Tag Archives: Data Domain

Random Short Take #43

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Welcome to Random Short Take #43. A few players have worn 43 in the NBA, including Frank Brickowski, but my favourite from this list is Red Kerr (more for his commentary chops than his game, I think).  Let’s get random.

  • Mike Wilson has published Part 2 of his VMware VCP 2020 Study Guide and it’s a ripper. Check it out here. I try to duck and weave when it comes to certification exams nowadays, but these kind of resources are invaluable.
  • It’s been a while since I had stick time with Data Domain OS, but Preston’s article on password hardening was very useful.
  • Mr Foskett bought a cloud, of sorts. Read more about that here. Anyone who knows Stephen knows that he’s all about what’s happening in the industry, but I do enjoy reading about these home projects as well.
  • Speaking of clouds, Rancher was named “A Leader” in multi-cloud container development platforms by an independent research firm. You can read the press release here.
  • Datadobi had a good story to share about what it did with UMass Memorial Health Care. You can read the story here.
  • Steve O has done way too much work understanding how to change the default theme in Veeam Enterprise Manager 10 and documenting the process so you don’t need to work it out. Read about the process here.
  • Speaking of data protection, Zerto has noticed Azure adoption increasing at quite a pace, amongst other things.
  • This was a great article on open source storage from Chin-Fah.

Random Short Take #37

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Welcome to Random Short Take #37. Not a huge amount of players have worn 37 in the NBA, but Metta World Peace did a few times. When he wasn’t wearing 15, and other odd numbers. But I digress. Let’s get random.

  • Pavilion Data recently added S3 capability to its platform. It’s based on a variant of MinIO, and adds an interesting dimension to what Pavilion Data has traditionally offered. Mellor provided some good coverage here.
  • Speaking of object storage, Dell EMC recently announced ECS 3.5. You can read more on that here. The architectural white paper has been updated to reflect the new version as well.
  • Speaking of Dell EMC, Preston posted a handy article on Data Domain Retention Lock and NetWorker. Have you pre-ordered Preston’s book yet? I’ll keep asking until you do.
  • Online events are all the rage at the moment, and two noteworthy events are coming up shortly: Pure//Accelerate and VeeamON 2020. Speaking of online events, we’re running a virtual BNEVMUG next week. Details on that here. ZertoCON Virtual is also a thing.
  • Speaking of Pure Storage, this article from Cody Hosterman on NVMe and vSphere 7 is lengthy, but definitely worth the read.
  • I can’t recall whether I mentioned that this white paper  covering VCD on VCF 3.9 is available now, and I can’t be bothered checking. So here it is.
  • I’m not just a fan of Backblaze because of its cool consumer backup solution and object storage platform, I’m also a big fan because of its blog. Articles like this one are a great example of companies doing corporate culture right (at least from what I can see).
  • I have the impression that Datadobi has been doing some cool stuff recently, and this story certainly seems to back it up.

Random Short Take #24

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Want some news? In a shorter format? And a little bit random? This listicle might be for you. Welcome to #24 – The Kobe Edition (not a lot of passing, but still entertaining). 8 articles too. Which one was your favourite Kobe? 8 or 24?

  • I wrote an article about how architecture matters years ago. It’s nothing to do with this one from Preston, but he makes some great points about the importance of architecture when looking to protect your public cloud workloads.
  • Commvault GO 2019 was held recently, and Chin-Fah had some thoughts on where Commvault’s at. You can read all about that here. Speaking of Commvault, Keith had some thoughts as well, and you can check them out here.
  • Still on data protection, Alastair posted this article a little while ago about using the Cohesity API for reporting.
  • Cade just posted a great article on using the right transport mode in Veeam Backup & Replication. Goes to show he’s not just a pretty face.
  • VMware vFORUM is coming up in November. I’ll be making the trip down to Sydney to help out with some VMUG stuff. You can find out more here, and register here.
  • Speaking of VMUG, Angelo put together a great 7-part series on VMUG chapter leadership and tips for running successful meetings. You can read part 7 here.
  • This is a great article on managing Rubrik users from the CLI from Frederic Lhoest.
  • Are you into Splunk? And Pure Storage? Vaughn has you covered with an overview of Splunk SmartStore on Pure Storage here.

