Insights

Today I was looking forward to sitting down and working more on Zerto DR into Azure. I had my schedule (and more importantly my mind) clear and ready to go. I woke up checked email, shuttled the kiddos off to school and grabbed a bite. Everything was ready! Wrong!

I’m not suggesting demos are bad, just that you shouldn’t become mesmerized by a slick demo. This is particularly important when it comes to Backup and DR to the cloud.

Imagine if every time you swapped out an old server you had to keep the old server sitting around and powered up for the next 5 to 7 years. Ridiculous right, but that’s what many organizations do with their legacy backups.

One of the most powerful tools in the marketing arsenal is the check box. Does your solution do this? Absolutely, there’s the check box right there! Compare our solution to our competitors? See that, we have way more check boxes.

One of the biggest problems for businesses today is an absence of or gaps in business continuity. Business continuity allows business to continue operating during and after a disaster. A business continuity plan (BCP) is comprised of policies and procedures to help fulfill that goal.

One of the most common barriers to Docker adoption for production deployments is a misconception around data persistence, or lack thereof. While it is true that if you remove a Docker container it’s destroyed and the data is lost but that doesn’t have to be the case.

I recently attended the Netapp Insight conference in Las Vegas. There were a lot of great speakers and sessions but for my money, the best one was Best Practices and Deep Dive for VMware with SolidFire. The presenter for this session was Andy Banta, his title was Storage Janitor.

While working on another project I ran into an issue running the Cloud/VMware modules for Ansible. No mater what I did it appeared broken. Newer module features required a newer version of Ansible. But I was being denied, stuck at 1.8 and no amount of apt foo seemed to resolve the issue.

What we generally see is that successful organizations approach transitioning to cloud purposefully, with a great deal of forethought and planning.

Marchitecture Noun A technology solution designed purely based on the information found in marketing slicks and Power Point presentations. Marchitecture can be created with no more than a high level understanding of the underlying technology and no attention need be paid to how the solution will actually solve a problem or achieve a desired outcome.

Over the last couple of years there have been huge advances in Disaster Recovery solutions. DR capabilities that are simpler and more cost effective are being built into platforms, included with Backup technologies or in many cases, come bundled with the applications themselves.

Outside of IT, "legacy" is usually a good thing. In sports, players and teams hope to build a legacy of winning, of making big plays in the clutch! But in IT, calling something legacy makes it sound old and crusty, like it might smell of arthritis cream.

There are many vectors to look at when protecting digital assets. The top concerns in my mind are backups, and security. I don’t think either are classified as sexy, but neglecting them tends to end poorly for your company, and possibly your career.

I’m still searching for that person that tells me they got into IT because they wanted to do backups. If you meet this person at a dinner party, get ready for a lively conversation! Nothing like discussing retention policies to get the party going!

First of all, we would like to thank all of our family, friends, clients and partners for supporting us in this new endeavor.