microsoft introduced the Windows 2000 operating system, they introduced a new way of managing disks and the capacity they contained. Developed in conjunction with VERITAS Software, Disk Management in Windows 2000 uses the concept of dynamic disks to allow users to dynamically configure their storage i.e. no reboots. The default disk type, referred to [...]

With many of us experiencing explosive growth, companies niched in broadcast, media, and entertainment are left trying to figure out how to improve data availability while minimizing cost.  Here at DLT we are helping customers:

The Federal Government has recently embarked on an initiative to consolidate its 1,100 data centers – the advertised primary objective being cost reduction, primarily through energy savings. While a simplistic approach to consolidation (virtualize everything and use lots of Clouds) may be tempting, changes taking place in the IT industry argue for careful consideration of [...]

What you talkin’ ’bout, fool? Does anybody else remember the “A-Team” – Murdock, B.A. Baracus, Hannibal, and Faceman? When planning a mission, George Peppard – the one-time-“Banacek” star – and the “A-Team’s” Hannibal, coined the line, “I love it when a plan comes together…”

Storage Foundation Volume Manager Operations will co-exist with Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management) without any performance penalties.  VERITAS Storage Foundation Dynamic Multi-Pathing provides Seamless Multi-path failover capabilities and is complementary to ASM for both high availability and performance.  Customers who wish to use Oracle ASM and VERITAS Storage Foundation together should be careful to follow [...]

By now most IT managers have heard the buzz around “e-discovery”. Depending on who is asking about it or requesting it, what they expect could be vastly different from what you plan on implementing. With my experience of implementing and supporting e-discovery solutions, I hope to clear up some of the confusion around e-discovery’s nomenclature [...]

Ever walked into a hot data center and fear for the life of the machines?  Maybe while walking in that data center you tripped on a loose tile and did the Macarena trying to catch your balance just to end up taking a foot and a half drop because of the raised floor?  Well, progress [...]

Virtualization is very much on the minds of IT managers this year. Some have the vision of a low power, smoothly running, optimized data center; thinly staffed but capable of provisioning new users almost instantaneously (AKA ‘Nirvana’). Others see the nightmare of single points of (hardware) failure bringing down an entire agency, virtual machines migrating [...]