Imagine you’ve won the lottery. The next morning you wake up and find
that you won again. That’s how the investors and executives at 3PAR are
feeling these days. The dueling takeover offers from HP and Dell for the
relatively obscure 3PAR left many in the investment community – and for
that matter in the storage industry – scratching their heads.
The heart of this bid – beyond the obviously testerone-fueled frenzy
culminating with a bid with sky-high multiples – was a weakness that HP
reportedly began attempting to resolve 9 months ago. HP resells HDS
(Hitachi Data Systems) equipment into the enterprise. The trouble is that
HDS also sells HDS gear into the enterprise; thus HP’s value proposition
was weak. Combine that with the fact that HDS is seen in the industry as
increasingly being left behind by more agile and more nimble competitors and
HP had a problem... (more)
Recently there was an interesting blog post by Scott Raymond entitled
“Where Are the Affordable Enterprise Online Backups?” I made a comment to
it – to the effect that bandwidth and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) are
incompatible. That caused some other comments to be made. I decided to
write a bit longer post concerning the entire phenomenon on this blog.
First of all, the term “enterprise online backup” is a bit misleading.
What the author of the post was complaining about was that there are no
unlimited storage options with associated flat-rate pricing of the sort in
the co... (more)
SAN backup, or the lack of SAN backup, is in the news. The failure of the
EMC DMX-3 SAN for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles has made not only
the technology press but the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and
others. No wonder. The lack of a SAN backup strategy left 26 of 83 of
Virginia’s state agencies down.
From Sam Nixon, Virginia’s Chief Information Officer
A piece of equipment went down that is meant to never go down, went down.
[...]
The recovery time has been unacceptable.
From 2001: A Space Oddessey
Interviewer: HAL, you have an enormous responsibility on... (more)
After the SAN backup fiasco in Virgina, I started thinking about how how far
we’ve gotten from the concept of what backup is really all about. Imagine
the following scenario from a college football game this weekend:
[In the middle of a nationally televised football game a linebacker blitzes
and catches the quarterback on the blind side; the quarterback's leg snapping
is audible to the sideline microphones.]
Trainer: Coach, your first-string quarterback, Tom, has a broken leg. You
need to get your backup in there.
Coach: Okay. Let’t get Tom in there.
Trainer: I don’t think th... (more)
Unitrends, the leading provider in integrated and scalable backup solutions,
on Thursday announced that Rappahannock General Hospital terminated its use
of Backup Exec and ARCserve in favor of Unitrends backup appliances for an
instant improvement in backup, archiving and disaster recovery usability,
reliability and performance.
Prior to deploying Unitrends' solution, Virginia's Rappahannock General
Hospital had two tape-based backup software products, Backup Exec and
ARCserve, which were necessary to protect their single information technology
infrastructure. "The two backup so... (more)
Mark Campbell is the COO of Unitrends. He originally joined Unitrends as its CTO in 2008. Unitrends enables its customers the freedom to focus on their business instead of backup. The company achieves this through a scalable, all-in-one 
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