Ken Ciolek

In my lab, I spent time integrating PowerProtect Data Manager with a Data Domain DD6410 to better understand deployment flow, configuration requirements, and real-world operational behavior. The process was straightforward overall, but there are several things worth validating immediately after deployment to avoid performance or retention problems later.

Let’s be honest—most disaster recovery plans look great on paper. That’s if you have a Disaster Recovery Plan available. I ask my customers and most don’t have one. What’s even worse is they don’t test their restores.

I recently deployed the Veeam Plug-in for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials version 13 (RTM) on my Veeam Backup lab server, which is running v13.0.1. Once tested, I’ll have it available to demonstrate to my customers. Veeam has introduced a dedicated plug‑in that enables image‑level backup and restore for virtual machines running on HPE VM Essentials.

​It was a technical milestone last week for me in the lab after successfully migrating my Veeam v13.0.1 backup server from Windows to a Linux VSA.

In this article I’m going to walk you through deploying a SOBR from scratch in my lab environment — not just the wizard clicks, but the design decisions, the gotchas, and the things I wish I’d known the first time I built one at scale. In recent years, before Veeam introduced direct-to-cloud capabilities, SOBR was

In this article, we’ll explore why backup validation matters and how you can validate backup integrity using Veeam Backup & Replication. A question I always ask customers. Do you test your backups? The answer I get is I don’t have the time or the resources. So, how do you know if the backup is good? Well,

Commvault is incredibly powerful. But that power comes with complexity—and complexity is where mistakes creep in. I’ve worked in enough environments to see the same patterns repeat: And most of the time, it’s not a product issue. It’s configuration. Here are 10 Commvault configuration mistakes I see all the time—and how to avoid them. 1.

You’ve probably heard the 3-2-1 rule a hundred times. Keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media types, with 1 copy offsite. It’s been the gold standard of backup strategy for years — and for good reason.

A question came up during a recent customer demo of Veeam I was hosting == Is a snapshot enough for a backup or do you need an actual backup. My answer was you should have both. In this post, we’ll break down exactly what snapshots and backups are, where each excels, where each fails, and

Testing new backup technologies in a lab is one of the best ways to understand how they will behave in a production environment. Recently, I deployed another use case for Ootbi (Out-of-the-Box-Immutability) from Object First and integrated it with Veeam Backup & Replication in a small lab environment. This environment will also be used as a use