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Our Most Popular Data Protection Posts of 2011

November 22, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

It’s that time of year again, when we look into our rearview mirrors and our crystal balls.  I’ll save my 2012 data protection predictions for a future blog post, although I will note that my “100% Accurate, Guaranteed!” predictions for 2011 all came true!

For now, I want to reflect on the past year of blogging. Rather than picking the topics myself, I’ll let the blog readers do it.  By that, I mean I will now reveal the top five most read data protection blog posts on the Syncsort blog in 2011 as calculated by Google Analytics.

#5 – Are Snapshots Backups? Yes Indeed!

I’ve done a number of posts around snapshots, and will continue to do so as I think they are critical to data protection. This post may have gotten a bit of additional eyeballs because at the time I was involved in a bit of back and forth with EMC blogger Mark Twomey, better known as Storagezilla.  Mark continues his opinionated and always-interesting blogging, though I haven’t had any reason to respond to him lately. However, I’m still watching!

 #4 – Talking with Netgain at VMworld 2011

Scott Baynes, CTO of Netgain, tells a great story about how his company, a service provider, is gaining serious data protection benefits from the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution.  I really like these customer testimonial videos because the best advocates of NSB are the people that use and rely on it every day.  If you like Scott Baynes’ video, check out this video with Campbell Alliance, also filed at VMworld.

#3 – Getting VMware Alignment Right

VMware alignment is a nice technical topic, the kind of thing I’d like to do more of in 2012.  I spent a lot of time in 2011 blogging about the higher-level benefits of NSB.  I’ll continue to do that, of course, but I think it’s time to dig a bit deeper into some topics.  This is also why we recently opened up our Syncsort Community site  to let Syncsort users and partners have detailed technical discussions around our products.  Join us!

#2 – EMC Replaces 3 Solutions with 4

I have to say, this is a personal favorite!  I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope I drew some compelling comparisons between the EMC data protection portfolio and NSB.  At the time, I made the statement that NSB is beating EMC 80% of the time when customers conduct product evaluations. That was back in May, and we’re still maintaining that win rate.  That said, the folks at EMC are formidable competitors and they continue to work on their products. Of course, we do as well and I’m sure 2012 will find us knocking heads more than once. We might have a surprise or two in store, as well.

#1 – P2V Migration in 10 Minutes

Perhaps it was the title that drew people in, with its “I can’t believe they can do that” effect. It’s true that NSB does indeed let you do 10 minute P2V migrations along with its data protection capabilities. What I find most interesting is how people continue to struggle with migrating to virtual machines despite the wide array of tools available and the fact that nearly everyone has at least some experience with the process by now. However, there’s always a better way of doing things, especially if you can do them in only ten minutes.

A sincere thanks to all of the loyal readers of our blog so far in 2011. We look forward to sharing our thoughts and exchanging ideas with you in the weeks ahead and as we move into 2012.

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‘Race to Recovery’ Taking VMworld 2011 by Storm

August 31, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

If you have been following this blog or Syncsort’s Twitter feed over the last week or so, you have no doubt heard of the ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge we’ve been running in our booth at VMworld 2011. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? All joking aside, the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution is so easy to use that show attendees that have never used it before are recovering virtual machines in record-setting times after sitting through only 3 or 4 minutes of “training.”

Through the first two days of the show, the current record stands at 1 minute and 8 seconds. Don’t take my word for it, check out the following video. For those of you attending VMworld 2011, don’t forget to swing by booth #527 for your chance to compete. While setting the new record and obtaining bragging rights is the ultimate goal, you can still walk away with an iPad 2 for scoring the best time of the day. Game on!

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Syncsort Announces Data Protection 4.0

August 30, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

As usual, VMworld started with a bang. The first night at the welcome reception is always the craziest. Nearly all the attendees wander the show floor simultaneously and there is a great buzz in the air (having a rock band playing not too far away only added to the noise and excitement!).  

