nScaled is now offering free accounts. We just rolled this out last week and we’re starting to see some good sign-ups. We hope you’ll give it a try too.

Rachel Dines is my hero! She wrote a dynamite piece on improving disaster recovery preparedness that is all about our favorite topic, Testing. Dines is an analyst at Forrester covering IT infrastructure issues like BC/DR, so she knows her stuff. In her article, she lays out 10 best practices for companies for exercising their DR plans. It’s all terrific advice. Go read it now.

This is the first of three posts we’ll do on a data/workload protection & recovery model we call Three Phase Workload Recovery.

One of the big old players in backup software recently announced that they will “blur the lines between backup and archive,” by automatically aging backups to an archive. If your perspective is that of the old-school backup mindset, this probably sounds like progress.