One of the unique aspects about running a blog site that primarily does analysis as opposed to commenting and covering today’s news is that the most read blog entries on DCIG’s site each year are rarely from the current year. This year was no exception as only one of the Top 5 blog entries written in 2012 made it into the Top 10 of DCIG’s most read blog entries of 2012 that I will start to reveal in tomorrow’s blog entry.
Exactly why blog entries from prior years are read more frequently is not always entirely clear to me though I have three thoughts as to why this may be the case.
First, many of the providers that DCIG works with in developing blog entries are emerging technology providers or, if the provider is more mature, the technologies that DCIG covers on its behalf are brand new for them. As such, companies are not yet encountering the problem that their technology solves so they are not reading about it.
Second, companies are by nature cautious and it may be years before they adopt a new technology. That was certainly my experience when I worked at First Data. I wanted to implement virtualization in 2002 but it was not until 2008 that First Data began to adopt virtualization on a broad scale. Assuming that trend holds true for other companies, blog entries on technology topics that DCIG wrote in 2008 and 2009 are now only being researched and/or adopted on a wide scale in 2012.
Third, the most popular blog entries from the current year address tactical challenges that companies face now. This assumption holds true for every one of most read blog entries of 2012 written in 2012. So without further ado, here are the Top 5 most read blog entries of 2012 written in 2012 from lowest to highest.
5. New HP ESRP Results for 90,000+ Mailbox Microsoft Exchange 2010 Deployments Show HP 3PAR Tripling the Performance of Competitive Storage Systems (link). Jerome Wendt. Microsoft Exchange remains one of the most if not the most critical applications in most organizations. However as enterprises look to consolidate and centralize their Microsoft Exchange deployments, they also need a back end storage system that can scale to meet both Exchange’s capacity and performance requirements without becoming more difficult to manage. In this blog entry, I examine how the HP 3Par T800 meets today’s enterprise requirements for Microsoft Exchange.
4. Rethinking Backup Strategies for Virtualization Part I: The Five Major Ways Server Virtualization Negatively Impacts Backup (link). Ben Maas. Everyone also talks about all of the benefits of server virtualization (of which they are many) but people also want to know about the risks it presents. In this blog entry, DCIG analyst Ben Maas takes a look at the five ways that server virtualization negatively impacts traditional backup processes which include: (1) making fewer resources available to virtual hosts; (2) VMs use virtual disks; (3) Difficult to detect new VMs; (4) VMs can move around (migration); and (5) Granular restores are problematic.
3. Universal Desire for Better Backups Provides Impetus for New Features in Backup Exec 2012 (link). Jerome Wendt. As the largest provider of backup software by market share, Symantec hears and sees it all when it comes to user feedback on how to make backup better. In covering its new Backup Exec 2012 release, I take a look at how Symantec took that user feedback to prioritize which features to introduce into Backup Exec 2012 to make it better suited for today’s backup requirements. Key features that Symantec introduced into Backup Exec 2012 included revamping its user interface, simplifying its licensing, providing two (2) new offerings for small businesses, a new V-Ray edition focused entirely on virtualized environments and eliminating the need to do hardware disaster recoveries.
2. Today’s Backup Software: Smarter, More Agile and Doing a Lot More than Backup; Interview with Quest Software Sr VP Walter Angerer Part III (link). Jerome Wendt. Early in 2012 I had the opportunity to speak to Quest Software’s (now part of Dell) Senior VP Walter Angerer and then do a blog series based on it. This third blog entry in the series clearly caught the fancy of many as Walter discussed how backup software was changing to meet new enterprise demands. These new demands include backup software offering higher levels of application integration and awareness, better accounting for virtualized environments and better able to adapt to the high levels of change occurring within enterprises.
1. The SSD Garbage Collection Explained in Depth by WhipTail CTO James Candelaria – Part I (link). Ben Maas. This was the first blog entry that DCIG posted in 2012 and it went hot almost the moment it was posted and never cooled down the entire year. In this blog entry, DCIG analyst Ben Maas met with WhipTail Technology’s CTO James Candelaria to discuss the particular challenges that SSDs present when used in storage arrays, why traditional storage controllers are not well-suited to manage them and why SSD garbage collection to data has presented a particularly daunting challenge to date for storage manufacturers. Considering the wide spread interest that organizations have in adopting SSD and flash memory, it should be no surprise that this blog entry ended up being the most read blog entry of 2012 that was written in 2012.
Check back tomorrow when I begin to cover the Top 10 most read blog entries on DCIG’s web site in 2012 regardless of the year in which the blog entry was written.
Also, if you have not already done so, check out yesterday’s blog entry as it looks at the blog entries on DCIG’s website that earned honorable mention for 2012.