Physical theft is a relatively recoverable event. Data theft? Not so much
Why do you backup your data? In case your computer crashes, or there’s a fire, right?
Here’s a new twist on the benefits of backup - theft protection. Seagate received this letter from a customer recently:
I deployed a Linksys NAS200 solution with 2 raided Seagate 500g SATA drives a few months ago for my client. As fortune would have it when my clients’ office was burglarized the thieves took his server. Fortunately they did not take the NAS unit and I was able to restore the entire contents to a new server the same day it was discovered. Needless to say, dependable hardware and good planning saved the day and made for a satisfied client.
Best Wishes
Gary Popkin
Command Computer
N Lauderdale, FL
Losing hardware vs. losing business data? No contest. This holds true just as clearly for personal digital content. Gary was a hero for his customer, but dodged a bullet thanks to less than thorough thieves. Will your customers be so lucky?
Anybody out there lost your hardware, but not your data? I’d love to hear some happy recovery stories, but nightmares are instructive as well.
Deduplication prevents businesses from repeating themselves
Clever marketing from Overland Storage: contrasting their de-duplication solution with a copy machine. For me it brings home the essence of what de-dupe is all about.
As I posted yesterday, a major headache and expense for business data protection today is redundancy, meaning copying the same files over and over and over again. Deduplication is one of those technologies whose value is pretty easy to explain: it makes only one copy of everything, reducing the capacity required by 10 to 20X.
Management is limited, data is not
Rather than reduce capacity requirements, that frees up more data to be created, used, saved, distributed. Storage demand is not limited by the amount of data created, but by the ability of consumers and businesses to effectively manage it.
Case in point: according to EMC and IDC, 2007 was the first year that the data generated and replicated in the world exceeded the storage available to keep it.
Less data leads to more storage
I’ll say that again: Deduplication leads to more storage. Agree or disagree? Tell me why.
Distributed computing enables IT As A Service. But how do you back it up?
Stan Williamson from The Blencowe Group shared successes and challenges around thin client solutions. Their solution looks a lot like “IT as a service” - an innovative way to translate technology into ongoing service revenues.
Data protection’s been a lot of work for Stan. Who’s got ideas on how best to protect data in this kind of environment?
Slow-motion video shows a laptop disk drive ”bracing” for a fall
What’s the one irreplaceable piece of a notebook computer? Any data that’s not backed up. The latest in laptop data protection is a zero-G sensor that automatically parks a hard drive head whenever a laptop goes into free fall.
This is an extremely slow-motion video of an actual disk drive head being parked as the drive falls. The drive spins at 7200 rpm, which is seen here as very slow rotation. Note the bounce at the bottom!
More facts about the zero-G sensor and the G-Force Protection feature on Seagate’s Momentus 7200 drive:
It is fast enough to protect in drops as little as 7 inches
It senses in 3 axes, allowing it to “feel” head-over-heels tumbles as well as a simple vertical drop
The drive is plug-compatible with standard laptop drives, and requires no configuration to enable the feature
