Backup Strategy – Continuous Backup Needed?

I had an interesting conversation with Vizioncore yesterday about how backup is not as much a decision about what software to use but what process to use. In addition, this process needs to be considered from the very beginning of your virtualization architecture. With the quantity of virtual machines being used today by the SMB and Enterprise customers, the backup window has grown to nearly an all day event. What you say? An all day event? My backups happen with the window I set.

Xsigo Forms an Alliance with CTC and Hitachi

Those of you who attended VMworld this year will remember the stack of servers and storage on display happily serving VM’s to the vistors, exhibitors and Staff at the conference, well one of the key components of that stack was provided by Xsigo. Their product the I/O Director offers signficant savings in large environments by effectively virtualising the I/O stack. I am not going to go into the ins and outs of I/O virtualization in this article. Well it now appears that they are expanding their partnerships.

Virtualization and Cloud Missing Key Features: Auditing and Forensics

There are two key features missing from Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Those are auditing and forensics. The A6 project aims to fix this problem for auditing, but there is only some research into forensics. The issue is about discovering who did what when, where, how, and hopefully why. Auditing plays into this for Compliancy but also for forensics. Forensics has two major components in its arsenal: Audit Trails, and Disk Images.

SMBs – Desktops in the Cloud, or Symantec Endpoint Virtualization?

Whilst new SMBs may be dabbling with online application suites, the bulk of the established SMB workload, however, is done in desktop applications, typically Microsoft Office, running in various flavours of Windows with a Windows Server. This is definitely not in the cloud, and there are lots of very good reasons why it won’t be, and less radical solutions are likely to offer more benefit.