Entries categorized under “Data Management”

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)

Usually everyone waits until the end of the year to talk about trends in the storage industry but being fully in the throes of the dog days of summer here in Omaha, I thought I would use this week's weekly recap blog entry to reflect on some of the trends that are taking place in 2010. In doing so, I looked back to a blog entry that I wrote in January 2010 where I forecast six subtle storage trends for 2010 to see how right (or wrong) I was on my predictions. Turns out I was more right than I anticipated but I have encountered some trends that I did not expect. (read more)

Not that many years ago the debate around how to best deduplicate data centered on inline versus post processing deduplication as data was archived or backed up. While that debate still simmers, a new one is brewing that was spurred in part by the recent announcement that Dell plans to acquire Ocarina Networks. (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)

Substantial technical differences exist between how the interfaces of storage clouds are presented, managed and secured. But from a business point of view, a cloud is a cloud is a cloud and the sooner that the technical challenges associated with managing these different storage clouds from a single platform are overcome, the sooner that businesses can ramp up their cloud storage adoption. (read more)

Not many individuals have ever had the opportunity to be worth $1 billion. Fewer still have had the opportunity to lose a billion dollars over the course of their lifetime. Then there are those privileged few that have both gained and lost that amount of money in just a few years. It was one of those individuals, Peter Bell, a general partner at Highland Capital, who spoke at the opening of this week's BDevent in Boston to share what he learned from that experience and how others can benefit from it. (read more)

Too often storage providers seem to think that "Services and Support" is just another way of saying "Skimp and Save". However more customers are seeing through this thin veil of deceit and holding storage providers more accountable for how well they deliver on this critical infrastructure component by making services and support a part of their buying decision. (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)

In a recent analyst conference call CommVault's VP of Marketing and Business Development, Dave West, pulled no punches about how CommVault wants enterprise organizations to view it in regards to backup modernization. While CommVault is certainly happy to assist those enterprise organizations that want to make incremental changes to their backup infrastructures, that is not who CommVault is specifically targeting. Rather CommVault is seeking out those customers and prospects that are ready to do a wholesale rip and replace of their existing data management products and go with a more modern solution. (read more)

Considering that many enterprise organizations have numerous applications spread across many server platforms with numerous database servers on the backend, the value of decommissioning these application servers quickly becomes evident. However application retirements go beyond just the hardware and software costs. Maintaining and managing the infrastructures needed to support legacy applications takes expertise, often specialists. (read more)

Just a few years ago disk-based backup was considered the cutting edge of backup. No more as cloud storage is now all the rage. However a cloud-based backup strategy that works or using cloud storage for archival data is still the exception, not the rule. This is why CommVault's announcement today regarding its new cloud storage connector merits attention for those organizations looking to make cloud storage a viable part of their corporate data management strategy. (read more)

Small, mid-sized and large enterprises are not the only ones looking to consolidate and simplify their IT management to create more cohesive management solutions. In the last few years, Symantec has been taking many of the same steps to integrate components of its Backup Exec, Enterprise Vault and NetBackup product suites to deliver solutions appropriate for the different size organizations that it serves. The progress that it has made in delivering on these ideals is reflected in today's Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 product releases. (read more)

Right now on Yahoo finance it is counting down what it considers the top 10 tech trends for 2010. However some of the trends that it is including in its top 10 are so broad in their definition that when it lists 'Data Centers' as its #2 trend and then identifies nearly every technology company in the space as being part of this trend, you have to question just how real this trend is? The list of what I consider the more subtle storage trends of 2010 will be a bit more specific in terms of what features, products, services and/or vendor alliances are taking place that support these theories. (read more)

On top of the storage news this week we saw the demise of COPAN Systems; or did we? It really isn't quite clear as to what has been going on over at COPAN as we have yet to get any confirmation from within the industry. Bill Mottram, a managing partner at Veridictus Associates, and fellow Coloradan such as myself, was unable to contact the Colorado company for comment. Concrete information is hard to find regarding COPAN but we were able to put a few pieces together from across the social sphere: (read more)

