Entries categorized under “Archiving”

Companies who execute Information Governance plans are looking for eDiscovery products supporting Early Case Assessment (ECA). ECA is a combination of search, workflow management, information processing, and multilingual user interfaces. ECA requires a cohesive set of technology, business and data science stakeholders to select products. ECA is powerful business process, but identifying ECA products is a beleaguering task. ECA mashes together eDiscovery and technology requirements. The "mashing of requirements" creates a broad matrix of products and functionality. Without question, eDiscovery has significantly evolved within the last few years. (read more)

In the product and investing world, $1 billion dollars is interesting. Interesting markets draw new and existing companies. Derrick Harris of Gigaom believes Amazon's latest filing indicates they will have exceeded $1 billion dollars in revenue for Amazon Web Services by year end. $1 billion dollars creates a lot of interest by existing and venture backed product companies. (read more)

Consumerization of content consumption models exposes opportunities to incorporate business process metadata with Big Data. Consumerization includes proliferation of social networks, content syndication and mobile devices, such as Apple iPAD, Samsung Tablet, etc. Consumerization of content merging with Enterprise Business Big Data is a challenge best met by standardized content interfaces. (read more)

You hear the words and phrases repeated in legal offices, data centers, break rooms, and boardrooms: liability, indemnity, retention, regulators, act of discovery, compliance. The discomforting sound of Information Governance contains echoes of cost, complexity, inconvenience, and potential penalties. (read more)

On average most mid-sized companies are not bothering with Information Management as a means to mitigate e-discovery costs. That is a conclusion reached by comparing Symantec's 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced in October 2011 with the research completed by King and Spalding, LLP for the Duke Law Journal December 2010. (read more)

Everyone asks, "Is tape dead?" Personally, I think that question is ridiculous. There will always be a demand for tape. The better question is, "How is the tape industry evolving to ensure tape remains relevant as a solution to address current technology trends such as "Big Data," "the Cloud" and virtualization?" This is the more pressing question regarding tape's future to which Spectra Logic provided some excellent answers this past week at its first ever analyst and press event. (read more)

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and data storage providers alike have become almost transfixed by storage system features that control storage capacity growth. Yet there are SMBs that possess applications such as medical imaging, healthcare records and video surveillance who need storage solutions that prioritize data life cycle management over controlling data growth. It is these SMBs who stand to benefit the most from Imation's recent acquisition of ProStor Systems and its InfiniVault platform. (read more)

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and data storage providers alike have become almost transfixed by storage system features that control storage capacity growth. Yet there are SMBs that possess applications such as medical imaging, healthcare records and video surveillance who need storage solutions that prioritize data life cycle management over controlling data growth. It is these SMBs who stand to benefit the most from Imation's recent acquisition of ProStor Systems and its InfiniVault platform. (read more)

Over the years big data has crept into the everyday life of systems administrators. Attempts to solve the big data problem in both block and file storage emerged as data management software. While data management software struggled to get a footing, deduplication and compression took off stunting data management software's growth. Deduplication and compression technologies have well known capabilities in both the storage and information disciplines. However, they differ in a significant way. These technologies do not ease the burden of information management. (read more)

Email is certainly not "out" as an information source when it comes to doing eDiscovery but structured and unstructured content are definitely "in" as the new primary information sources that global companies access when responding to an eDiscovery request. That is just one of the conclusions reached in Symantec's 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced today that was based on feedback from 2,000 global enterprises and released today. But even as companies change what internal information sources they access during eDiscovery requests, many remain ill-equipped to deal with it. (read more)

Continuing (dare I say exploding?) data growth in small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) is forcing these size organizations to confront an issue that was primarily confined to larger organizations: data archiving. Chief among these issues, the question as to what media to store archival data on is one that needs to be answered. While many may assume that tape is best positioned to assume this role, there is a growing body of evidence that disk may be the most appropriate media for SMEs to use when archiving their data. (read more)

When Symantec announced in early June 2011 that it was acquiring Clearwell it was described by at least one analyst as not a shot but a cannon ball across the bow of competing archiving and e-discovery solutions. But what makes the combination of Enterprise Vault and the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform so powerful goes beyond the simple ability for enterprises to purchase these two leading products from Symantec. Rather Symantec has laid the foundation to provide enterprises an end-to-end automated in-house e-discovery solution. (read more)

Over the past 15 or so months DCIG has released a multitude of Buyer's Guides on topics ranging from Midrange Arrays to Virtual Server Backup Software to Small Enterprise Storage Arrays to Midrange Array Snapshot Software. As DCIG has done so, it has learned a great deal about what it has done right and areas where it can improve. But the general feedback is that the Buyer's Guides provide users valuable insight into different technologies and help them understand the market landscape. So today DCIG is announcing the topics for its Buyer's Guides that it plans to release for the remainder of 2011 and the first half of 2012. (read more)

