Email. Retention. Policy
Newark, NJ -- Three words that businesses often overlook. Almost every business today is receiving emails, a lot of them! As I am writing this article, the volume of global email is reaching 210 billion emails a day and is expected to grow up to 297 billion a day by the end of 2010. The Radicati Group, a market research firm specialized in the technology industry, released those compelling numbers. The same firm also predicts that workers will spend 41% of their time handling email by 2011.
The dramatic part, that we notice here at Sonian, is that most of the management of these 210,000,000,000 emails is left to employees - as if emails were random pieces of information with no intrinsic value. Usually, employees walk into work in the morning, open their computer, and brave the onslaught of emails invading their inboxes. I know my personal habits involve straight up deleting what I deem to be most irrelevant, unimportant, or SPAM. Right there is a prime example of why an email retention policy should be a common practice nowadays. Allowing employees to manually archive emails can great gaps in an archive, and regardless of whether this was done intentionally or unintentionally, this could cause big problems from an eDiscovery perspective.
Companies should, first and foremost, create an email retention policy that clearly outlines archiving practices. Leaving it up to employees to decide leaves your business open to some serious fines. Next, incorporating a third-party hosted archiving solution will not only alleviate pressure and lighten the workload of a company's IT staff, but it allows your IT staff and law department to define an automated email retention policy that automatically archives all necessary emails, protecting the company should it face litigation.
An email retention policy is especially relevant, and not just for industries that are highly regulated by increasing constraints and compliance laws. Financial services, educational institutions, government agencies, and health care related entities are, now more than ever, concerned with data archiving regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SEC and NASD requirements, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, and FRCP. These regulations changed the weight that emails, IM, SMS, and other files carry in case of litigation or eDiscovery requests. In fact, those regulations are driving more and more companies to put in place, or drastically revise their, archiving policies. Today, a lack of email retention policy can, lead to millions of dollars in fines and even put companies out of business.
As I mentioned earlier, all emails don’t have the same weight when it comes to archiving them. Here comes into play your email retention policy, which will help you to determine what are the qualified emails for archiving. Once the policies have been determined, another important step is to determine how (can I suggest 3rd Party email archiving) and where (on-premise, hosted, cloud…) you will archive those emails.
According to email experts, you have to consider 5 steps when designing your email policy.
Decide what are the relevant emails to keep.
Choose how long you want to store them.
Determine how you want to get rid of them.
Define the way to educate and notify employees about the policy.
Establish sanctions for employees failing to comply with the policy.
Companies should particularly spend time on the last step and make sure that the implications of breaking the rules match the incurred risks for the company. This is even more relevant for small businesses risking going out of business in case of litigation if they don’t have an efficient archiving system or retention policy. The ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association found out in their 2007 survey that 28% of the surveyed bosses had fired employees for email violations.
A small business should make sure that the chosen archiving system matches the following criteria:
- Ability to capture inbound and outbound messages and their attachments.
- Presence of an advanced search feature based on indexing to make sure that emails are easily retrievable.
- Matches the regulations in case of a litigation or eDiscovery request (capacity to retrieve an email in its native format, ability to put legal holds…).
- Ensures security of the archives, e.g. through encryption..
The final thought I want to leave you with: companies should never let their employees save their emails in “individual” archives or on their PCs. The reason is very simple, in case of a litigation the forensic team in charge of the case will start by peeling off your employees’ mailboxes and personal hard drives, which can be invasive and time consuming.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater S3 EC3
Symantec's Backup Exec.cloud is aimed at small businesses or remote offices that want to wash their hands of IT infrastructure.
Tampa Bay, FL -- Flollowing the lead set be i365 EVault in yet another move of a standard, server-based application to an offsite alternative, Symantec revealed May 3 that its venerable and market-leading BackUp Exec will be adding a cloud-based option later this year or next.
The company made the announcement--one of several, in fact--at its annual Symantec Vision conference in Las Vegas.
