Small, mid-sized and large enterprises are not the only ones looking to consolidate and simplify their IT management to create more cohesive management solutions. In the last few years, Symantec has been taking many of the same steps to integrate components of its Backup Exec, Enterprise Vault and NetBackup product suites to deliver solutions appropriate for the different size organizations that it serves. The progress that it has made in delivering on these ideals is reflected in today's Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 product releases. (read more)

Right now a major re-alignment is taking shape in the computer industry driven in large part by enterprises questioning the value of heterogeneous hardware and software solutions. Heterogeneity originally lowered upfront procurements costs but over time it created new levels of complexity when it came time to make these disparate solutions work well together. These difficulties are leading more providers to build end-to-end solution offerings that is raising questions about the role that independent enterprise software providers like Symantec will provide in this new world. (read more)

Small enterprises want to make technology changes but can't afford it. Large enterprises can afford to make technology changes but won't. That leaves it to midsized enterprises that are seeing the benefits, have the resources and are making the changes that are resulting in them emerging as the new IT leaders in 2010. This in a nutshell summarizes the 83-page 2010 State of the Data Center report just released by Symantec. (read more)

Data centers face an unprecedented challenge as the next decade approaches. New storage cloud offerings not only bring the upfront cost per GB of storage down to commodity pricing levels but they make it possible for companies to outsource this critical part of their IT infrastructure. This puts new pressure on data center managers to identify and implement appropriate storage cloud solutions because they are no longer competing with internal business units or historical third party providers but new leaner, more efficient cloud providers like Amazon and Google. (read more)

Three (3) months ago Symantec published the results of its SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey that shared what nearly 1,700 small and midsize companies worldwide had to say about disaster recovery (DR). While the results of this report were mentioned by a number of publications (Continuity Central, eWeek, IT Business Edge and Techworld just to name a few), there were a couple other nuggets of information included in this survey that these articles either glossed over or simply failed to mention. (read more)

The dramatic changes that are currently sweeping through the storage industry are once again preparing to reshape the look of tomorrow's enterprise data centers. Among these changes, features and/or products like high availability, solid state drives (SSDs), server virtualization and thin provisioning are emerging as the predominant ones that IT managers are well under ways towards wide spread adoption. But as the implementation of these features begin, they create new storage management 'gotchas'. (read more)

One of the barometers that can be used to gauge the popularity of a specific topic among readers on the Internet is the frequency for which they search for it on Google. In that sense, it is noteworthy that Google searches for "cloud storage" started to take off in late 2007 according to a Google trends report and have only increased since. But as organizations in 2009 move from searching for and reading about cloud storage to actually selecting cloud storage solutions, they need to ensure it offers flexibility to avoid public storage cloud lock-in. (read more)

IT's role in the enterprise has changed dramatically in just the last few years - most notably in its responsibilities and workloads. No longer is it enough for IT to manage data protection recovery, networks, systems, and storage, but its responsibilities have expanded as it has merged with other operational and strategic business functions. This is forcing IT to develop a holistic understanding of the needs of the entire organization to ensure that the technology it deploys meets those needs as well as aligns with the larger company strategy. (read more)

To say that the concept of "cloud storage" has come out of nowhere to capture the fancy of organizations and individuals is a bit of understatement. Probably nothing better illustrates the heightened interest in this topic than a Google trends report that shows how searches for "cloud storage" took off on Google in late 2007 and have only increased since. (read more)

The recent launches of Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Servers 2008 R2 have been greeted with a lot of fanfare. But what can sometimes get lost in the mix is that as organizations look to adopt the latest versions of these operating systems there is a need to update the software that runs on these platforms. In that respect, keeping one's backup software up to date should be at or near the top of one's priority list when deploying any of these new OSes. (read more)