Data archiving with Blu-ray
Data archiving with Blu-ray: Silicon Angle was amongst the sites reporting last week’s acquisition of Optical Archive Inc… by Sony. The company built a storage system based upon Blu-ray disks, and Sony clearly sees an opportunity to extend the life and value of the blu-ray format it created. According to [Optical Archive founder Frank] Frankovsky, […]
Why It’s OK To Say No to Backup Appliances
According to IDC’s latest report storage capacity shipped grew 21.5 percent, while total disk storage sales fell 5 percent. Makes sense. Volumes of data continue to explode. And you have to backup that data to ensure you can quickly restore it, if needed. But budget is tight. So what are the options? Many IT professionals are […]
The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply […]
Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2 in a Single Click
In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud. I recently met Uri Wolloch, the founder of N2W […]
Syncplicity moves to Document Lifecycle and Workflow
I use a bunch of document and file synchronization, backup and collaboration tools. From SugarSync to Box.net, from Dropbox to Syncplicity I’ve pretty much used, and currently use, them all. One of the things that interests me from a business strategy perspective, is how companies that primarily sit in the backup and synchronization space manage […]
Now You Can Get Your Google Apps Data Backed Up for Free. Startup Econ 101: When Giving it Away is a Good Deal.
Ouch that’s a longish title. OK, I admit, I am tired, could not decide between two messages and ended up combining them. Well, let’s see the messages. The Art of Pricing The other day I got into a tweet convo with a Startup Entrepreneur whose product I found interesting, at least at first glance. But […]
Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)
A few hundred thousand (numbers range from 150k to 500K) Gmail and Google Apps users had the scary experience of losing ALL their email content yesterday. Their account was accidentally “reset”. Google acknowledged the error, and issued a statement that they are working on restoring “lost” content. Let’s stop and think here a minute. Is […]
The Appliance of Backup Science
With apologies to Zanussi for the corny title, I had an interesting conversation with Axcient CEO Justin Moore and HP’s VP for Channel Strategy & SMB Meaghan Kelly about the issues of helping small and medium businesses cope with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Yesterday’s conversation was taking place in the context of today’s […]
I thought I Was So Cloud
Last Monday, the hard disk on my primary computer failed. A Western Digital 250GB 2.5 SATA drive in a 6 month old Lenovo ThinkPad. Losing a hard disk is a terribly disruptive event. But I was (rightly) more annoyed about the disruption than potential data loss. The data loss didn’t really concern me. After all, […]
Dropbox – Envisaging a Future Well Beyond Files
I’ve been talking a lot recently to cloud storage, cloud synchronization and cloud backup vendors (all variations on a theme but they all have a different emphasis to what they do). Recently I had a couple of opportunities to talk with Dropbox, first with founder Drew Houston, and later with recently appointed SVP Marketing and […]
GDrive, Rackspace Cloud Drive, Syncplicity Drive – It’s a Veritable Driving Range up in the Clouds
Anyone who contends that we’re not reaching some kind of critical mass with complete solutions from cloud services should really look at what’s going on behind the scenes. Initially used for just point solutions by way of SaaS, and then infrastructure plays (Gmail replacing exchange, Amazon Web Services for hardware), we’re now rapidly getting to […]
Cloud Computing Does Not Absolve a Company of Good Disaster Planning
Yes the data blowout at Microsoft’s Danger data center should have everyone taking a short sharp look at the way that they do data recovery and disaster preparedness. The problem is not so much the outage but the data loss, data loss caused because the backups didn’t work. This is not a cloud computing issue […]
Smugmug Crashes
On a note left on the Smugmug Blog, a critical piece of infrastructure failed on Smugmug this morning leaving everything that was connected to the system pretty much so down. At time of writing logins are not working and the site is in read only. A critical part of our infrastructure failed this morning and […]
Big Gamble, Big Loss: the Fisher Plaza Datacenter Fire
Image via Wikipedia Disaster recovery, it is one of those IT 101 issues, there is no viable good reason to not have a hot/cold spare site in the day and age of cloud computing, data centers stitched across the planet, and while it is not trivial, the ability to synch all those systems into a […]
Zmanda CEO Chander Kant talks about Backup and the Cloud
Chander Kant is Founder and CEO of Zmanda, a provider of Open Source backup solutions that exploit the capabilities of Cloud storage services (such as Amazon’s S3) to supplement the traditional on-premise backup practices of their business customers. I spoke with Chander recently to learn more about the company, and to understand the particular issues […]