Symantec's Backup Exec.cloud, aimed at small businesses or remote offices that want to wash their hands of IT infrastructure, will be a hosted, automated backup service that protects files on Windows desktops and servers with a straightforward user interface for online backup and recovery.
Thus, it will soon compete directly with such marketshare-grabbing services as EMC Mozy, Seagate's i365, CommVault, Acronis, Amazon S3 and others for the SMB cloud storage business.
Home-court Advantage
However, Symantec has a built-in advantage, due to its considerable (nearly 60 percent) share of the installed backup market, so it will be able to get in the door to existing customers first with the new service for potential sales opportunities.
The company also is expanding its Symantec.cloud menu of SaaS offerings to provide more options for security, email management, and data protection, Cloud Caboodle CEO Brian McCarthy told eWEEK.
"This is the end of backup as we know it. Users will be able to basically set it and forget it," McCarthy said. "They will be able to protect their data by streaming it over a SSL connection to Symantec's secure, off-site data centers. Backups can be started by file changes or run according to a set schedule, while modified files are protected as they come in the gateway."
Should disaster strike, the service keeps business data up and running by restoring critical files to any service-enabled machine using only a Web-based connection. Employees may use individual file restore feature for routine file retrieval, McCarthy said.
McCarthy said improvements within Backup Exec 2010 R3, the on-site version, include:
Faster virtualization backup performance: This is available worldwide immediately. Backup Exec 2010 R3 adds Symantec's new embedded V-Ray IT to enable users to easily protect and recover their virtual machines with the same software that protects their physical environments. Symantec's Backup Exec Management Plug-in for VMware is now part of the standard agent for VMware providing Backup Exec management through vCenter.
New security layer: Backup Exec 2010 now includes SSL support from the agent to the server to provide an extra layer of security for users who transmit backup data across the WAN or to a private cloud.
Improved archiving for data management and recovery: Archiving now tied directly into backup. Software helps companies identify what to store, what to delete and when to move older data to secondary systems, while ensuring fast discovery and recovery of older data.
Symantec also announced that some new Backup Exec software-based appliances, also to be launched later this year. These will house Backup Exec R3 in easy-to-use templates, which standardizes the protection of information from a data center, by a channel partner, or from other remote locations.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance,
Cloud storage seems like such a no-brainer for backups [1] and disaster recovery [2], it's a wonder that more businesses aren't taking advantage of it. If you're concerned about cloud outages [3], cloud storage costs, data loss, data security, or the ability to push your nightly backup sets up the Internet straw, Riverbed Technology's Whitewater appliance may make cloud storage easier to embrace.
Hartford, CT -- The Whitewater cloud storage gateway combines data deduplication, local NAS services (supporting both CIFS and NFS), data encryption, and integration with leading cloud storage services in a single virtual or physical appliance. A disk-based target for your existing backup software, Whitewater receives the backup, dedupes and encrypts the data, and transmits only the new bits to your cloud service.
The deduplication reduces your bandwidth requirements, speeds up the data transfers, and keeps your cloud storage needs (and cloud storage fees) to a minimum. A local cache in the Whitewater appliance allows you to restore from the most recent backups without making a trip to the cloud. And because Whitewater encrypts the data using 256-bit AES, it's safe from prying eyes.
The Whitewater appliances scale from a virtual appliance capable of ingesting up to 250GB of data per hour to a 3U unit (the 2010 model I tested) capable of handling up to 1TB per hour. The three physical appliances use RAID-6 for local fault tolerance, with local raw disk capacities available from 3.5TB to 11TB. None of the appliances is limited on the amount of data it can store in the cloud.
Mission: Off-site backup
Over the past few weeks, I put the Whitewater 2010 appliance through its paces with a variety of file types and usage scenarios, and I found it to be an excellent tool for reducing data size and speeding up replication to cloud storage providers. The deduplication engine works very well, and setting up the cloud connections is a snap. Reporting isn't extensive, but it doesn't really need to be. Overall, Whitewater is a very effective tool for saving time and money when storing data or disaster recovery sets off-site with a cloud provider.
