• Overview of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V – June 5, 2013 from 5:00PM to 6:15PM (MDC-B338)
• Transform the Datacenter with Server and Management Innovations from Microsoft – June 3, 2013 from 11:00AM to 12:00PM (FDN06)
• Windows in the Enterprise – June 3, 2013 from 11:00AM to 12:00PM (FDN07)
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Windows, But Were Afraid to Ask – June 4, 2013 from 8:30AM to 9:45AM (WCA-B201)

For Nimble Storage, this is our first year as an exhibitor at the show and we couldn’t be more excited. Join us in our booth #2523 to experience first-hand the efficiency, performance, and functionality the Nimble Storage CS-Series of hybrid storage systems can deliver for Windows environments. Our booth demos will include SmartStack for Windows Server,  along with solutions for Exchange, SQL Server, and file serving using Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Nimble Storage.

That’s not all – you’ll have a chance to enter our daily raffle for a $100 Amazon gift card, just for joining the conversation. You can also connect with us and ask questions on Twitter by following @nimblestorage or by using the hash tag #nimblestorage.

See you in The Big Easy!

Another hurdle is corrupted backups that force you further back in time for your Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Virtual systems have added another wrinkle that has caught traditional backup vendors off guard and created a new category of backup solutions. However, even these newer backup solutions that target the virtualization marketplace are still doing a “backup” of the virtual machine. Thus, the RPO is still challenging.

Now we get to the real pain point of backup-based solutions: restoration. Restoration of incremental backups can easily take hours or days to complete before your end-users can continue working. Therefore, your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is really the true enemy of productivity after an outage; you just don’t feel the restoration pain point daily like you feel the backup pain point.

The time alone to copy data off of backup media across the network has grown along with backup windows. When was the last time that you copied 100 GB across your network and timed it? How about 500 GB, 1 TB, 3 TB? Now what about multiple server’s worth of data competing for the same network? It takes hours to move the data that our servers are holding today, and your business is down until the copies complete at the very least.

As we continue to see further data sprawl and virtual server sprawl, it’s becoming readily apparent that the backup solutions that could barely meet our needs yesterday can’t scale to meet our appetite for growth now and in the future. Backup windows (RPO) and restoration (RTO) resemble a house of cards, with your company’s ability to do business sitting at the top and your reputation sitting right beside it.

IT departments need to get back to performing full backups on a regularly scheduled basis, rather than the exception. The only question is how to perform full backup fast enough in today’s data center so that we don’t have to settle for lackluster incremental backup and the time and risk associated with slow restoration. In-addition, it’s agreeable that any solution will have to be at a price point that’s somewhat competitive to your existing solution, otherwise management will likely hold back budget until the race to backup becomes a real problem. That’s why your disaster recovery project keeps getting pushed back year after year, right?

Nimble Storage takes a different approach to backup that leverages disk snapshot technology, providing near instant backup. Nimble’s patent-pending CASL file system combines primary storage with disk-based backup storage to provide a complete storage and protection solution. It includes inline compression and redirect-on-write snapshot technology that greatly reduces the amount of physical storage required to store data and its backups. Nimble snapshots eliminate backup windows and allow many more point-in-time backups (RPO) with much longer retention than existing methods. They also eliminate production impact and network bandwidth to copy backups to different storage media. Most importantly, recovery time (RTO) is greatly reduced because there is no longer a requirement to perform restoration from backup media to primary storage; you can simply mount and go.

So how are you planning to back up VMware, Hyper-V, SQL Server, Exchange, and the rest of your data center when you start exceeding your incremental backup window? We look forward to hearing your stories.