John Webster

Prior to the year 2000, business was a world in love with office spaces and corporate travel. We traveled to work (the office) every day. We traveled away from the office for customer meetings, for internal meetings, for conferences, for awards ceremonies. We traveled because we could and we believed that it was necessary for the competitive advantage. That all changed rather quickly with the economic downturn of the early 2000s and, of course, 9/11. In short order, we relearned how to do business by staying put. Another consequence of the most recent recession was corporate payroll compression. As good corporate citizens who are mindful of keeping our jobs, most of us were tasked with far more work than a single individual could perform adequately. To help make us more efficient, we introduced cell phones so that we could make calls while traveling, and WiFi-enabled... (more)

Data as Baggage

It's often said that IT administrators in general, and storage administrators in particular, are highly risk-averse. Clearly that's the case today. Look for a moment at any one of the surveys that seeks to understand the most pressing issues on the minds of those are tasked with the stewardship of enterprise data. These surveys point to data protection, security, system reliability and availability, and responsiveness to regulatory agencies and corporate governance as top priorities. Hot products these days are continuous data protection (CDP), disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T), and e... (more)