The shift from the Internet being a medium that enterprises use for news and information to one that they actively participate in is in full swing. But as enterprises embrace Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, they are facing new requirements to plug into these social media portals to access the content stored there and even control what their employees do while participating in these forums. So to give organizations the flexibility they need, Enterprise Vault 10.0 this week introduced a multitude of options from which enterprises can choose to monitor, control and/or archive content that their employees place there. (read more)

"The debate is over. Social media has become the Internet." Those comments kicked off my conversation with Symantec's Director of Product Marketing, Sean Regan, as we discussed the results of a Social Media Protection Flash Poll that Symantec released yesterday. Among its many findings, social media is rapidly gaining momentum in enterprises as an accepted way to communicate even though IT is still in the early stages of making social media safe for enterprises to use. (read more)

To say that tape is currently viewed as a strategic initiative in most organizations could at best be described as optimistic and at worst a fabrication. But the continuing growth of rich media (social media in particular) and unstructured file data, much of which appears to be destined for the cloud, are creating an unprecedented demand for economical back end storage on which to store it. Tape is now better poised to become that storage media of choice but it still has a lot of growing up to do in order to gain broad market acceptance. (read more)

Yesterday the first ever Tape Summit kicked off at the Sunset Station Hotel and Casino in Henderson, NV, which is about 15 miles southeast of the Las Vegas strip. The opening night began with a keynote by Spectra Logic's VP of Marketing, Molly Rector, who cited a recent article by Storage Switzerland's George Crump where he said (paraphrasing) that what is saving tape is the same thing that saved Apple: innovation. I agree with his sentiments in part but I see innovation as only part of what is spurring tape's growth. (read more)

Symantec's decision to offer hardware as well as software is generating a lot of buzz among both customers and storage providers alike. But what is getting overlooked is that in order for Symantec to succeed and gain mind share in today's Windows environments, it needs to do more than just offer a hardware/software bundle; Symantec needs to become more Windows friendly in general. That is exactly what Symantec accomplishes by not just adding hardware to its portfolio but adding support for clustered CIFS and tightening its integration with Enterprise Vault in its FileStore v5.6 release. (read more)

This past week I have been in Palo Alto, CA, attending the ExecEvent. The focus of the ExecEvent is to facilitate conversations and meetings between storage industry executives, analysts and press who are there primarily to explore new ways that they can work together and partner on initiatives. It was during this event that a group of us had an interesting conversation on how to automatically, cost-effectively and safely manage virtual machine (VM) sprawl. (read more)

Over the past few years there has been a lot of hype that tape storage is being left dead. But while disk is capturing the fancy of enterprise organizations because of disk's success in solving their primary backup and recovery problems, longer-term issues with data management are just now starting to surface. It is for this reason that enterprise data centers are finding new tape library solutions such as the Overland Storage NEO 8000e well suited for their emerging archiving needs. (read more)

Backup problems are supposed to be gone, right? All you have to do is throw in some disk and a good dose of deduplication and organizational backup problems will magically disappear. So while that may be true up to a point, today's newly released Information Management Health Check survey conducted by Applied Research and sponsored by Symantec reveals that organizations are failing to take into account the implications of what infinite backup retention periods mean for them long term. (read more)

I have to admit that once upon a time, I was on the "I hate tape" bandwagon. In the past, I spent too many days, nights and weekends as an administrator troubleshooting failed backups and then doing slow recoveries from a media I barely understood (or wanted to understand). But more recently I have found myself breaking through my "I hate tape" mentality. (read more)

It is funny how this industry changes almost from week to week. Sometimes there is so much activity going on you do not even know where to start. Other times (like during holiday shortened weeks such as this one), it is difficult to find anything really noteworthy to write about. In light of the fact that this week was a bit quiet from a news perspective, I wanted to reflect on some innovation occurring in the area of LTO-5 tape and how this might lead to a renewed interest in tape media in the years to come. (read more)

It's easy for those new to VMware, or even for those who have used VMware for awhile, to assume that all VMware backup solutions provide similar functionality. While it might be true to say that all of these solutions protect VMs, their similarities in many cases end there. Among their differences, two of the largest focus on how they manage VMware backups and the ensuing archives that are created which is where software like VizionCore's vRanger Pro stands out. (read more)

Upon arriving at Symantec Vision on Wednesday morning, it quickly became evident that the messaging at this year's event focused on how the business world is shifting from a Systems-Centric View (policies and governance is done according to the physical devices on which they reside such as servers, networking and storage) of data management to an Information Centric View (policies and governance are set independent of what storage device on which the data resides). (read more)