Bruce Backa

Bruce Backa's Storage Blog: The New Economics We have all watched the price of on-line storage decrease year after year. While it is still neither infinite nor free (and it's certainly not free to manage), it is pretty inexpensive these days. So inexpensive, in fact, that tape is now dramatically more expensive. This cost inversion (tape used to be much cheaper than on-line storage) should change the way we manage our storage. If you are a large corporation with sites all around the world, you need to replicate your data to these sites anyway. If London, New York and LA have all ceased to exist, you probably won't care much about the tapes at Iron Mountain... Trust me, your concerns will be elsewhere. As a result, there is really no need to have any of these tapes.It's a costly security blanket that really accomplishes nothing. A smaller company needs tapes for disas... (more)

What's In Store For 2006?

Okay, summer's over. Let's get back to work... But first, let's look at what's new. Microsoft has taken WinFS, its new file system, out of the first release of its next operating system. The story is that WinFS will follow soon after the OS releases. For most of us, this is something we don't need to worry about for a couple of years, at least. EMC has reduced prices on its Celera line of NASes. Network Appliance still dominates the high-end NAS business and its alliance with NTP Software for storage management gives it a significant advantage in the marketplace. Speaking of NTP S... (more)

Where's the money?

Bruce Backa's Thoughts: Where's the money? Remarkably, as we work with clients we discover that they rarely analyze the component costs of their operations. So let me make this easy: the bulk of the money is in whatever you do for data protection. But even if you know this, have you looked at the details of what you’re protecting and how it flows through you systems? What components make up the bits you write? How often do you write them and why? Last year we worked with a client who had done this analysis. They discovered that 40% of what they were writing each day was us... (more)

Storage & Security Journal: "Striking the Right Balance"

Storage is still one of the most costly and fastest-growing aspects of everyone's network and is likely to remain so for some time. Every network user is a storage user. We're all part of a community that shares the costs and the benefits of this expensive resource. Storage management can be a challenging task. There's so much hardware, so many alternatives, and so many issues that it's easy to get lost in the details and fail to see the forest for the trees. Networked storage is a service not a product. While hardware is necessary for you to provide the service, successful stor... (more)

End-to-End Application Security

Last month (.NETDJ, Vol. 1, issue 12) we demonstrated a simple technique that allows you to avoid storing passwords in clear text, making your .NET applications more secure and safer should they somehow be compromised. In this article, we want to step back a bit and look at the big picture: application security from end to end. When it comes to security, we developers are in charge. Security is not something that can be pushed off onto the network administrator; it is an integral aspect of an application's overall architecture. A well-built application should be inherently secur... (more)