The first three hours of VMworld 2011 were packed with non-stop action in the Syncsort booth.  We talked to literally hundreds of customers and propsects in that brief period of time, and ran at least five or six showings of our ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge (tell you the truth, it was so busy I can’t even remember the exact number of times we ran the Race – and I’m one of the presenters!).

Tuesday at the show, news takes the spotlight as Syncsort announces the upcoming release of Syncsort Data Protection 4.0, a key component of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution that we are demonstrating at booth #527. Here is a quick rundown of what’s new in the release:

  • Agentless VMware backup support. This provides management and ease-of-use benefits to users by letting them more easily protect virtual machines. (While Agentless backup has its place, we still think agents are important for some use cases – more on that in an upcoming blog post!)
  • Rapid VM recovery from Agentless backups. We are bringing our patented Instant Virtualization technology to the Agentless space, allowing you to restore entire VMs in less than two minutes.
  • Remote backup enhancements to better enable cloud deployments, for both private and public clouds.
  • Enhancements to storage efficiency (squeezing out even more disk savings) and backup management (major reductions in backup job overhead).
  • A new, improved user experience in terms of both user interface and documentation.

Version 4.0 is scheduled to ship within 90 days from today. Once we get past VMworld and all the non-stop activity, I’ll be blogging more about the details of these new features. We are also announcing today that EVO Merchant Services, the largest privately-held credit card processor, is using NSB to reduce backup and recovery complexity. EVO uses NSB to protect its mixed environment of 250+ physical and virtual servers.

Meanwhile, you can stop by our booth and see for yourself, and maybe even run a recovery as part of the ‘Race to Recovery.’  Last night, our iPad 2 winner was Sean Bettencourt, who recovered a VM in a blazing 1 minute and 12 seconds! Not bad for never having even touched the product before.

Yes, it’s really that simple to use, and that fast.  We’re giving away another iPad 2 today, so check the demo schedule at the booth and see if you can’t be today’s ‘Race to Recovery’ winner.

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VMworld 2011 Move-in Day: Chaos Reigns!

August 28, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

And so it begins. Having escaped Hurricane Irene by a few hours, I’ve spent most of today in the Sands Convention Center during move-in day for VMworld 2011. If you’ve never worked a tradeshow from the vendor side, you may have no idea of just how chaotic things are before the show opens. When you arrive as an attendee, everything is nice, neat and pinned up. Demos are humming along and vendors are in their polo shirts smiling and handing out squishy balls. But just a day or so earlier, it’s a mess.

Because words don’t do it justice, here is the view from the Syncsort booth (#527) during move-in day. I’ll make sure to post a picture of the finished product during the show!

As you can see, the show floor is littered with crates, pallets and boxes. Everyone is working furiously to build booths and connect up hardware and make sure a thousand little details are in perfect working order. In a way, it’s like what you do as an IT person each day: countless details to track, always the threat of something going wrong, and just when you think you’ve got it all down, you realize you missed something and you have to scramble to make it work properly.

I guess it’s endemic to life in IT, whether you’re on the vendor side or the user side. I’ve been at this for 18 years and like the French say, “same old same old.” Everything changes but it’s always the same. But it’s the changes that make it fun.

When I started in 1993 backup meant one thing: file backup to tape. It was slow and unreliable, but the best we had.  We tried just about everything to make it faster. How many of you remember Tape RAID? In a RAID 0 configuration, the idea was to stream a backup to multiple tape drives at the same time. Problem was, if you lost any of the tapes, you lost the whole backup because you couldn’t recreate it. It was as crazy as it sounds and practically nobody ever used it. To make up for that there was a tape RAID 5 setup, where you wrote data to two tapes, and a third tape was your parity tape (just like RAID 5 in the disk world).  If you lost Tape 1 you could re-create the data from Tape 2 and the Parity Tape. It was the same thing for Tape 2. And it made for nice, slow backups! Once again, nobody used it.  

Things have come a long way since then, but in some ways the chaos remains.

Here at VMworld 2011 though, we’ll be sure the chaos is over when the show floor opens on Monday night. We’ll see you there!

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