The Whitewater appliance allows for both CIFS and NFS shares; my testing focused on CIFS traffic, but NFS storage is done the same way. Admins can carve Whitewater into multiple shares, each with its own folder, share name, and user access rights. While admins won't enjoy the level of access control found in Active Directory, they can define a share as read only, require authentication, and even specify which subnets have access to the share. Currently, iSCSI support is not part of the feature set.
One of my test scenarios was as a simple destination for daily backups. Using Symantec's Backup Exec 2010 R2 installed on a Windows Server 2003 Standard server, I created a nightly backup set composed of line-of-business data, Exchange message stores, SharePoint SQL data, and private user data with a share on the Whitewater 2010 as my backup destination. Backup rates for my data set averaged 500Mbps (over a single gigabit link) even while Whitewater was encrypting the data with AES-256. Deduplication and replication to my cloud storage provider took place immediately, as data was written to local disk.
During my time with Whitewater, I tried to fool the deduplication engine by renaming folders, intentionally copying folders multiple times, and moving folders around inside the server's file system. Regardless of which tricks I tried, the deduplication engine was not fooled. The duplicate data was tracked as file system objects, and no additional storage was used either on the Whitewater appliance or in the cloud. By the end of my testing, I was seeing a 10-fold improvement in storage efficiency -- that is, 90 percent less data to send and store in the cloud.
Making the cloud connection
With the release of the Whitewater 1.2 software, the solution can now interface with Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network in addition to Nirvanix, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, and others. Riverbed has done an excellent job of making it easy to set up the connector to the cloud provider. I used the Cloud Settings wizard to create a profile for my Nirvanix account and completed the setup in less than five minutes.
Although not overly granular, the cloud profile does allow admins to manage some aspects of the cloud interface. I like that I can define a replication schedule, such as when to pause and resume replication or when to suspend replication entirely. You can also set an upper bandwidth limit on the traffic to the cloud, as well as separate bandwidth limits for specific periods of time. For my tests, I imposed an upper limit to the cloud only during business hours.
Using the built-in graphs, it's easy to monitor the effects of the bandwidth management during a typical day. The appliance will try to use all available outbound bandwidth to the cloud, and I discovered this greatly impacted my production Internet connection until I enabled the workday limits. If Whitewater is on a shared Internet circuit, you'll definitely want to set an upper limit.
For a single-purpose appliance, Whitewater includes a fairly robust user management system. In it there is role-based user management, as well as support for local database, RADIUS, and TACACS+ authentication systems. Admins can create user accounts to allow read-only and read/write access to Whitewater's configuration files. Whitewater does not currently support user authentication against Active Directory or LDAP.
Picturing cloud storage
The reporting system is not flashy, but it's good enough to keep up with Whitewater's network and storage activities at a glance. The storage optimization graph is an easy way to see the total amount of stored data versus the deduplicated data, while the throughput graphs are useful for monitoring the various network interfaces. One report that most admins will want to keep up with is the replication graph, which shows the amount of data transferred to the cloud storage provider and the amount of data waiting to be sent. Whitewater supports SNMP 3, email alerts, alarm thresholds, and Syslog remote logging.
Like the Riverbed Steelhead WAN acceleration appliances I've tested [6], the Riverbed Whitewater appliance lives up to the hype. Cloud storage provider support is easy to define, and Whitewater does an excellent job of reducing the size of the data set stored in the cloud. The only shortcomings are the lack of support for Active Directory and iSCSI, but neither of these should be roadblocks to implementation. I'll take a 90 percent reduction in storage footprint and data transfer times any day of the week.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance,
The need for end-to-end accountability
San Jose, CA -- Choosing a cloud storage provider is more difficult than one thinks, complicated by the issues of accountability and responsibility for data latency, availability, corruption and in the most extreme circumstances, data loss. Reports of data availability and data loss abound. Amazon Web Services, who many cloud gateway vendors partner with, suffered from as many as 10 hours of downtime for some of its users and ended up losing some data as well. The data of customers who used Dropbox was left unprotected for as much as four hours recently. And, finally Google lost emails from 2% of its users earlier this year. Who’s responsible for these losses?
