Loss of data ranks as a “worst nightmare” for businesses of any size, but for SMBs data loss can be especially catastrophic: FEMA even estimates that 40 to 60 percent of SMBs never re-open after a data disaster. So, considering the threat of natural disasters, hardware/software failures, and worker recklessness leading to catastrophic data loss, why do some SMBs still fail to back up their data? Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code 42 Software shared with me this list of the top 10 reasons SMBs fail to back up their data....More

The nomination phase is over, so now's the time to cast your final vote!...More

For a number of years, I’ve admired NETIKUS.NET’s network-management offerings—particularly the company’s EventSentry product, which provides monitoring capabilities for critical infrastructure systems. NETIKUS.NET has released a new version of EventSentry (2.92), and it’s got some cool changes worth pointing out to you network admins out there. The biggest change is the introduction of an SNMP daemon, which lets you receive SNMP traps (v1, v2c, v3) with EventSentry traps. The SNMP trap daemon is also available in the tool’s free edition, EventSentry Light. The SNMP daemon is extremely easy to set up, so anybody can configure basic SNMP monitoring at no cost in a matter of minutes....More

In a market in which disaster recovery and data protection are typically provided in separate solutions, you’ve probably found yourself wishing for a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution that would just do both for you. There are a few solutions on the market that promise that kind of functionality, but one of the easier-to-use, more innovative choices is arguably Acronis’s Backup & Recovery, the latest version of which (version 11) brings its functionality into the virtualized and cloud environments. I just spoke with Izzy Azeri, Acronis’s senior VP and general manager for the Americas, about the new version of Acronis Backup & Recovery, specifically about the product’s deep reach into physical, virtual, and cloud environments. “As the size of data continues to grow, our aim is still to help customers manage their information better,” said Azeri. “We offer an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage technology that solves all their needs in one solution.”...More

EMC Isilon is tackling Big Data in an innovative way. Data is growing at an alarming rate, and the challenge is to find a way to easily and intelligently control and analyze that data. Enterprises need an easy-to-use, easy-to-scale, highly flexible, and immensely powerful storage solution that can be managed quickly and non-disruptively. Isilon, EMC’s recent high-profile acquisition, more than fits the bill. But just to give you a sense of its basic capabilities, Isilon can scale capacity from 6TB to 15PB in a single file system and single volume, and can deliver 85GBps of throughput and 1.2 million NFS IOPS. And by offering up to quadruple failure protection, Isilon ensures that even if as many as four nodes or drives fail at the same time, 100 percent of your data remains available. Many solutions tackle the traditional challenges of the data center—delivering centralized enterprise administration features, reliable performance, and ever-increasing capacity—but Isilon’s differentiator is that it does so while giving you a customized, flexible architecture that’s perfect for you. Isilon is endlessly scalable, letting you start small and scale out over time almost effortlessly, and the platform will remain in step with your most complex enterprise applications. And you don’t need to add storage administrators as you grow. One person can manage petabytes of data, minimizing operating expenses and keeping the staff focused on managing data—not storage....More

Just finished interviewing Steven Toole (chief marketing officer) and Joseph Hand (senior solutions architect) of AppAssure about their Best of TechEd award finalist, AppAssure Replay 4. Promising “the world’s fastest and easiest backup and disaster recovery” capabilities on the market, AppAssure certainly offers a bevy of game-changer features.Particularly impressive about Replay 4 is its evolution from file-based recovery to image-based recovery. Traditional backup products move files to an alternate storage medium such as tape. But what if you have to restore apps or whole servers? AppAssure wants to shatter that resource-heavy paradigm by leaving tape behind and focusing on an agent-based approach that captures an initial image of a server and then takes incremental snapshots. You might set up a 15-minute interval, collect those into a collapsed 1-day interval, and then into a 1-week interval, and so on into months and a year, until that history can be embedded into a base image. You’re getting near-continuous backups in real time—so, say goodbye to the traditional notion of backup jobs....More

At work—in fact, on the system I'm typing on right now—I use two monitors. I find that the extra real estate drastically improves productivity when I'm, for example, entering text from a Microsoft Word document into a web tool or moving data from one spreadsheet to another. I just drag items from left to right. If a journalist finds that kind of capability helpful, I imagine it's exponentially so for IT administrators. But perhaps you don't have access to or resources for additional monitors. What's the solution? How about virtual desktop software? Even better, how about free virtual desktop software? Dexpot is a solution that lets you open more than one desktop at a time on your screen so that you can have multiple open windows. The tool also lets you easily toggle between the separate desktops for full-screen viewing....More

Here's a free email app that provides a simple, effective way to manage your incoming email and stop spam. Essentially letting you check and manage your email before you download it, MailWasher is non-expiring and works with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, GMail, Hotmail, Incredimail, Thunderbird—you name it. MailWasher is a remarkably safe way to stop unwanted email before it even has a chance to infect your computer. It's a great feeling to turn the tables and fool spammers into thinking they've reached an invalid address. And once MailWasher has achieved that, you can add bounced senders to a blacklist that automatically bounces all future spam attempts....More

Technology refreshes are accelerating as the economy grows stronger, and enterprise storage upgrades are a major component of these initiatives. Obviously, it's essential that you plan and execute such operations properly by selecting the appropriate partners, technologies, and production-proven processes in accordance with business requirements. Central to the success of any storage-migration project is a strong Request for Proposal (RFP). Written correctly, an RFP written is a tool that you can use to thoroughly evaluate potential partners, eventually settling on the vendor that will bring the right levels of expertise, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness to the project. For the vendor, it provides a detailed view of the project to make it possible to deliver accurate project proposals and pricing estimates. A well-constructed RFP is a critical planning tool because it lays out important details of the project, providing the enterprise and its eventual partner(s) with a blueprint to reference through the various stages of project planning and execution. SANpulse has come up with a helpful 10-point storage-migration RFP checklist that will lead to the perfect RFP for any organization....More