In high tech we tend to use a lot of complex terms: environment, encapsulation, epicenter, infrastructure, scalability, tertiary, user-centric, virtualization … the list goes on. Heterogeneous is one of those terms. I rather like the “big H” word, generally defined as a variety of different elements mixed together. It applies to many facets of technology and to life as well.
Maybe it’s because I’m American and adopted, biologically mostly Irish + a dozen others, with an Italian name, raised in a Puerto Rican family in diverse San Jose, California. I spent 6 years in the US Marine Corps working with folks from the 50 states and beyond. America is heterogeneous and Silicon Valley is the world’s epicenter of innovation in large part because of its mixture of people and technologies.
A good example of a heterogeneous solution is Drobo + Acronis Backup & Recovery 11. ABR11 is a user-centric backup application, which protects both physical and virtual servers. Drobo B800fs storage is also user-centric and great for cost-effective scalability. Deduplication in ABR11 makes backups space efficient, which is very cool for heterogeneous sites, both onsite and offsite backup over a WAN.
Looking back, every one of my blog posts talks about storage heterogeneity in some way, and Tom’s “My other SAN is a Drobo” expression encapsulates the design idea that a variety of storage elements in an infrastructure make for a better environment.
Net = Heterogeneous is a good thing, think about products such as Acronis ABR11 if you have a mix of physical and virtual servers in your environment. Think of Drobo if you want a great mix of storage for all of your other cases, including tertiary backup. I think I got all 9 buzzwords in … BINGO!
Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
Mario Blandini
Mario is VP of Technology Solutions @ Drobo. Responsible for technical marketing, the pre-sales technical team, product marketing contribution, and solution development with industry partners, he is the voice of Drobo webcasts / podcasts and the pitch man in most Drobo videos. Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live, or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
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