Falconstor Community

Yesterday Searchstorage.com published a Q&A with Curtis Preston, widely known as Mr. Backup. The topic was around the use of snapshot technology for data backups – basically a look at the increased use of SAN-based technology as an alternative or complement to traditional backup solutions.

Curtis brings some great points to the discussion and argues that, if you want better backup, snapshots is the way to go. I tend to agree with him. I’ll try to answer some of the questions that he leaves open, since the question of backup transformation is probably broader than I can cover in one or even a few blogs. The poignant fact that Curtis points out at the end of the Q&A is this: “…the backup and recovery space moves at a glacial pace. Backup people, by nature, are paranoid.” Therefore, I think it’s up to us as a collective – vendors, subject matter experts, and industry analysts in conjunction with end users – to redefine that space.

The world, it seems, has gone virtual.

The boon in virtualization in the data center in recent years has been huge, and the reasons are clear.  Virtualization not only saves resources, it creates them.  IT staff, able to provision virtual machines quickly and to more easily manage them, are freed up for other tasks, and enterprises gain a straight path to cloud computing.

But as businesses raced forward with their virtualization strategies, one critical element often went overlooked: storage.  Today, there is a glaring gap in many data centers where virtual storage should exist, and the proliferation of unstructured data and cloud computing is only enlarging the problem.  Until businesses fill this chasm, they will never fully realize the true potential of the virtualized data center.

Looking for a DR solution for you VMware environments? I can comfortably say that VMware has developed one of the best DR automation tools I’ve ever seen. It’s intuitive, comprehensive, and allows you to execute DR plans efficiently, and DR tests and rehearsals with no disruption to your production environment. vCenter Site Recovery Manager - we’ll use the abbreviation SRM for this post, not to be confused with Storage Resource Management – leverages the storage infrastructure to replicate data between the primary and DR sites. This integration allows for a full execution of DR processes and a seamless operational failover. In the labs you’ll learn how to set up you SRM environment, execute a DR test, trouble shoot and resolve issues that you may encounter. How to find them? Here they are: ALT3001, LAB11, and LAB12. You can also see the schedule at FalconStor @ VMworld 2010 website.