Storage @ Work

It isn't exactly fresh news, but what does seem newsworthy is that the story recently got worse. There's nothing quite like receiving a gift that sends your passwords to China.

Here's an earlier blog on the topic that appeared a couple weeks ago.

In the video below, Scott Reynolds, an attendee at the Data Protection Summit tells Storage @ Work that the sessions at the conference were awesone. Too bad the conference was sparsely attended because the content was top-notch, great stuff. Even if the cake was B-grade. I don't know why, but conference interviews often involve chow.

FWIW, this is the first of three discussions with Tom Coughlin, an expert on storage devices technologies who covers the gamut, from consumer to enterprise applications. In this video he sagely reveals that "they can't smell your breath on a video". Thanks Tom for the confidence builder.

Storage @ Work rants about the status of digital security and launches off for a few seconds when another driver cuts him off on Highway 280 in San Jose.

The security industry likes to characterize the situation as an arms race, but that's mostly because they are developing digital protection technology. I think its much more like a siege, where our digital resources are mostly sitting waiting for hackers to attack, with very little means to attack the hackers in defense. It's the ultimate rope a dope, but without a jab, hook, uppercut to go with it.

Computerworld just published an article on the recovery operations at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Biloxi after Hurricane Katrina flattened most everything. I always like articles like this because they clue me into logistics problems that I hadn't anticipated.  One of the items mentioned in this article was the loss of cellular towers, which made it difficult for team members to communicate. 

A couple weeks ago I asked the question on my Storage @ Work blog on the EqualLogic web site "Is tape dead?"   It certainly is not dead at the Hard Rock because the article talks about how they use an offsite service to transport tapes every day.

Since recovering, their IT team moved quickly to implement disk to disk (D2D) backup with Commvault software and Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN arrays in order to get their backup window down to a few hours.  I assume they are making good use of our snapshot software.

StorageMojo got hacked recently and talks about it on his blog. Of course that all happened in cloud space, but it made me think about the situation closer to home.