Entries categorized under “Archiving”

Companies sometimes assume that they must continue to use legacy archival techniques for retaining their critical intellectual property and business data. Based upon my experience, when developing new and more up-to-date archival strategies for organizations, tape and optical can no longer be viewed as the primary media for archival data. (read more)

Sarbanes-Oxley, FRCP amendments, the FTC Red Flag Rules and the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) are just some of the many federal, state and local regulations with which businesses may need to comply. This does not even begin to factor in the need to satisfy the many internal governance policies and procedures with which they need to adhere to. Then even if they somehow manage to satisfy all of these compliance requirements, they still have pools of data that do not fall under any compliance or regulatory requirements, at least not at the beginning of the data's lifecycle. (read more)

Before storing documents electronically gained acceptance in the enterprise, retrieving documents meant parsing file cabinets and retrieving paper forms. And when it came time to share that information with the public without revealing classified information, it usually meant copying the original document and then pulling out a black marker that was used to cross out sensitive information on the copy, followed by more copying until the underlying text could no longer be seen. So while in the last decade most companies have scrapped file cabinets in favor of document images, more companies keep the black marker handy than they would probably like to admit. (read more)

One of the more interesting conversations I had was with John Martin, VP of Product Management with Riverbed Technology. For those of you unfamiliar with Riverbed, its Steelhead® appliances provides WAN acceleration to improve application performance across corporate WANs. As part of the underlying secret sauce in these appliances, Riverbed uses compression and deduplication technologies (among others) to accelerate application performance. That information is fairly well known. What is not so well known is that it has seen instances where it has improved the data reduction rates by 30 - 70% of data that was already deduplicated, and it has specifically seen these results when testing with Data Domain's appliances. (read more)

There continues to be a lot of buzz about storage consolidation and, more specifically, consolidating file servers. Regardless of what form NAS consolidation takes - monolithic NAS filers, file virtualization or clustered NAS - companies tend to focus on its obvious benefits. Smaller data center footprints, improved storage utilization, centralized consoles for simpler administration and even deduplicating redundant files are some of the advantages that companies will realize should they consolidate NAS. Yet what companies may forget to consider is the new backup challenges that consolidation creates and that the new backup problems created may mitigate whatever benefits consolidation delivers. (read more)

When you really look into the data that your organization is archiving, there is usually a good reason for the business to retain that data, otherwise why would it be archived at all? Placing that data on a system designed and built from the ground up to be an archival repository is probably a really good idea. (read more)

It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy's solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI. (read more)

For most end-users the promise of a truly open archival system has been mostly out of reach. The proprietary approaches taken by storage vendors in the deployment of archival systems inside the hardware and application stacks has left users without a viable, standards-based archiving option. (read more)

In Part 1, we talked with Jack Halprin about transitioning from a forensic collection product and market to Autonomy's enterprise solutions. Now we get to learn more about the specific products that he is working with and how they address customer's pain points in the early stages of the e-Discovery lifecycle. (read more)

Companies can experience an overwhelming sense of relief when they finally resolve their ongoing backup problems by switching from tape to disk as their primary backup target. But what companies may fail to fully contemplate is the new possibilities - and challenges - that storing data on disk opens up to them. On the upside disk makes data recoveries and off-site replication of the data much easier to accomplish. Conversely, it can present companies with new challenges to manage the data on disk as it ages lest the escalating costs of disk capacity and cooling and powering the storage system start to offset some of the benefits that disk-based backup provides. (read more)

Day 2 at VMworld has come and gone and probably my biggest regret was that I had to miss this morning's keynote by VMware's new CEO, Paul Maritz. In reading through some other blogs this evening about the event and assuming Storagezilla called it right, it was a doozey essentially declaring open war on other operating systems. In any case, my day was focused on catching up with a number of vendors to get some of the latest behind the scenes scoop in the storage world. In fact, as one walks into the exhibitor hall in VMworld, it is hard not to mistake this conference for a storage conference. (read more)

Cloud storage is generating a fair amount of interest in the press, among analysts, and even, to some degree, among the end-user community who actually store their data in the cloud. The big attraction of cloud storage is that it provides companies with an economical, always available pool of storage that they can use for their data storage needs while off-loading the task of storage management to a third party provider. On the surface, this sounds great. But companies really need to understand exactly what problems that they hope to solve using cloud storage and then only use it under those circumstances. (read more)

Asigra makes no bones about it: it unabashedly advocates that companies keep all of their backup data on disk under the management of its Televaulting software. The reasons Asigra provides for keeping backup data on disk are plentiful as well: Faster backup and recovery times; elimination of tape management tasks; deduplication technologies that minimize data storage requirements for disk; and, data that is easy to copy and replicate locally and remotely. Yet if there is anything companies know about backup, it is that managing backup data and its recovery over the long term, whether it is on disk or tape, is where the complexity can start to surface. (read more)

If you have spent any time in the IT world you have seen technologies come and go, but few areas have been subjected to the dramatic changes that storage has endured. As enterprise networks have matured the storage of data has exploded. This has fostered new and inventive ways to store and retrieve critical data like the emerging cloud storage platform. Cloud storage's time is upon us and as large companies such as Amazon take the lead in this area it has brought legitimacy to the cloud concept. In 2007 IDC released the Digital Universe Study which stated between 2006 and 2010 information stored in the digital universe would increase from 161 Exabytes to 988 Exabytes. Based on this incredible projected growth in data and how cloud storage is evolving we quite possibly are witnessing the future of storage unfolding before us. (read more)

