Entries categorized under “Information Management”

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)

DCIG attended LegalTech New York January 30th thru February 1st, 2012. The conference was well attended by legal professionals, consultants, and vendors. While meeting with them a few opportunities stood out as compelling: Mobile device handshake, Four Rules of Early Data Assessment, Enterprise Versions of box.com and dropbox.com, THE Best LegalTech Cocktail Party (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)

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)

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)

"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)

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)

To many enterprise organizations, the question of whether or not they will store backup data in a cloud is already a foregone conclusion: it will be stored there. But that does not mean they should abandon tape in their new cloud-centered environment. Practical use cases for tape abound since tape enables enterprises to keep a firm, long-term grip on data that they temporarily or permanently store in the cloud. (read more)

Back in October 2010, CommVault introduced Simpana 9 but did so in a two-fold manner. It first announced Simpana 9's core data management features on October 5. Then, a few weeks later on October 19, CommVault introduced Simpana 9's enhanced information governance capabilities. It was during this latter presentation that a number of statements were made by CommVault's Senior Director of Information Access Management, Simon Taylor, about Simpana 9's enhanced information governance capabilities that I asked him to elaborate upon. (read more)

The situation confronting a VMware and Windows architect that I recently spoke with is probably one to which many system administrators can relate. On one hand, he had a requirement to make patches and updates to his company's systems to keep them in compliance with PCI DSS regulations. On the other, making such changes could result in system downtime and disrupt his company's operations (i.e. - stop its flow of income.) To resolve it, he turned to a new technology called the Thin Capture appliance from Kubisys. (read more)

As more organizations consolidate servers and create private storage clouds to store the data associated with these servers, the need to lock down that data to meet emerging data governance and eDiscovery demands has grown more acute. It is for reasons like these that features such as 3PAR's new Virtual Lock are becoming more sought after on storage systems. (read more)

When it comes to implementing any form of data reduction (compression or deduplication) on primary storage, many companies are still reticent to do so. So it was with some interest that I spoke to Mike Power, the CEO of Neuxpower, whose company is having success in not just delivering data reduction of files on primary storage but doing so leveraging lossy technology. (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)

I am playing the role of road warrior this week by attending two conferences. The first two days of this week I was attending Storage Networking World (SNW) 2010 in Orlando, FL, and then today I hopped on a direct flight Las Vegas to catch one day of the Symantec Vision conference. (read more)

It is time for organizations to heed the calls to take a proactive position on data management and preservation. While the sirens have been wailing for a number of years about the risks of not putting in place a comprehensive data management solution, too many organizations have failed to heed these warnings. Now a recent landmark opinion has dramatically altered the data management and preservation landscape by making it a necessity for organizations to implement a comprehensive, singular data management solution like CommVault® Simpana®. (read more)

Best practices for data management call for organizations to definitely not keep data that they do not need. On the surface, this approach sounds good but as organizations face growing stores of inactive data, they may not know who owns the data, what its value is, what risks it presents or which applications within the organization need to access the data? (read more)