A little over two years ago companies were advised to "start small" with virtualization but "think big" and, based upon what we are seeing today, it's clear that organizations followed that advice considering the wide scale adoption of virtualization that has occurred. But as they enter the "Think big" phase many are encountering a roadblock: business critical applications that they are hesitant to virtualize because of availability concerns on virtualized platforms. Enter this week's newly announced ApplicationHA from Symantec that looks to extend server virtualization all the way to even these business critical apps. (read more)

Symantec's decision to decouple DMP from its parent Storage Foundation puts concerns about other dependencies that all multi-pathing software solutions have to rest. Currently, a standalone version of DMP is available for Solaris, AIX and Red Hat and SuSe Linux. Beginning in Q4 2010, Symantec will also make DMP available as a standalone product for HP-UX and Windows. This now frees customers to deploy DMP without a requirement to first deploy Storage Foundation or VxFS. (read more)

Backup problems are supposed to be gone, right? All you have to do is throw in some disk and a good dose of deduplication and organizational backup problems will magically disappear. So while that may be true up to a point, today's newly released Information Management Health Check survey conducted by Applied Research and sponsored by Symantec reveals that organizations are failing to take into account the implications of what infinite backup retention periods mean for them long term. (read more)

In the past two months I have probably received more calls from end-users inquiring as to what steps they should take to re-architect their backup infrastructures than I have in the past two years. Yet what I find encouraging is that they are no longer just asking me for point solutions or short term fixes. Rather they are looking for architectures that they can put in place that will solve their immediate pain points while leaving them well-positioned for the future. (read more)

A few months ago I wrote a blog entry that took a look at how enhancements in the NFS v4 standard have opened the door for NAS file service appliances to be used with more highly available (HA) transaction-oriented applications such as the TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). But before organizations adopt a NAS solution that uses NFS v4 for real-time failover, they should be aware of features offered by the Veritas Cluster File System (CFS) solution that NAS with NFS v4 alone does not yet provide. (read more)

In a previous blog entry, I took a look at how Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) combined with Veritas Cluster File System (CFS) - Veritas CFS High Availability - enables organizations to achieve faster failover without the associated complexity and costs. Despite these advantages, organizations that are already using an HA solution such as Oracle RAC still may be reticent to switch as they need more concrete business and technical reasons to justify such a switch to Veritas CFS. But here's the good news: There is an unequivocal answer to the "To RAC or Not to RAC" question. (read more)

The tolerance for downtime in enterprises is nearly gone. Business requirements have changed, service levels are more stringent and every second of an outage could translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue. Classic high-availability (HA) solutions no longer cut it as enterprise applications require fast failovers, often with sub-minute recovery times. (read more)

Two general techniques have now emerged that reclaim storage on thinly provisioned volumes: zero page reclamation and file system-based, intelligent storage reclamation. Both techniques identify when blocks are freed on a thinly provisioned volume and mark them as available for reclamation and restoration to the storage array's general storage pool. However there are other factors that come into play that should influence when organizations select intelligent versus zero page reclamation as their preferred method of storage reclamation. (read more)

Best practices for data management call for organizations to definitely not keep data that they do not need. On the surface, this approach sounds good but as organizations face growing stores of inactive data, they may not know who owns the data, what its value is, what risks it presents or which applications within the organization need to access the data? (read more)

Software-only providers of private storage cloud solutions are quick to point out the value of using only software to build a private storage cloud solution. Enterprises can select any storage provider's hardware, they have more flexibility in how they scale out the solution and they can create competitive situations where hardware providers compete to provide servers, storage and networking gear. But other intangible factors also come into play that requires enterprises to carefully consider what private storage cloud software solution they select. (read more)