Personally, I have traveled around the world and seen some amazing things this year from priceless works of art at the Государственный Эрмитаж (Hermitage Museum) in St. Petersburg, Russia to footsteps in front of the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska.  My family has been very supportive of my work and I am very thankful for the time I do get to spend with them.  Some of my favorite hobbies have taken a backseat this year, but I still make time rake in some pots at the poker tables and occasionally still spot a thunderstorm or two for the local ARES group on ham radio when I can.

While reflecting on 2010 is great, I am ready to head into 2011 full steam ahead.  The new year is going to be just as exciting if not more than the one ending today.  I always try and set a few goals each year, not necessarily resolutions as those die fast I find, but goals that can be measured and obtained.

Here is my short list:

• Travel under 150,000 miles next year… I have staff now that can make up for it
• Log 10,000 steps a day and shooting for a minimum of 3,000,000 for the year (Great new internet connect pedometer is helping with the math)
• Lose 20% by the end of the year… much more realistic goal this coming year
• Do at least 105% of quota with my global teams
• Challenge and mentor at least two employees personally in my organization
• Find more quality time with the family be it on the road or at home
• Blog a post at least once a week… glad I found that schedule option for the really busy times

I hope everyone has a safe and Happy New Year and I look forward to seeing you all on the other side in 2011.

– Dave

11.  The big bonus word in buzzword management bingo next year will be “Private Cloud”

10. Consolidation of storage companies will continue… Who buys NetApp, DataDirectNetworks, ExaGrid?

9. Federation between cloud providers will become key… Niche players will emerge here.

8. Disk to Disk to Tape (D2D2T) backups will finally start becoming Disk to Disk to Cloud (D2D2C)

7. The adoption of mixed operations between private and public clouds will still be slow.  (Security, SLA management, Federation issues will hold it back)

6. The year of end point virtualization in the traditional View / XenDesktop model will still be waiting for next year.

5. End point virtualization providers who provide persona management, composite virtualization, and content caching will gain ground. (Think Unidesk, Atlantis Computing, Virtual Computer types)

4. Virtualizing big resource Tier 1 apps will make more widespread adoption in production.  Resource allocation increases and management enhancements, virtualization powered recovery options, and better performance management remove the final barriers.

3. iWant, iNeed, iWill monitor, control, and operate my virtualization environment and ecosystem tools from my iDevices. (I heart the iPad platform)

2. Acquisitions of niche ISVs will be a hot trend by the larger  OEM players trying to polish their “TotalControlApproachforWorldDomination(TM)” of the virtualization ecosystem from the hardware to the app stack.  (Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Cisco, etc are just getting warmed up)

1. The teeam that is green will continue rocking on the World Domination Tour 2011 that is coming to a data center near you!

The VMs were spun up from templates out of thin air,
vCenter was kindly watching over and knew they were all there

The resource pools were all balanced, the clusters content,
While admins fast asleep dreamed of vMotions

And DRS and HA always ready to act too,
Stood by ready to mitigate any issues

When out on the SAN a snapshot arose,
Filled with VMs quiesced in a pose

Away went the bits flying with speed,
as vStorage API was feeding them to Veeam

The backups complete, the snapshot released,
SureBackup stood ready to verify thee

An application stack mounted and testing complete,
Audit reports are sent to the admins while sound asleep

With a solid backup on disk tightly compressed and deduped,
I knew I was ready for recovery should there be an issue

Protected for now, the future, and ever more,
Remember you have Instant Recovery in the need of a full VM restore

Now to the files on FAT, EXT, or NTFS! To those running Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP and oh AD, yes you are all protected so rest easy

You can relax and breathe in a breath of fresh air,
you never have to worry because you are equipped with U-AIR

Now legacy solutions be worried your days are numbered
Veeam is the new sheriff in town and you will soon to retired

Just then down the chimney came quite a steal,
If you act soon before the New Year and you could secure quite a deal!

Going un-legacy is in and using tape is dying out,
You have replication included to move your VMs about

With so much available and ready to explore,
Visit Veeam.com today and download a copy to see all and learn even more

Now awake from your sleep and realize your dream,
Can all become possible when you go green with Veeam.

Happy Holidays to all and to all a good night!

So how do you get your free goodies to keep you occupied till you can open some other presents… Just browse on over to our special landing page for VCP, vExperts, and VCIs and provide your credentials.

Happy Holidays!

This year our booth was just slammed with people clamoring to see the new release of our market leading data protection product, Veeam Backup and Replication version 5 in action.  The buzz about our five new patent-pending features that encompass vPower, our approach to virtualization powered protection, really kept the booth hoping and me busy.  If I was recording this post as a podcast, my voice would have sounded a little like Barry White as I overworked my voice.

