One of the great features that Veeam has is the ability to easily off-site your backups and replicas for you. This can be done in a few fashions, such as using a backup copy job to move data to different media, or you might use the replication feature to move a copy of your VMs offsite. Reminder: replicas != backups; corruption will just be replicated. ...
Veeam recently went GA with their Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product, and like a lot of folks, I’ve been looking forward to it. I was fortunate enough to be involved with the beta, so I knew going into it that setup would not take long (just a couple of minutes really). What I didn’t test a heck of a lot of though were backup locations. The Problem Veeam Backup for Office 365 UNC Error ...
Recently, when I attended the Toronto vForum, I found myself hanging around the Veeam booth … a lot. I know quite a few of the local folks, so I enjoy chatting with them. They also work with me on my Veeam User Group, so sometimes the conversation steers that way too. But, I also have a passion for helping people. Given that I usually have some form of Veeam swag on, it isn’t uncommon for me to get questions from folks who assume I’m an Systems Engineer. I am always very quick to point out that I don’t work for Veeam, and I find that usually changes the tone of a conversation. Folks like hearing from customers, the good and the bad. I’ll usually try and loop an SE is as well since a) it’s not my booth and b) they will have different experiences and potentially different suggestions. ...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post covering Tintri’s recently announced synchronous replication. At the time, I was also given a walkthrough of another upcoming feature: snapshot replication to S3 data stores. This is another big feature that I was glad to see previewed at VMWorld, and even more excited to see an in-depth demo of. For a quick bit of background, S3 is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service which is an object storage system. Although S3 was designed by Amazon, there are many providers out there that offer S3-compliant data stores. This is definitely an emerging market, and the fact that you can have cloud-capable data stores in your datacenters has it’s own curiosities. All of that, however, is beyond the scope of this post - I just wanted to point out that AWS is not the only S3 provider. ...
The first stop for us at Tech Field Day 12 was Cohesity’s office, where we had a nice breakfast waiting for us (along with a great delegate gift consisting of a multi-end USB cable, a notebook, a portable battery, and a Polaroid Snap camera). Soon after settling in, we got straight down to business. I had previously written a ’ primer’ regarding Cohesity, and I saw them present recently at the Toronto VMUG, but I still wasn’t fully familiar with the brand or their offering. Cohesity markets itself as secondary storage, a market that its founder, Mohit Aron, felt was being underserved. Without repeating everything from my previous post, the common use-cases for secondary storage include data sets such as backup targets, cold data, and test / dev. ...
Today I was fortunate enough to present at the Toronto VMUG. That’s two talks that I’ve given at the TO VMUG this year - not bad considering I only started ‘participating’ in the vCommunity earlier this year! As always, I see these opportunities not only as a way to give back to the community but also as a way to practice and develop my own skills. I am constantly trying to improve my public speaking - I have found that the key for me is to be able to turn my presentations into a conversation (admittedly it is a one-sided conversation). It still takes me a bit of time to ‘slip into’ that mode, but I’m definitely getting better at it. ...
Something that I think is often over looked when it comes to backups is security. I’m not referring to physical security (e.g. locking the media up in a vault), but rather making sure that the backups aren’t being abused. There are plenty of horror stories kicking around about folks who have their backups wiped out. This might be due to a malicious admin, bad hardware, or (more and more common) something like Cryptolocker. ...
Rubrik will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12 on Day 2 (November 16th, 14:00 PDT), and I’m quite looking forward to hearing more from them. I had a chance to chat with some engineers from Rubrik in the Solutions Exchange at VMWorld 2015, and a couple of times at local VMUGs since. At the time the product struck me as unique in that it seems to revolve around simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency. ...
I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a ‘cozy’ conference call hosted by Tintri. I say cozy because excluding Tintri staff, there were less than 10 of us customers and users who were invited. The purpose was to give us a demo of some of Tintri’s recently announced products and features, and the small size definitely gave it a nice touch. There was also no shortage of talent on the presentation end to take us through these new additions. ...
Cohesity will be presenting at the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event, and I opted to do some research on them ahead of time. Cohesity was founded in 2013 and has gone through two rounds of funding, totaling $70 million. Headquartered in Santa Clara, they currently have over 100 employees. So, what does Cohesity do? They focus on secondary storage, which could include domains such as test/dev, but particularly backup storage / repositories. Cohesity is an interesting mix in that they provide storage, features using said storage, and services, namely backups. In a nutshell, they bill themselves as ‘hyperconverged storage’. ...