Entries categorized under “Data Management”

Managed File Transfer (MFT) companies are kicking off 2012 by positioning their products in the enterprise File Synchronization and Share (FSS) market. Their positioning is based on an organic growth and adoption trend of consumer-FSS by small, medium and large enterprises and organizations. (read more)

Later this month DCIG will be unveiling a new product designed to aid end users, value added resellers and sales teams within our coverage community. The product is based on a successful line of analysis that DCIG has been producing since 2010 - the DCIG Buyer's Guides. (read more)

Expect 2012 to be a great year filled with calamity and surrounded by opportunity. The calamity may arrive in political, mystical, technologic and economic forms. Calamity creates opportunity which brings people, vision, ideas and investment together. When thinking about future history of 2012, four (4) calamities come to mind: 1) Big data cleansing, 2) Social mashups of content, 3) Mobile first cloud applications, and 4) TV antennas (read more)

2012 ushers in the Consumerization of IT (CoIT) within the enterprise as the most strategic opportunity in IT infrastructure. CoIT is generally defined as consuming applications and content within your work life the same way you do it in your personal life. For enterprises to deliver equivalent applications they need more than an Enterprise App Store, they require a storage cloud supporting customers, partners and employees. (read more)

Before DCIG announces its top three blog entries of 2011 tomorrow, this year we thought we would do something different and take a look at some other blog entries that garnered a great deal of attention throughout 2011 but not quite enough to reach the Top 10. That being the case, an honorable mention for these blog entries was in order. Further, what is notable about these entries is that, with the exception of one, they were all published in 2011. (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)

Information managers can expect data storage companies to drive significant campaigns around Big Data as we enter 2012. Storage is the least of anyone's concerns, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report Big Data: Harnessing a game-changing asset. Information Governance in 2012 requires Data Science strategy and practitioners be added to all business teams. (read more)

IBM briefed DCIG on the details around its October Active Cloud Engine product announcement on Wednesday, November 16, of this past week. The briefing covered three functional areas, two products, one statement of direction and ironically nothing about the cloud. However, IBM deserves kudos for making a big change to its scale out NAS (SONAS) product during its Active Cloud Engine product announcement. (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)

Cloud storage as a replacement for high-cost, in-house storage to files and databases is here. On October 5th Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) crossed the half a trillion mark.  Cloud storage requires eight (8) functional areas for successful... (read more)

Last week the DCIG team attended the Fall 2011 Storage Networking World (SNW) show in Orlando, FL. While there were a lot of cool storage companies, only two meetings left any kind of impression on me: one with IBM and another with SNIA. (read more)

Enterprises have been hearing about the value and veracity of public cloud for years even as Symantec has been getting feedback on its value proposition from its public cloud customers. The message that Symantec has received is that "ripping and replacing" is not an option. Rather enterprises want and need revolutionary infrastructure with evolutionary products and prices. (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)

Microsoft SharePoint is fast replacing network file servers as the preferred tool for information sharing and workplace collaboration within enterprises. But as that occurs, the same set of data management issues that exist on network file servers are re-surfacing in these environments. By Symantec now extending the capabilities of its Data Insight to reach into SharePoint, enterprises can be assured that they are only keeping the data that they need in SharePoint while confidently archiving, deleting or re-assigning the rest. (read more)

Desktop and laptop protection has been at most a blip on the radar screen of IT priorities. But with these devices increasingly being used to store more critical enterprise data, organizations are putting new emphasis on backing up data stored on these devices for reasons ranging from increasing productivity to corporate compliance and data security all the way to business intelligence. (read more)

Few things in the IT industry are truly both push button and fully featured. This adage is so engrained in the community that when a product line breaks that axiom it defies belief. Cofio's AIMstor is designed to do just that. (read more)

When DCIG released its first ever Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide in December 2010, it created some controversy when it became public that CommVault® Simpana® had achieved the highest score and was ranked #1. But just over a month later when another analyst firm Gartner positioned CommVault in its "Leaders" Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup/Recovery, the silence was deafening. (read more)

Nearly every small, medium or large organization is heading down the path of adopting disk-based data protection as a way to solve their legacy problems of backup to tape. But what many of these organizations have yet to recognize is that as they adopt disk to store these post-production copies of data, a new opportunity is presenting itself. They now have the option to manage and leverage post-production data in ways that were never possible when on tape but now lack the tools to do so. (read more)

A little over a week ago CommVault released the results of a survey of Simpana users on their IT Storage Spending Intentions for 2011. As part of that, CommVault also created a PowerPoint (which I had the opportunity to review) that included more details than its accompanying press release. It was while going over that PowerPoint that I gained some additional insight as to why many of these organizations are able to hold the line on hiring and spending even as they look to introduce needed new features and functionality into their infrastructure. (read more)

Moving unstructured data onto lower cost tiers of storage is an initiative on almost every enterprise organization's "to-do" list. But convincing a business unit or department to "volunteer" to move its data to a lower cost tier is not always as easy as it seems, especially when doing so may possibly put production applications at risk. (read more)

2011 is shaping up to be a point of demarcation for how enterprise data is managed and protected. But in making that claim I cannot point to any specific analyst study or market survey to support it. Rather it is my sense that enterprise organizations can no longer ignore or put off their need to better manage, protect and recover their data. So when I see new releases like today's CommVault® Simpana® 9 and the features that it has packed into it, I see it ushering in the new era of enterprise data management, protection and recovery that these enterprise organizations crave. (read more)

I cannot think of a technology event that I have ever attended where record crowds were the best indicator that the economy is still struggling. But if there was ever an exception to that rule, VMworld 2010 is probably it. (read more)