In the end the hardwork by all was more than worth it.  This year when the TechTarget awards were given out, it was nothing but absolutely acknowledgement of our company’s hardwork and our dedicated to deliver to the market the tools and solutions our customers really need.  We took home four awards including the coveted Best of Show and Best New Technology awards.  You can head on over to veeam.com to get all the details, I don’t want to still our excellent marketing teams thunder.

Looking back on VMworld 2010, I will look back at a week that was a whirlwind for me.  Many, many long hours that paid off and will continue to pay off in great dividends of the year to come.  I am honored to work for Veeam and Green is the new gold standard.

With regards to the show itself, I loved the VMworld Labs.  The cloud powered labs were spot on and a complete hit.  The downside of VMworld were the sessions.  Something needs to be done to bring back Schedule Builder.  The ability to show up and attend any session would have been cool if you could get in.  I tried to attend six different sessions and was denied access to all.  Thankfully I know the online content will be there, but it was a disappointment.

Doug Hazelman is traveling on business this week and asked if I would write a post and provide some advice on using a cloud service provider as a backup option for your virtualization backups.  My name is David Siles and I am the Director of Worldwide Technical Operations for Veeam Software.  I am also a VMware vExpert and VMware Certified Professional.

In my job, I am continually asked by customers, partners, and service providers who purchase our backup and replication product the best way to utilize our solution to interact with the cloud.  While this sounds ominous, dealing with backing up data into remote hosted storage or cloud storage has been around for some time.  You may be familiar with services such as Dropbox, Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3), Rackspace CloudFiles, and the like already.  They are great for protecting your personal documents and sharing items with colleagues for collaboration.  However when it comes to backing up virtual machines for remote data protection and business continuity additional questions arise.

The 4 C’s
Cryptography, Compression, Compatibility, and Cost are the four “C’s” to consider when dealing with cloud storage for backup of your virtual machines.  Everyone wants their data to be secure as it leaves their premise so encryption is always a concern.   Almost any cloud storage provider you choose to host your backups  is going to provide some access utilizing network transport encryption.  The further question is always around the backup archive itself.  The decision to encrypt the backup archive needs to be balanced with the purpose of the archive, business regulations, and corporate policy.  Just be aware that encryption is always a time trade-off.  Software encryption of the archive versus hardware encryption at the storage layer should be evaluated to best meet your needs.

The next consideration is compression, which feeds into the cost angle as well.  The moment backup data leaves your internal network, you are paying a bandwidth cost to both your Internet service provider and cloud storage provider.  The ability of your backup solution of choice to compress and deduplicate your backup archive is going to help reduce bandwidth and storage cost.  It is a must-have when looking at cloud storage.

When speaking to compatibility, you need to ensure that the chosen cloud solution presents a storage point that is compatible with your backup vendor.  Many providers will give you the ability to mount and present the cloud storage location as locally mapped target drive.  The other aspect of compatibility to consider is does this cloud storage provider offer a way to utilize my backups to extract and run my virtual machines in the cloud?  Many managed service providers are aware that in a true disaster situation, the ability to provide you cloud based storage for backup is key, but  the ability to restore and run the virtual machines in the cloud is just as important.  You may wish to consider providers that have a compute cloud that is compatible with your virtual machine format and hypervisor of choice.  Some service providers also offer the ability to host replicated virtual machines in native virtual disk format in a standby state that can be brought online if needed quickly.

The last aspect is always the one people focus on first—cost.  You typically pay for backup storage on a GB-per-month basis.  Additional fees include inbound and outbound bandwidth from the provider’s network along with additional services such as geographic distribution of content and guaranteed level of protection.  When doing your research, always consider the service level agreements and guarantees your provider offers.  Review the terms and conditions on the reimbursement of fees and damages for not meeting the SLAs.  Sometimes the most cost effective provider ends up costing you more in your time of need if they can’t deliver when you need them most.

Take an Educated Chance
I always recommend that our customers start with low hanging fruit and test our solutions with their new cloud storage provider of choice.  As a place to start, reach out to your current backup solution provider and see if they have a recommendation for a provider.  Of course, since every situation is unique, you should still conduct a test for your environment.  Since you can typically pay as you use, test your backups into the cloud, test conducting recovery, and monitor your bandwidth utilization in a pilot program. Then make the decision that is right for your business needs.

The new launch is going to be just that with my blog starting a fresh.  The old posts are pretty much lost forever, some of the good nuggets I had there may come back as new posts.  If your looking for an old referenced post linked from somewhere on the interwebs, sorry you reached a dead end now.

The new mantra for Silesville is “Partly cloudy with a chance of virtualization.”  This perfectly sums up what you will find here on the weblog.  I will still cover virtualization topics of interest while branching out to muse on cloud computing.  I am still a geek at heart and at times I will share cool and new technology that piques my interest as well.  Finally as this is my personal blog and some times I will be making posts of rants, raves, and ponderings that intrigue me whether or not it is technology related.

So thanks for stopping by and look for exciting growth as I go Silesville 3.0… The forecast is bright and sunny for the future.

– Dave