What's Inside

Features

• • Snapshot: Do you outsource your backups?

  • Three ways to outsource backups

    Getting third-party help for backup--through insourcing, online backup or hosted backup services--can improve a storage group's productivity, consistency and efficiency.

  • Survey Says: Offsite tapes continue to grow

  • Tricky backup for SharePoint

  • Backup-to-disk performance tuning

    Disk-based backup can lower costs, reduce complexity and add scalability. But to achieve top performance, you'll need to do lots of benchmarking and watch for poorly configured production storage.

  • Backup SLAs: The art of diplomacy

    Negotiating backup service-level agreements (SLAs) can be one of the toughest elements of transitioning IT from a mere technology competence center to a real part of the business. Detailing what a backup service will provide, and figuring out how to measure and report on these promises, will greatly improve enterprise storage operations.

  • Disaster recovery: Test, test and test some more

    Storage managers in New Orleans thought their disaster recovery (DR) plans were solid. Hurricane Katrina showed them otherwise. These dramatic stories are testimony that a DR plan is worthless unless it's been tested, updated and then tested again.

  • Snapshot: Have you fulfilled an electronic discovery request?

  • Quality Awards II: The elite of enterprise arrays

    Hitachi Data Systems consolidates its claim as the top-rated enterprise array by sweeping all five user-experience categories in the 2006 edition of our survey.

  • Local governments feel regulatory pinch

  • Latest VMware rev tackles storage shortcomings

  • Forecasting capacity with an eye on performance

  • Backups are not archives by W. Curtis Preston

    While it's possible to restore data from old backups, you shouldn't use them as archives. Leading storage expert W. Curtis Preston details the differences between the two technologies and explains why you need an e-mail archiving program.

  • BlackBerry strains Exchange storage

• • Sony soldiers on with AIT-5 tape drive

  • Lessening filers' backup load

  • How faster tape drives can slow down your backups by W. Curtis Preston

    Today's high-speed tape drives can outrun a network, causing the drive to have to wait for a data stream. This shoe-shining effect can be overcome, but only if you make disk your primary backup target.

  • CDP: Look before you leap

    Some pundits have postulated that continuous data protection (CDP) will replace backup. But is that just new technology hyperbole or is CDP a must-have technology?

  • Users eye snapshot to cut back on tape

  • Is VTL a transitory technology?

  • Anatomy of an upgrade: Veritas NetBackup 6.0

    Veritas NetBackup 6.0 is a significant revision of the popular backup application but, like many new software versions, it has had its share of bugs. Did Symantec release Version 6.0 too soon, or did users fail to plan properly?

  • 64-bit Exchange lessens I/O load

  • Three ways to create clustered storage

    Clustered storage systems run on storage servers, NAS gateways and hosts. Here's how to determine which clustered file-system architecture is best for your needs and storage environment.

  • Survey Says: Users back up immense amounts of data

  • Storage apps keep Exchange running 24/7

    E-mail has earned mission-critical status among enterprise applications, and reliable storage systems are the key to keeping it up and running. Storage managers need to understand Microsoft Exchange's unique requirements to ensure its high availability.

  • To survive, backup reporting tools must expand their scope

  • The pros and cons of portable storage

  • Storage Firsts

• Columns

  • Rethinking data protection strategies

    Thirty-one percent of organizations say they'll experience significant revenue loss or another adverse business impact within one hour or less of application downtime--it's no wonder organizations are "rethinking" their data protection strategies.

  • What's scarier--not being able to recover your data or recovering a smoking gun or two?

    Storage Bin: What are you most afraid of? Not being able to successfully recover your data or finding out that you can get it all back--but that you also recovered a smoking gun or two?

  • New backup techs need new thinking

    New backup techs need new thinking

  • Backup best practices are always evolving

    Some new advances in backup, such as virtual tape libraries, represent evolutionary enhancements to the traditional backup process, while others like continuous data protection and single-instance storage are potentially far more transformational.

  • 10 points to consider before deploying an e-mail archive

    Selecting an e-mail archiving application based solely on features and functions may result in unexpected administration costs. Consider these 10 points before deploying an e-mail archiver.

  • Some small tech upstarts might play big roles

    Storage Bin: The big storage vendors are always trying to steal a piece of each other's pie. But some small tech upstarts might play big parts in determining who comes out on top.

  • Getting started with encryption key management by Jon Oltsik

    You've probably come to realize the importance of encryption in securing your storage environment. To do the job right, you don't have to become a security guru, but you do need to learn about encryption key management. Here's how to get started.

  • The wide world of tech support

    The wide world of tech support

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• How to improve your virtual server storage setups

  

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  One of the biggest challenges of building a virtual server infrastructure is fine-tuning the storage that supports the virtual machines. Having ...

• Rethinking the way storage architectures are packaged and presented

  

  E-Zine

  Cloud storage, virtualization and the growth of unstructured data have contributed to the way storage architectures are built and used. Virtual ...

• Archiving stays active with LTFS and the cloud

  

  E-Handbook

  While the concept of data archiving has existed for decades, archiving practices that were once considered standard are becoming inadequate. Factors ...