Mention the year 2008 or 2009 to almost any person and it almost inevitably elicits a negative reaction in terms of how those years were from a business perspective. However as DCIG renews its annual tradition of reflecting back on what blog entries were most read on its website during the course of 2012, 2008 and 2009 emerged as very good years in terms of DCIG providing content that is still relevant and frequently read in 2012. Today and over the next four (4) business days, I will share what blog entries garnered the most attention on DCIG’s website in 2012.
I use a very simple metric to evaluate which blog entries garnered the most attention each year: I simply look at the total number of page views on a specific blog entry over the course of a year. What is noteworthy about this year’s results is that even though most of the blog entries that topped this year’s results were written in 2008 and 2009, they covered topics that organizations of all sizes are now addressing and/or researching in 2012.
So to kick off this year’s annual recap, I begin with those blog entries that garnered a lot of attention but did not quite make it into DCIG’s Top 10 most read blog entries for 2012. However to ignore them would be doing these blog entries a disservice so I am awarding the blog entries listed below the status of “Honorable Mention” for doing so well but coming up just a bit short in DCIG’s year end results.
(in alphabetical order)
- A “Destroy All Data” Policy Will not Absolve You of Your Data Retention Responsibilities (link). Howard Haile. This blog entry written in June 2009 is one of many written in 2008 and 2009 on the topics of Big Data and eDiscovery that struck a chord with DCIG readers in 2012. Companies already face increasingly complex and difficult decisions when it comes to managing their Big Data stores and even hate to think about the implications of eDiscovery. While some are adopting a “destroy all data” policy, this blog entry covers why this is NOT a recommended course of action.
- Cloud Storage Architecture Gives MSP New Found Flexibility to Respond to Spikes in Application Requirements (link). Jerome Wendt. These days everyone loves to talk about cloud storage and the benefits it provides but in 2009, cloud storage was still on the drawing boards for most companies. Not so with the MSP covered in this particular blog entry. It brought in HP 3PAR’s private cloud storage architecture so it could do more than easily scale to meet increased demands for capacity. It also gave it the flexibility to meet an annual spike in performance associated with a client’s charity event.
- Deciphering Application Metadata is Data Deduplication’s Next Frontier (link). Jerome Wendt and James Koopman. Deduplication is now an integral part of the backup process for many companies. However based upon the increased interest in this 2009 blog entry in 2012, it suggests that companies are looking to optimize how they deduplicate their backup data. In this blog entry, James and I discuss the need for backup software and deduplication appliances to look into the backup stream itself to better deduplicate data.
- Four Data Megatrends for the Decade of the Teens (link). Jerome Wendt. This blog entry got a lot of attention in 2011 when it was published as it was picked and re-published on a couple of DCIG’s partner sites. However the interest in the four (4) datacenter megatrends covered in this blog entry continued into 2012 as companies continue to centralize their infrastructure administration, automate the datacenter, look to satisfy increasing end user needs for instant gratification and put a cloud infrastructure in place.
- Using Virtualization to Anticipate and Solve Today’s and Tomorrow’s VMware Virtual Machine Backup Problems (link). Jerome Wendt. Server and storage virtualization were already hot in 2009 but the challenges of doing backup in these newly virtualized environments were just beginning to be understood. It is clear that based upon the large number of people reading this blog entry in 2012 that more companies are experiencing the pain associated with doing backups in their virtualized environment and are looking for ways to do more than just solve their backup pain but identify the source of it before it impacts them.
Check back on DCIG’s web site tomorrow when I cover the most read blog entries on DCIG’s web site that were written in 2012.