Surely not the cloud storage provider, you say. It’s your responsibility – the consumer of storage – to choose a cloud storage provider that can provide that accountability for issues that are often out of your control.
It’s also difficult to implement cloud storage when you have to choose multiple vendors to meet your needs for cloud gateways, WAN acceleration and cloud storage – vendors who all promise that they work together well and will protect your data from loss and corruption. You need to ensure that they do work together to resolve your problem, but as you’ve seen with the Amazon and Dropbox events, their partners had little effect in solving the issue. Customers weren’t able to access their data or that data was unprotected – and the vendor you chose wasn’t accountable for it. In addition, when you are working with multiple vendors for your cloud storage project, when it comes to finger-pointing for a data loss or unavailability of data, there’s no one vendor to point the finger at.
Further, visualize companies such as EMC, who has enabled both private and public cloud storage platforms using its EMC-branded products and software and partnerships with service providers such as AT&T or Peer1 Hosting or Rackspace. When problems occur, who is at fault? EMC? AT&T? Rackspace? Who is accountable for data latency, data availability, data corruption or data loss? Further, who’s responsible for end-to-end network visibility, management and QoS?
To offer the most successful cloud storage – either private, public or hybrid – you need a vendor that owns and manages both ends and the middle of the storage network – the cloud gateway, private and public cloud infrastructure and the cloud service. When dealing with multiple providers, you can’t rely on one vendors’ assurance that your data will be safe in the hands of one of its partners.
There are few vendors that offer full accountability for private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. Nirvanix is one of them. The company offers a cloud gateway, private cloud enablement and public cloud service provider capabilities. It offers the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network, the company’s enterprise-class public cloud service; a cloud gateway for storing unstructured backup and archive data called CloudNAS; a Web Services API that allows access to the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network, and finally if the public cloud isn’t what you want, the company can also implement local cloud storage instantiations in your data center with its Hybrid Cloud Storage and Private Cloud Storage solutions.. And it manages all this with the Nirvanix Management Portal, not a separate management product.
With the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network and Nirvanix’s portfolio of cloud solutions, customers can put their trust in cloud storage again and receive accountability from a single source.
Note: Nirvanix is a client of Storage Strategies NOW. The information and recommendations made by Storage Strategies NOW are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Storage Strategies NOW and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. As market conditions change however, and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Storage Strategies NOW, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors which may appear in this document.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance
Hartford, CT -- Today Nasuni formalize our confidence in the quality of our service with the introduction of a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Storage as a service that can be used as primary storage inside your data center is something new. We want to set expectations about the quality of service and drive home the point by putting in place penalties should we fail to meet those expectations.
Underpinning the confidence in our SLA are hundreds of working Nasuni Filers at customers‘ sites and the extensive, long-term tests we run against our systems and all of the major cloud storage providers. In order to fully qualify the level of service, cloud storage becomes a component in a larger system that still includes the Nasuni Filer at the edge of the network but now adds the Network Operations Center (NOC) to control and monitor activity across the system.
We made every attempt to keep the language simple and avoid unnecessary legalese. The SLA applies to our new data services. Data Protection is the first of several data storage services that we will be launching from the new system. Data Protection unifies local storage and unlimited snapshots (no more backups) with multiple offsite copies of the data (no more angst). The pillars of the SLA are availability, access, security and immutability.
100% Data Availability - your storage is always available to write or read from it
100% Data Access - you can always get to your data (even if your data center was not available)
100% Secure - your data is encrypted at your premises and unavailable to anyone who does not have your encryption keys
100% Immutability - it is not possible to modify snapshots of your data
These are the minimum requirements that any vendor that wants to provide enterprise class storage as a service must be able to deliver. We have attached penalties meant to reflect the absolute confidence we have in our ability to sustain these service levels. These are unlike any in our industry and include 10-days of free service in the event of a 5-minute data availability outage.