No matter where one works anymore (public or private sector), the line between what data organizations should keep classified and what data they should expose or make public is becoming more convoluted. Laws like the Freedom of Information Act coupled with recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are forcing organizations to re-evaluate their data management practices so they can differentiate between what data they should keep private versus what data they should expose or make available to comply with these acts. However to meet the specifications of these laws requires data management software that easily gives companies the flexibility to access and manipulate their data to meet these new requirements. (read more)

As a former end-user, I know companies internally spend a lot of time talking about the importance of cutting costs. But at the end of the day, often their bigger concern is to mitigate risk in their environment. So no matter how much money a new technology saves, companies do not want to adversely impact their existing production environment. However, standing still is not an option either. The question for companies then becomes which technologies are worth taking a chance on and innovating versus preserving the status quo. While everyone's criteria for making that decision and tolerance for risk are different, a major question they always ask is, "What happens if it does not work in my environment?" (read more)

In Asigra's recent release of Televaulting 8.0 data security remains at the forefront with their use of the AES encryption algorithm to encrypt data while in transmission across the network; or at rest in its DS-System or BLM Archiver. Televaulting's approach to encryption key management provides several options in how to best approach encryption key management. Televaulting 8.0 gives users and service providers several key ways to protect data from unauthorized exposure. (read more)

The reliance that organizations have upon electronically stored information (ESI) is phenomenal. Not only is ESI the life-giving blood that courses through corporations, ESI is becoming more important in safeguarding and reducing risk as organizations deal with increased litigation. eDiscovery is the process of searching, locating, and securing ESI that is used as evidence in litigation. Any company not complying with a request to perform eDiscovery can incur costly and potentially disastrous side effects. (read more)

I spend a great deal of time analyzing and writing about different disk-based backup products. The reason is simple. Companies are buying disk-based backup products as a quick fix to their backup problems and want to know what purchasing options they have. But companies should not assume that the purchase of a disk-based backup solution, deduplicating or otherwise, equates to an improvement in the management of their production data. Rather it is just a band aid. (read more)

A frequently reiterated statistic is the high percentage of infrequently accessed or static data that resides on production storage systems - up to 80% according to some estimates. In fact, a recent joint study conducted over 3 months by researchers from NetApp and the University of California and presented at USENIX 2008 found that over 90% of the 22 TB of data stored on two enterprise file servers was rarely accessed after it was stored. Specifically, 66% of the files were re-opened only once and 95% were re-opened fewer than five times. (read more)

Knowing how long to keep copies of production data in backup repositories is a problem that companies only give scant attention to now. When companies back up production data to tape, they tend to only invest minimal time and effort managing the data after it is backed up. The backup data remains on the tape until the data is overwritten during the next backup job; or the tape, and data on it, is simply discarded when the tape wears out. Besides, taking a more proactive approach to managing backup data on tape is time consuming, difficult to implement and has, to date, shown minimal return on investment (ROI). (read more)

There are many more enterprise applications that can be dual purposed for eDiscovery and business benefits. Desktop search can help users find and designate ESI. Firewall and spam systems can actually be used to collect IM conversations. Content Management Systems expand the potential search/preservation criteria and can decrease the potential volume of ESI by enabling active expiry of unnecessary items. The important thing is to think beyond point solutions and bring legal, business and IT to the table to extract the greatest value from the 'cost of doing business' in America. (read more)

Overall, SMB's have a potential shortcut to 'Litigation Readiness' through SaaS outsourcing of the primary messaging and file storage systems. Legal definitely needs to be involved in the provider selection and RFP process, but IT should welcome another sponsor to the project. Legal should request documentation on system capabilities (search/culling for Rule 26 disclosures and Meet & Confer), Chain of Custody, exception reporting, deposition fees for authenticating evidence (Rule 30(b)(6)), SLA's for retrieval rates, physical/electronic security and the actual storage format of the ESI. The last is particularly important in case the requesting party makes arguments for using alternative search engines on the ESI. Governmental agencies are required to store records in an open format like MSG files for email, so any SaaS provider who has public sector clients should utilize an open format storage system. With a little research and diligence, SMB's can leverage SaaS to achieve litigation readiness in a cost effective manner. (read more)

Backup to disk is fundamentally changing corporate perceptions about backup and recovery. Using disk as a primary backup target has solved long-standing corporate backup problems including successfully completing backups within designated backup windows and expediting recoveries while deduplication is resolving the cost and capacity issues associated with storing backup data on disk. But before companies breathe a collective sigh of relief and think that disk has officially solved their backup problems, they need to think again. The immediate crisis may be over but longer term problems still remain. (read more)

WORM (Write Once Read Many) technology is often viewed by users as a ubiquitous technology. Though WORM is available on many types of storage systems today (whether they use disk, tape or optical), a company may fail to fully recognize or comprehend that about the only aspect of WORM that these storage system vendors agree upon is the words that comprise the acronym WORM. Beyond that, how WORM is implemented and managed long term on each storage system can vary significantly. (read more)