I just returned from Symantec Vision, held June 9-13 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The weather wasn’t the only thing that was hot (some days topped out at nearly 110 degrees), but all the buzz was around data deduplication. In addition to SEPATON (with DeltaStor), there were no fewer than seven other vendors exhibiting under the deduplication banner. However, the focus of this buzz was on the larger “data center class” customers, where the following deduplication themes were highlighted:

• Simplicity of management
• “Scale As You Grow” grid concepts
• Availability of data

These are clearly points that SEPATON wholeheartedly agrees with. Naturally, Symantec was heavily promoting their branded technologies, but it’s interesting to note their intended direction, and compare that with what SEPATON has been advocating for years.

Lets’ see:

• Simplicity of management? Check. Our just-released v5.0 software (S2100-ES2 VTL, Site², and DeltaStor) sports increased levels of automation, wizards, and simple “click management” that is all presented through a single management pane.
• “Scale As You Grow” Grid? Check. Our very first products included grid technology, and we strongly leverage that ability with DeltaStor to simplify scaling out deduplication. The difference is we can make guarantees around performance, availability and recoverability of data that are difficult or impossible with a software-only play.
• Availability of data? Check. Combined with our fully-redundant hardware plant along with end-to-end integrity checks in the software, we can provide a compelling data availability solution.
  

The biggest difference that I noted: SEPATON’s software is available today, and much of what Symantec was preaching was part of their “Vision and Roadmap” presentation.

If you were there, let us know what you thought!

Data protection is a term we all throw around as if data is a big block of interchangeable 1s and 0s. More and more enterprises and governmental agencies are finding out the hard way that all data is not created equal. Different data types require different backup policies, retention times, archiving and even restore requirements. The nature of some data may also change the way you want to back it up, deduplicate it, restore it, and archive it. With these choices, it’s becoming less feasible to claim ignorance on data protection - let alone claiming you simply don’t have the data.

As Rick Wolf said in his DataKOS Blawg last year,

…This is a take-no-prisoner compliance area and courts are not accepting the “keystone cops” defense anymore.

Email is the best example for three reasons. First, you probably backup more email than any other data type, second it is both business-critical and subject to all sorts of regulations and legal requirements, and third, a large portion of it is typically duplicate data.

Yet according to recent article in Computer Technology Review entitled, Email Archiving: No Room for Excuses, companies are still not getting it. They said,

…most companies are treating emails like all of their other data—just backing up to tape or worse, retain it for 30 days and delete it.

Good luck defending yourself in that lawsuit.

But just how prevalent is this problem? In a recent survey, The Enterprise Content Management Association (AIIM) found that,

Companies depending on backup tape are rarely able to meet regulators' demands for completeness or timeliness. In fact, AIIM asked its users, "If your organization was sued by a former customer or citizen, how long would it take to produce all of the information related to that person?" and 27 percent answered more than one month.

Granted, some of us wish our emails would go away and stay away. Take the US government for example.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Mental Health director Ira Katz recently wrote an internal email that I’ll bet he wishes would just evaporate. There had just been an investigative news report by CBS News which said that the VA hospital knowingly covered up information on US military veteran suicide rates. Three days after the story ran, Katz wrote an email to his media relations department with the subject line of - “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.” His email began with, “Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month...”

Now, that email, along with hundreds more, are being reviewed by the Federal District Court of Northern California, where a lawsuit against the VA is being heard.

With the growing volume of email we are all generating and the growing regulatory pressure to backup, archive, and restore that email easily, enterprises need to be aware of the content of their data volume, particularly of their email. Using a powerful backup system, like a VTL with a ContentAware architecture that knows the content of your data enables you to support your backup and retention policies, deduplicate only the data you want—and at the level that works best—and restore your files at nearline speeds.

So, given all of this information to consider, one question remains…

How well do you know your data?

The other day, I came across an interesting article about a study that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was working on about data center energy consumption. The study is going to be used to provide the public with benchmarks to help IT managers compare their energy consumption to other data centers.

In a Report to Congress the EPA said that, in 2006, the nation’s servers and data centers used almost 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption. That’s huge - and from what I’ve seen, it’s not slowing down. In fact, several independent studies have found that anywhere from 1/3 to more than 2/3 of midsize to large businesses will build data centers or expand existing ones in the next few years.

We can tackle data center growth another day, but what I hope the EPA study will inspire is a newfound awareness that data center energy consumption is out of control and IT departments will continue to struggle if they don’t figure out the best way to introduce efficient technologies that allow for expansion but don’t drain the coffers dry.

The fact remains that at the end of the day that not many IT storage decisions are made because the solution is “green”; more likely it’s because of the time, money and resources that can be saved from an operations standpoint. And that’s perfectly fine. But perhaps the EPA’s message will finally help enterprises understand that the “green” benefits of technologies like virtualization and (more so) deduplication are REAL; not just by-products of smart storage decisions. Rather technologies like dedupe offer legitimate and proven green storage solutions that can be the first step in helping a company “green-up”.

In early May, I actually get to talk about this very subject with a panel of my peers. I’ll be speaking at the Red Herring North America Conference on CleanTech solutions and I’m excited to spread the word that simple storage solutions can be and are some of the best ways to green the data center. I’d really love to hear your ideas on the types of issues to bring to the table. What do you think about EPA standards? How much did green factor into your storage purchase?