We wanted to exceed customer expectations. In the event of a complete meltdown of your local storage, you will also be able to restore end-user access to your data quickly and simply, in less than 15 minutes.
Nasuni is leading the charge for a whole new class of storage company that delivers high quality data services into enterprise customers. Storage as a service is new and familiar at the same time. To have a unified system capable of complete data protection is exciting and new but, as it evolves, storage as a service is passing through some familiar storage landmarks. Just like in the end, the major storage OEM had to certify and absorb the hard drive as a component in order to improve the overall quality of their systems, we have had to absorb cloud storage as a component in order to deliver the best possible level of service to our customers. This end to end data protection is something you, as a customer, should expect and the service guarantees that Nasuni can provide are the best in the industry.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, and a 30+ year Storage Veteran. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Cloud Caboodle specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection products and advanced services. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance
More enterprise data will be created in the next three years than in the history of the planet. Customers need to preserve this information, and will pay for features that mine data for actionable intelligence.” -- Greg Arnette
Tampa Bay, FL -- Sure, the mainstream tech media is buzzing with headlines about “Big Data,” and second only to cloud computing, is an area of increased interest to enterprise IT buyers. But what is “big data?” While many have made declarations, we believe, big data generally refers to a digital information corpus that is so large it requires new architectures to store, manage, search and analyze its value.
Big data is not a new enterprise problem; it’s been around for quite some time. It’s just that 90% of the data that exists on-premises was created within the last two years! With huge amounts of business information (email, files, Sharepoint) the amount of unstructured, employee-generated content within the enterprise is growing exponentially right along side the normal “big data” areas such as CRM, SQL, financials, and structured content. From log files, to click-stream data, to web indexing, corporate data centers are collecting massive volumes of digital information that need to be cost effectively processed in order to drive actionable intelligence and ultimately monetization value.
According to an Infoworld Analyst:
“enterprise data allegedly doubles every 18 months. ‘IT’ struggles to cost-effectively manage all this growth, and then there is the huge, untapped value in all that data.”
The “data deluge” is exactly why the cloud is the perfect place from which to manage enterprise big data. Today, Sonian’s cloud-powered archiving system ingests and indexes over 15 million objects per day; nearly a half a terabyte of emails and attachments, each and every day…and growing. With enterprise data growing at such a fast rate, the cloud is becoming an important platform to solve these enterprise storage needs.
Getting your Arms Around Big Data
Today, it’s a standard practice to declare a company that has over a petabyte of data a “Big Data” company. But it’s definitely not all about the size. Companies having fewer than hundreds of terabytes still have a “Big Data” problem, because the consumption and nature of the information has dramatically changed.
As a “Big Data” company, Sonian views the growth challenges of “Big Data” across several dimensions; Quantity, Speed, and Size.
Quantity would refer to a large quantity of “small items,” like Twitter “fire hose” data feed. Each tweet is limited to 140 characters, but with over 200 million users, that can accumulate a lot of data.
Size would refer to small quantity of “large items,” like Netflix. This video distribution company can stream over hundreds of thousands of movies and shows, each about 4GB large.
Speed, refers to the ability to quickly find a digital needle in a gigantic data haystack. With big data typically being unstructured, new kinds of searching mechanisms (including alternative indexing strategies) are required to handle their quantity and size.
While size, speed and quantity each have their own unique problems; together they create an enormous challenge for enterprise companies. Managing information can be time consuming and costly and it can quickly evaporate your valuable human resources. However, utilizing cloud infrastructures to deliver SaaS services, like Sonian does, makes enterprise companies more agile and makes the complex…well, simple. Within a matter of hours, using no hardware or software, our customers can store and search all types of data (i.e. emails, attachments, social media, etc.) with unlimited retention, forever.
