Mark Campbell

Imagine you’ve won the lottery.  The next morning you wake up and find that you won again.  That’s how the investors and executives at 3PAR are feeling these days.  The dueling takeover offers from HP and Dell for the relatively obscure 3PAR left many in the investment community – and for that matter in the storage industry – scratching their heads. The heart of this bid – beyond the obviously testerone-fueled frenzy culminating with a bid with sky-high multiples – was a weakness that HP reportedly began attempting to resolve 9 months ago.  HP resells HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) equipment into the enterprise.  The trouble is that HDS also sells HDS gear into the enterprise; thus HP’s value proposition was weak.  Combine that with the fact that HDS is seen in the industry as increasingly being left behind by more agile and more nimble competitors and HP had a problem... (more)

Byte-Level Versus Block-Level Deduplication and Backup

Unitrends is supporting byte-level deduplication on its backup appliances with its release 6 (due this month – March, 2010.)  Since there’s some confusion concerning byte-level versus block-level deduplication, I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain the differences between file-level deduplication (what Unitrends supported prior to release 6), block-level deduplication, and byte-level deduplication. File-level deduplication operates by eliminating redundant files.  Despite what many pundits state, file deduplication is very efficient (and note that I’m stating this even ... (more)

InformationWeek: “Appliances Are Game Changers”

“I’m betting that they’re [appliances] are game changers, because the whole premise of these machines goes far, far beyond the no-value concept of simply taking two five-pound bags of concrete and combining them into one 10-pound bag, and calling that innovation.” [Bob Evans, InformationWeek] The cover of InformationWeek on September 27, 2010, pictured a towering rack and the headline “Rise of the Appliance.” While all of the examples from the article came from massive companies like Oracle and IBM, the truth is that almost everything discussed in the article is directly applica... (more)

Enterprise Online Backup and Losing a Lady Gaga MP3

Recently there was an interesting blog post by Scott Raymond entitled “Where Are the Affordable Enterprise Online Backups?” I made a comment to it – to the effect that bandwidth and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) are incompatible.  That caused some other comments to be made.  I decided to write a bit longer post concerning the entire phenomenon on this blog. First of all, the term “enterprise online backup” is a bit misleading.  What the author of the post was complaining about was that there are no unlimited storage options with associated flat-rate pricing of the sort in the co... (more)

SAN Backup, Broken Legs, Football, and Stupidity

After the SAN backup fiasco in Virgina, I started thinking about how how far we’ve gotten from the concept of what backup is really all about. Imagine the following scenario from a college football game this weekend: [In the middle of a nationally televised football game a linebacker blitzes and catches the quarterback on the blind side; the quarterback's leg snapping is audible to the sideline microphones.] Trainer: Coach, your first-string quarterback, Tom, has a broken leg.  You need to get your backup in there. Coach: Okay.  Let’t get Tom in there. Trainer: I don’t think that... (more)