Jason Buffington .com

  • OFS and BaaS – why you need both

    At first glance, the services can be easily confused: Yes, it’s very easy to see how OFS and BaaS are similar.  And for individual users and their consumer data, one might use either service for both goals – but they are NOT the same. Maybe individual consumers can blur the lines on these, but IT…

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  • Beware of SPOF – Single Point of Failure

    While most IT Pro’s think about ‘Data Protection’ as the proactive activities, technologies and policies for assuring recovery and resiliency, a lot of folks forget to look for the architectural and cultural SPOF’s that can hinder production and recovery. Here is a non-DP SPOF example that I am currently struggling with – my home-office’s Internet…

  • Video summary of Disk-Based Backup Target Systems

    A few months ago, ESG completed its research on Disk-Based Backup Target Systems – the storage platforms that data protection solutions are often built upon. The nice folks in ESG’s video team were kind enough to help me record some of our findings, as well as what made the research compelling. CLICK HERE to read…

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  • The term PBBA is overused and often incorrect

    There are some who would refer to optimized disk-based target devices that are optimized for as Purpose-Built Backup Appliances (PBBAs), but that term is actually misleading. When one refers to a “backup server,” the implication is that the server performs backups—and in fact, those servers do perform backups. When one refers to a “storage controller,”…

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  • Snapshots vs. Backup – a great debate, no longer

    It wasn’t that many years ago that “snapshotting vs. backup” had the same kind of fervor in IT debates that some American political discussions have today, or religion, or any other media-infused divisive issue. Sidenote: my favorite of these incite-ful battlegrounds is still to enter a filled room and shout “Tape is Dead” (which it…

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  • Why can’t everything be as easy as a Drobo?

    I am a Backup Guy, which by definition means that I somewhat pretend to be a Storage guy, too (cuz where else are you going to store back up stuff?). Well, a few weeks ago, I decided to augment my home lab with some additional storage and had been really intrigued by the iSCSI offerings…

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