Securing Big Data
While managing size, speed and quantity are important, we must also acknowledge the need for security, as enterprise data is not public data, it’s private. Leveraging the cloud, we can provide our customers with “eleven nines” data retention SLA by utilizing numerous physically separated data centers that leverage high-speed networks to interconnect with one another. With this highly reliable storage infrastructure, we also offer a three-layered security system. Sonian uses Secure Socket Layers (SSL) to encrypt all communication between the web browser and the data center, and AES 256 bit encryption for data stored in the cloud.
Taming Big Data with the Cloud
A recent statement by Joe Corvaia, Vice President, Solutions Engineering, at Broadview Networks sums up the business value of cloud computing and Big Data.
“Cloud computing has evolved from terminology used in connection with big data centers and large IT departments to something understood by business decision-makers at all levels. Business owners are increasingly aware of how the cloud model can change the way they consume and use information technology. Now that it has become more common knowledge in board rooms, we can expect to have many more discussions about how cloud can increase productivity, improve operations, and reduce the total cost of IT ownership."
Simply put, “Big Data” is the future of the enterprise and tackling Big Data will determine the winners and losers in the next wave of cloud computing innovation.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, and a 30+ year Storage Veteran. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Cloud Caboodle specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection products and advanced services. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance
A new survey shows that public cloud storage adoption is strong and poised for a big increase over the coming year, amid concerns over security and performance.
Orange County, CA -- Three quarters of companies are either currently using or plan to use public cloud storage offerings. What's more, all organizations with more than 500 employees are using or planning use of public cloud storage, mostly for e-mail, data protection and front-office applications like CRM, especially SaaS-based CRM solutions such as Nasuni's Virtualized File-server.
That's the upshot of a recent survey of 133 CIOs/CTOs and their operations staff in North America conducted by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) and our industry analyst firm, Storage Strategies NOW. The survey paints a picture of a technology that's poised for takeoff — if providers can overcome user apprehension over two big concerns: security and performance, says Brian McCarthy, CEO of Cloud Caboodle, and provider of hybrid-cloud storage.
Anand Kapoor, vice president of technology of WNS Global Services (WNS), a business process outsourcing firm in Mumbai, India, puts it this way. "Generally you see two sets of early adopters: smaller enterprises and SMBs that cannot afford the redundancy that an enterprise-class infrastructure would cost, and larger enterprises that need rapidly scaling infrastructure that is managed by organizations with the core competencies related to storage," says Kapoor.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, and a 30+ year Storage Veteran. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Cloud Caboodle specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection products and advanced services. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance
New York, NY -- It's become fairly common for companies to use cloud storage to spin a temporary production environment up or down for testing and development or a short-term marketing campaign. On the other hand, enterprises are not exactly pinning their disaster recovery strategy on the cloud, at least not last year.
Many enterprises already have multiple data centers in place that can be used as primary data centers and backup disaster-recovery facilities. In addition, companies are concerned about security in the cloud, in terms of data protection and privacy, physical security, and application security, frankly that is now being called, "old school thinking."
Potential network downtime is another drawback when it comes to cloud disaster recovery when you use a single remote cloud, vs. today's cloud designs with 2 to 4 different areas to store data. Enterprises can't put up with service interruptions regardless of whether the cause is a bandwidth constraint or a distributed denial-of-service attack. "It's all about quality, not about low-cost services anymore," said Lalitendu Panda, global CIO at D&M Holdings Inc., based in Japan. "Interruption of service is an issue; we have had a couple of 'situations,'" he said. "It's not like having your own [infrastructure] that you can modify. You have no control over what else is running on the cloud that could degrade performance."
Regardless of these concerns, the ease of using cloud storage is proving to be a draw for some enterprises. Cloud storage offers recovery assurances that are similar to those of other off-site storage options but cost less -- even though they provide faster recovery time objectives (RTOs), according to industry analysts.