IT's role in the enterprise has changed dramatically in just the last few years - most notably in its responsibilities and workloads. No longer is it enough for IT to manage data protection recovery, networks, systems, and storage, but its responsibilities have expanded as it has merged with other operational and strategic business functions. This is forcing IT to develop a holistic understanding of the needs of the entire organization to ensure that the technology it deploys meets those needs as well as aligns with the larger company strategy. (read more)

This week I am going to hearken back to a conference call that took place a couple of weeks ago on the morning of November 3, 2009. This is a new quarterly conference call that CommVault is sponsoring. This particular call was hosted by its Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, David West and was intended to provide some insight into CommVault's Q209 successes. But, to my surprise, Tyco Electronics' Scott Zeiders who heads its UNIX Tech Support, also joined the call and commented on Tyco's experiences with implementing CommVault® Simpana®. (read more)

New corporate mandates for improved application availability are placing a new premium on software that can deliver centralized data management. These requirements call for software that can provide a central management console from which data management policies can be set and applied. Enterprise backup software is where many organizations are looking to deliver this functionality but for this to become a reality, features like archiving, continuous data protection (CDP), deduplication and support for disk-based backup targets must come under backup software's purview. (read more)

More enterprise organizations are examining the possibilities of storing their data to a "cloud" and archive and backup data are heading the list of the two forms of data that they are most likely to store in the cloud. But managing these two types of data once they are in the cloud is anything but a straightforward process. Different archiving and backup software solutions create their own data silos with their own data management and retention policies. This situation can create new eDiscovery and legal hold challenges that organizations are ill-prepared to deal with. (read more)

Most VARs who have had success selling Data Domain systems over the last couple of years are feeling a bit uncomfortable right now: EMC has announced its official take-over of Data Domain. VARs have made a good living on Data Domain, contributing to Data Domain's success as having one of the best-selling, fastest-growing deduplication storage systems in the market. VARs are now feeling vulnerable to EMC's goodwill - or probable lack thereof. (read more)

Maybe it has always been this way, but when a vendor hosts a customer event, it always seems that you (Mr. Customer) must pay to go and to learn about their (Mr. Vendor's) product. To me, this has always seemed somewhat backwards. You (Mr. Customer) pay a whole bunch of money for their product in the first place, then another 15 - 20% annually for support, then more for training and then, to add insult to injury, they make you pay for airfare, hotel and a registration fee to attend their annual customer event. (read more)

In the last few weeks I have had conversations with users and consultants in the US and Europe regarding the new role that data deduplication will play in enterprise data centers. Needless to say, everyone is talking about it, many are starting to implement it and data deduplication's role as a permanent fixture in reducing backup data stores is all but assured. But what is more interesting is that these individuals are starting to look beyond just using data deduplication as a means to solve their backup problems. (read more)

Most organizations simply do not like to think about their backup problems. To many their backup problems feel so overwhelming and the steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. (read more)

Obama's administration allocated $17B of the recent (Feb 09) stimulus spending package to healthcare, for the purpose of building better healthcare infrastructure. The goal of the new infrastructure is to move patient records online and enable a ubiquitous Electronic Health Record (EHR) to be shared universally among hospital systems. Obama himself promised a total of $50B in spending for this purpose during his campaign. Some experts believe that even more is to come. But, now that some of the money is allocated, how are healthcare institutions getting access to it and what are they doing with it? (read more)

If one didn't know any better, one would think that deduplicating backup data is going to solve all of IT's backup pains. The current train of thought goes something along the lines of "Plug in a deduplicating appliance, point the backup software at the new appliance and, Voila!, the backup problems are solved." The only problem with that viewpoint is that deduplicating appliances alone do not solve equally pressing corporate data management problems and may even create new backup and data management challenges along the way. (read more)

The million (or maybe billion) dollar question that companies are asking as they look at the server virtualization market is which platform to place their bets on: VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2. VMware has streaked out to an early lead while Hyper-V Server has left many enterprise organizations asking for more. But don't count Microsoft out quite yet as Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is just around the corner. (read more)