TVP Tag Archives

Data Protection: Implement before you Need It

Data Protection techniques should be implemented and tested long before they are needed. This is a necessary component of any IT organization. However, the most recent communities podcast brought to light several implementation aspects of Data Protection, specifically about Disaster Recovery: organizations still do not test their DR plans and organizations are waiting for a hardware refresh to implement a DR plan.

Data Protection is NOT just about Backup

Data Protection is not just about backup these days, but instead concentrates on two all important concepts for a business: disaster recovery and business continuity. While backup is a part of Disaster Recovery, restoration is all important. If it is not possible to restore your data in a timely fashion the backup has failed. So technologies that allow us to access our data immediately provides a level of business continuity. But how is this achieved? So where do you save your critical data is is readily restorable? Is your backup integrated into your monitoring software? Have you tested your restore today?

What Do You Think When You Hear The Word Host?

When you hear the term “host” when talking about virtual environment, what is the first thing you think of? For me, the answer is simple, a host is an appliance. For years now I have been standing on my soap box and preaching the power and fundamentals of automation in building and configuring your virtual environment. I came across a thread on the VMware VMTN Community Forum where a concerned individual was in a position that he was going to have to rebuild his host from scratch. What he did to get himself into this position was to run a hardening script on the host and then the host became broken and unusable. This person was concerned that he did not have a backup of the host and was looking for a way to rollback.