"When this cloud concept came up, we were prepared," said Dan Zinn, CIO for the 15th Judicial Circuit of the Florida State Attorney's Office. His IT department had been deduplicating data to minimize the amount that needed to be backed up, and encrypting the data on tapes for a weekly rotation. With the cloud solution provided by i365, "scheduling a backup and clicking a button freed up the sysadmin's time, and gave me a solution so I didn't have to worry about [the tapes]," he said.
The heaviest users of cloud disaster recovery are small and midmarket businesses with annual revenue of $50 million to $1 billion, according to Dick Csaplar, senior research analyst for virtualization and storage at research firm Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston. Enterprises with more than $1 billion in annual revenue typically have data centers in multiple locations, and have less need to use the cloud for disaster recovery, he said.
Last October, Aberdeen Group surveyed 100 organizations that have a formal disaster recovery strategy to learn whether they used cloud storage and if they did, whether they realized any benefits in disaster recovery performance. The survey found that organizations that had moved at least part of their storage to the cloud recovered four times faster than those with no formal cloud storage program. In addition, cloud storage users met their RTOs more often than those who kept data in-house.
The survey also found the following:
Companies with a cloud storage strategy reported an average of 2.5 downtime events in the past year, and resolved those in an average of two hours. The longest downtime event among this group of companies, which had an average RTO of 12 hours, was 5.3 hours. Companies with no cloud storage strategy reported an average of 3.5 downtime events in the past year, and took an average of 8 hours to recover from them. The longest downtime event among this group of companies, which had an average RTO of 13 hours, was 13.7 hours. A disaster recovery strategy was their No. 1 driver for using cloud services, respondents to the Aberdeen Group survey said. Those respondents deemed best in class, in terms of their cloud disaster recovery strategy, take the following measures:
55% deploy a secure connection to the cloud.
40% utilize server failover to the cloud.
22% do continuous data replication to the cloud.
10% use multiple cloud providers.
Tiered storage and IT governance
Cloud storage does not work well for data warehousing in a situation in which one database is accessed by several different applications, according to Andrew Reichman, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
It also presents governance issues that IT executives need to be on top of. "The problem is never with i365; it's always, 'Where is my data?'" said Zinn, of the Florida State Attorney's Office.
With the amount rising by the hour, data is tough to keep track of. At the Sisters of Mercy Health System based in St. Louis, clinical studies' storage demands are astounding. "Fifteen years ago, the first milestone was a terabyte of storage, total. Now we're doing that a week," said Jeff Bell, chief operating officer at Mercy Health, a network of 28 hospitals across a four-state region.
Gartner Inc. analysts project an 800% increase in the amount of data over the next five years. Of this data, 80% is unstructured and generally goes untouched after 90 days, according to Ray Paquet, managing vice president at the Stamford, Conn.-based firm.
"Storage is growing greatly," said Bell, who implemented a tiered storage strategy on an internal cloud. Older data gets placed on older disks, and data that repeats gets compressed. "Dedupe is big, so we don't have to back up everything," he said. The idea is to "store as few times as possible, put it on the correct tier of storage, and make sure it's available."
Done right, cloud storage promises to free up IT staff from complex and onerous storage management tasks. Nevertheless, CIOs should push for service-level agreements that are as good as, if not better than, ones they could offer internally, Forrester Research's Reichman said.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, and a 30+ year Storage Veteran. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Cloud Caboodle specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection products and advanced services. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance
Burbank, CA -- The biggest traditional “Big Content” problem is the humble shared drive, where shared content is stored. Here, for example, a corporate presentation is stored and it is typical for a person to copy the original, paste it, edit one or two slides and save a new copy. The same slides are stored over and over again. Old presentations are always kept. Everyone has the same problem, but no one has the responsibility of fixing it. Moving forward, the biggest new Big Content problem is rich media and large volumes of video in these shared drives.
