Sunday, November 27, 2011

Latest EMC Product Lineup: MozyPro

MozyPro serves as off site backup for desktops, laptops, and windows servers. This backup software offered by EMC is ideal for either enterprise or remote-office environments. It can be configured, deployed, and centrally managed through a web-based application which is accessible anywhere in the world.

Some of the features and benefits include multitenan administrative console which allows the user to centrally manage end-user backups from any location through a web-based adminnistrative console. nIt allows for "Hot" backup of Exchange, SQL and VMware where the user can get native backup support while in production. The software provides you with a private encryption key.

The software is offered as a monthly subscription service and requires no hardware purchase.


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Sunday, November 20, 2011

SearchStorage: Cloud Storage - 5 best practices for moving to cloud.

I recently read an article from SearchStorage.com about the 5 best practices for moving to cloud. I will briefly explain what each practice is.

The first best practice that the article states is to scrutinize service-level agreements. Meaning to closely examine your service-level agreements before committing. Lauren Whitehouse, a senior analyst feels that data access is an area that needs close examination in an SLA.
The second best practice that the article discuss is to Follow your business needs. Businesses can save millions of dollars by creating a private cloud. Business now have an easier way to say consolidation, virtualization, standardization.
The third best practice is to Repurpose your own resources. Alex Godelman, Vice President of technology at Gorilla Nation said that cloud replaced more expensive NAS setup. In order to grow the internal cloud all you have to do is add more nodes.
The fourth practice is to Prepare for the future. The author of the article believes that even if you are not ready for the cloud you should still begin to think about how it can help your business down the road.
The final practice discussed in the article is to Beware of hidden costs. The basic cost per gigabyte of cloud storage will be given to you but the basic costs are only part of the bill. Providers may charge extra for data transfers, metadata functions, or copying and deleting files.







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  • http://bit.ly/kkyyrZ

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Network/Storage Virtualization.

Virtualization is the engine that runs cloud computing. There are many types of virtualization though. The main types are server, network, and storage.

When dealing with network virtualization many tend to confuse it with VLAN. Network virtualization is far more complex than VLAN alone. With network virtualization you are taking many of the traditional client based services and allowing access to them over a network. Cisco believes that there are 3 parts of network virtualization which are: access-control, path isolation, service edge.


When dealing with storage virtualization many people also get it confused with SAN but as before it is more complex than SAN. Storage virtualization can be seen as an abstraction at a layer in the storage software and hardware stack. Many data centers utilize Storage virtualization to run the cloud technology.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Backup and Recovery

Backup and Recovery is very important in Information Technology. A backup is the process of making copies of data which one may find important and would allow for one to recovery any data that may have loss. A backup strategy begins withe a concept of a data repository. Different repository models have different advantages. The different models include Unstructured, Full only/System Imaging, Incremental, Reverse delta and Continuous Data Protection.

Different companies specialize in created backup and recovery products. EMC being one of them. Their company is said to have reliable, efficient, cost-effective data protection for data centers, remote offices, laptops, and more. Some of their products include Data domain, disk libraries for the mainframe, as well as software such as Avamar and NetWorker.

As long as new data is being created and changes are being made to the data backups will need to be updated. It is important to know the different objectives of the backup process. They include RPO, RTO, and data security. RPO is the recovery point objective which is the point in time that the restarted infratstructure will reflect. RTO is recovery time objective which is the amount of time elapsed between disaster and restoration of business functions.



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