Entries categorized under “Archiving”

Email and other electronic communications are defacto business records and public agencies must take steps to preserve and give access to government records or face the consequences. (read more)

As corporations slowly face the consequences of unmanaged information assets, they have started to form ESI retention policies, acquire email archives and other enterprise technologies needed to track and dispose of newly created communications. It is much simpler to enable policy, process and technology to handle the go forward content than to deal with years or decades of accumulated unstructured content. Most public corporations have existing preservation requirements to deal with on top of possible long term retention regulations. (read more)

Right now commercial data stores are on track to achieve the petascale range sooner rather than later. According to multiple sources, data collected and stored is doubling every year for most businesses; a rate of growth that has held fairly constant over time. In the 1990s, a 100 GB database was large enough to stress most systems - back when disk scanning speeds were 30 MB/s and database tools were relatively immature. In the current decade, terascale data stores are already common - and managing 100 GB is now considered somewhat trivial. In the coming decade, truly massive petascale systems can be expected to dwarf today's large multi-terabyte stores - requiring a similar leap in the technology being used to store and retrieve the data. (read more)

In many respects, this year's Microsoft Tech-Ed represented an interesting year without the impending march of a new version of Windows or key applications. Since there were no major product announcements from Microsoft this year regarding its major product lines like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server or Windows, users in attendance had other motivations for attending. Some were looking to deepen their knowledge base about existing products from Microsoft and its partners like CommVault, while other individuals were looking for the inside scoop as to what new features Microsoft might include in forthcoming releases of its products. (read more)

While the tape market is not growing as fast as it was in previous years, IDC announced that in calendar year 2007 LTO drive shipments increased by 15 percent over the previous year and the midrange tape automation market generated $1.3 billion in revenue. This robust market continues to spur innovation from companies such as Overland Storage, whose customer base still heavily relies upon NEO SERIES tape libraries and the ARCvault family of autoloaders and libraries as part of their data protection strategies. According to Peri Grover, Overland Storage's Director of Product Management, innovation remains important to the company's customers because their data storage requirements continue to grow. "It may seem obvious, but companies still need technologies - including tape technologies - that can keep up with this growth," she says. (read more)

The recent Quon v. Arch Wireless decision has raised many questions about a company's ability and right to monitor employee communications. Fortunately, a deeper read shows that the real issues centered around the employee's reasonable expectation of privacy, which a well documented and communicated policy solves handily. So an employee might ask, "I know that the company owns my email, but do they really read it?" (read more)

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality. (read more)

Last week's announcement that yet another vendor has made adaptations to its deduplicating system to support archive retention as a new system feature can mislead companies into drawing the conclusion that if this appliance works for backup that it is suitable for archiving as well. Many companies are frugal when it comes to storage purchases so if they can buy a disk-based appliance that addresses both their archiving and backup needs, they may be tempted to do so. (read more)

The State of Texas recently passed H.B. No. 2833 stating you must hold a license as a security services contractor if you "engage in business activity in which a license is required." The law then outlines that a company acts as an "Investigations Company" under Section 1702.104, (4) (b) "...includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public." Investigation is a key word in the statute and appears to be broadly defined and it has lead to confusion and controversy. (read more)

Simon: Despite what people may think, archiving changes constantly. Laws are constantly changing which can force companies to re-classify data they had previously archived under a different set of rules or policies. Legal holds are creating new sets of problems of companies. Now you must add another set of retention and management rules on top of rules that you already have in place. These new rules may only apply to a subset of the data. Legal holds require companies to take segments of the information that are managing now, group it separately and then manage it by this separate set of policies. (read more)

Deduplication is currently one of the hottest topics in data protection but it takes more than one form. The CommVault® Simpana® software suite implements deduplication as a Single Instance Store (SIS). In this iteration, SIS deduplicates archived and backed up files at the file level and then only stores one occurrence of the file. In part 2 of this interview series with CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, Simon Taylor, elaborates on how Simpana leverages SIS for information search and data mobility as well as how this approach complements block-based deduplication approaches found on certain disk-based storage solutions. (read more)

One would think that at some point organizations would reach the tipping point for storage consumption and that year-over-year storage capacity growth rates of 30%, 50%, 100% or more would come to an end, or at least slow down. If so, it hasn't occurred yet and, if anything, it shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future. Nowhere is this more evident than with the amount of data that companies need to archive and retain. (read more)

There is a growing perception among those who are intimately involved with information management that the discipline of information management is changing. The fact that it is changing comes as no surprise to anyone as everyone knows that a change has to occur. The question is, "Is this just an evolutionary change or is a paradigm shift in information management about to occur?" (read more)