Random Short Take #17

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Here are some links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 17 – am I over-sharing? There’s so much I want you to know about.

  • I seem to always be including a link from the Backblaze blog. That’s mainly because they write about things I’m interested in. In this case, they’ve posted an article discussing the differences between availability and durability that I think is worth your time.
  • Speaking of interesting topics, Preston posted an article on NetWorker Pools with Data Domain that’s worth looking at if you’re into that kind of thing.
  • Maintaining the data protection theme, Alastair wrote an interesting article titled “The Best Automation Is One You Don’t Write” (you know, like the best IO is one you don’t need to do?) as part of his work with Cohesity. It’s a good article, and not just because he mentions my name in it.
  • I recently wanted to change the edition of Microsoft Office I was using on my MacBook Pro and couldn’t really work out how to do it. In the end, the answer is simple. Download a Microsoft utility to remove your Office licenses, and then fire up an Office product and it will prompt you to re-enter your information at that point.
  • This is an old article, but it answered my question about validating MD5 checksums on macOS.
  • Excelero have been doing some cool stuff with Imperial College London – you can read more about that here.
  • Oh hey, Flixster Video is closing down. I received this in my inbox recently: “[f]ollowing the announcement by UltraViolet that it will be discontinuing its service on July 31, 2019, we are writing to provide you notice that Flixster Video is planning to shut down its website, applications and operations on October 31, 2019”. It makes sense, obviously, given UltraViolet’s demise, but it still drives me nuts. The ephemeral nature of digital media is why I still have a house full of various sized discs with various kinds of media stored on them. I think the answer is to give yourself over to the streaming lifestyle, and understand that you’ll never “own” media like you used to think you did. But I can’t help but feel like people outside of the US are getting shafted in that scenario.
  • In keeping up with the “random” theme of these posts, it was only last week that I learned that “Television, the Drug of the Nation” from the very excellent album “Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury” by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy was originally released by Michael Franti and Rono Tse when they were members of The Beatnigs. If you’re unfamiliar with any of this I recommend you check them out.

EMC – BRS Announcements – Q3 2013

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Disclaimer: As part of my participation in EMC Elect 2013, EMC sometimes provides me with access to product briefings before new product announcements are made. I don’t want to turn this blog into another avenue for EMC marketing, and EMC are not interested in that either. Nonetheless, I’ve had the opportunity via various channels to actually try some of this stuff and I thought it was worth putting up here. I’ll reiterate though, I haven’t had the chance to verify everything for myself. This is more a prompt for you to go and have a look for yourself.

So, EMC made a few announcements around its BRS line today and I thought some of the Data Domain stuff was noteworthy. Four new models were released; here’s a table of speeds and feeds. Keep in mind that these are numbers published by EMC, not verified by me. As always, your mileage might vary.

DD1

In any case, the DD2500 is the replacement for the DD640, the DD4200 replaces the DD670, the DD4500 replaces the DD860 and the DD7200 replaces the DD890. One of the cooler parts of this announcement, in my opinion, is the improved archive support. This is something we’ve been investigating internally as part of our take the Centera out the back and shoot it  project. Here’s a screenshot of a marketing slide that includes a number of logos.

DD2Other aspects of the announcement include EMC Avamar 7 and NetWorker 8.1. The Avamar NDMP Accelerator now supports backup for Isilon, in addition to VNX, VNXe, Celerra and NetApp systems. Being a tape user, I’m also mildly excited about DD Boost over Fibre Channel support in NetWorker 8.1, although I’ve not had the chance to try it in our lab yet, so I’ll restrain my enthusiasm until I’ve had time to test it out.

In any case, have a chat to your local EMC BRS team about this stuff if you think it might work for you. You can also read more about it on EMC Pulse and the Reflections blog. When I’ve had a chance to test DD Boost over FC I’ll post it up here.