The Computerworld column I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic of "A Bit of a Flaw with SATA disk drives" sparked quite a bit of debate around just how safe is data on today's RAID-based storage systems that use SATA disk drives? A series of comments appeared on Computerworld's site where the column appeared as well as on a forum at Nabble's web site. Also, at least one storage system vendor felt obligated to send me their white paper that explains how its RAID-based storage system accounts for this bit error rate problem on SATA disk drives. (read more)

In this entry, David explains why an appropriately configured Data Collector is so important to data protection and information recovery and what features Asigra has introduced into Televaulting in time to ensure its Data Collectors are appropriately configured in order to optimize the management and placement of data long term. David also shares his views on the use of removable media in data protection and information recovery. (read more)

It's 2008 and one would think that disk-based storage systems are beyond the point of catastrophic outages and/or data loss as a result of disk drive failures. The prevalent use of RAID in storage systems for disk drive protection in its many forms would seem like ample insurance against the loss of data. However a careful examination of the facts exposes the flaws in assuming that RAID alone is sufficient as a means of data protection; especially when used in conjunction with today's high capacity SATA disk drives. (read more)

Hard-disk drive storage is taking center stage as the preferred media for enterprise archiving, data protection and information recovery needs. But as the shift to using disk for long term data storage needs occurs, companies are coming to realize that the software that they have relied on for years is, in many instances, poorly equipped to deal with the management of hard-disks as part of their larger data management scheme. Optimizing the placement of data on hard-disks, replicating data to disk storage systems at different sites and then recovering the data are new challenges that companies face as they introduce larger capacity hard-disks into their environment. (read more)

However as companies move towards archiving data on disk-based storage systems, you can't just always build bigger buildings or knock down walls. If anything, companies want to store more data in a smaller footprint. Making it more complicated, companies are creating exponentially more data than they were 10, 5 and even 2 years ago and keeping it for longer periods of time. Factor in mobile devices that manipulate existing data and create new data and the increasing use of video in corporations and the result is millions, billions and even trillions of file-based data elements that create thousands of terabytes of data. (read more)

Storage resource management (SRM) software is probably one of the more "on again, off again" storage technologies that I cover. In the many years I have been intimately involved with and covering storage, no one (standards boards, analyst firm, or vendor) has yet arrived at a definition of SRM that everyone agrees upon. If anything, this lack of an industry standard has done more to hurt the adoption of SRM software by end-users since it can leave users confused as what they are actually going to get from SRM; if and when they actually go to purchase it. (read more)

"CommVault® Systems has transformed from a backup company into an information management company." That statement by Marcus Muller, CommVault's Intellectual Property Counsel, encapsulates how CommVault Systems currently views itself as a company. Muller justifies his position by pointing to CommVault's innovative efforts around its Simpana® Software suite and how these have resulted in patents that helped CommVault transform itself into an information management company while giving it an edge up on its competition going forward. (read more)

In the face of these fundamental shifts among corporate data centers in server data protection and virtualization, data protection software needs to do more than just adapt. It needs to embrace backup-to-disk and server virtualization in order to transform data protection software into an information recovery platform. That is exactly what today's 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting brings to the table in the following ways: (read more)

One can hardly have a conversation about storage management these days without the topic of archiving surfacing. Part of the reason that archiving is commanding more attention is because as companies create and keep ever greater amounts of referential data on their production storage systems, it is creating a host of new problems (read more)

Paulk revealed that he is now in full production with the production code loaded on the NEC HYDRAstor. However he is still using the same hardware configuration (two Accelerator Nodes and four Storage Nodes) that he started out using due to the high deduplication ratio that he is achieving with the HYDRAstor. Last fall he was achieving a 17:1 deduplication ratio and hoped to eventually achieve a 35:1 ratio. Six months later, his deduplication ratio is now approximately 39:1 which has mitigated his need to buy additional capacity and has driven his cost/GB down to approximately 70¢/GB. "It's like getting 390 TB for the price of 10 TBs," says Paulk. (read more)

Today and tomorrow I am putting on both my reporter and analyst hats. Living in Omaha, NE, I am only a hop, skip and jump away from Minneapolis, MN, so I took the opportunity to drive up here to attend Compellent's annual C-Drive user conference that runs from May 6 - May 8 and do some live, on-site blogging about my experiences while I am here. Already a few notable items to report from last night's customer reception and this morning's opening presentation. (read more)

Day 1 of the Spring 2008 Storage Networking World is Orlando, Florida, is now in the books and with it came some interesting tidbits but nothing what I consider earth-shattering - at least at this point. First briefing of the conference was with Permabit's CEO Tom Cook, CTO Jered Floyd and VP of Marketing, Mike Ivanov. (read more)