Benefits for File Share Deployments
The StorSimple appliance is designed to manage large volumes of content and automatically tier deduplicated, compressed content securely to the cloud. Your working set is managed on Solid State Drives while your total storage can be transparently provisioned to cloud storage with volumes that can be up to 100TB in size.
StorSimple “Large File Share” customers benefit from:
Reduce Large File Share Storage Costs by up to 80%
Integrating multiple storage devices into one simple-to-manage enterprise cloud storage appliance slashes infrastructure costs, energy consumption and rack space requirements.
Storage capacity silos are replaced by one elastic storage pool with consistent deduplication and integrated cloud high-availability.
Reduce Large File Share Management Costs
Separate primary storage, archival, backup/restore and Disaster Recovery hardware means multiple separate management consoles.
Now one integrated console makes it dramatically simpler to manage the whole storage infrastructure - freeing up people from expending unnecessary time, moneym and energy
Optimized Large File Share Performance
StorSimple offers pre-configured, optimized volumes designed for Windows File Shares.
Get the Recovery Point Objective and the Recovery Time Objective You Want at the Cost You Want
StorSimple’s integrated Snapshot technology enables instant and frequent backups instead of a typical daily backup allowing you to deliver the RPO you want at the price you want.
StorSimple’s integrated Snapshot technology delivers instant restore in seconds, not hours. In the case of a failure Cloud Snapshots and Cloud Clones offer the offsite data protection of the cloud.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, and a 30+ year Storage Veteran. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Cloud Caboodle specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection products and advanced services. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance
Optimized SSD Performance for your VMs with Cloud Backup/Restore and DR
Washington, DC -- While organizations deploy VMware for the next-generation data center as the foundation for the private cloud, many quickly realize the manageability, flexibility, and cost benefits from a server and application perspective.
However, traditional storage infrastructure is expensive and inflexible when examined through the lens of end-to-end data lifecycle management.
Virtualization enables rapid protection, maximum efficiency, and portability of application and server infrastructure; yet a legacy storage architecture prohibits organizations from fully realizing its potential. Additionally, the cost of legacy storage infrastructure impedes many companies from fully deploying virtualization.
Benefits for VMware Deployments
The StorSimple appliance is designed to provide primary storage performance with cloud elasticity and economics for VMware virtualization deployments. Integrated primary storage deduplication with SSDs and automated tiering ensure that virtual machines receive the storage performance they need, and an on-ramp to the cloud enables organizations to take advantage of cloud elasticity and economics for both primary and backup storage.
StorSimple can be used with both vRanger and Veeam.
VMware customers that deploy StorSimple benefit from:
Reduce VMware Storage Costs by up to 80%
Integrating multiple storage devices into one simple to manage enterprise cloud storage appliance slashes infrastructure costs, energy consumption and rack space requirements. Storage capacity silos are replaced by one elastic storage pool with integrated deduplication for storage efficiency and lower cost, simplified data protection using efficient local snapshots and cloud backup capabilities, and disaster recovery using the cloud and portable backups.
Reduce VMware Management Costs
Separate primary storage, archival, backup/restore and disaster recovery hardware mean multiple separate management consoles. One integrated console makes it dramatically easier to manage the entire storage infrastructure, reducing overall management costs.
Get the Recovery Point Objective and the Recovery Time Objective You Want at the Cost You Want
StorSimple’s integrated snapshot technology enables instant and frequent backups of virtual machine datastores, allowing you to deliver the RPO you want at the price you want for your virtualized infrastructure. StorSimple’s integrated snapshot technology delivers instant restore in seconds not hours. In the case of a disaster, Cloud
Snapshots and Cloud Clones enable simple off-site disaster recovery.
Enjoy Virtual Machine and Application Portability for Migrations and Cloud Bursting
StorSimple’s Cloud Snapshots and Cloud Clones enable fast off-site backups of your VMware environment using the cloud, which are globally accessible from any location where a StorSimple appliance is deployed. This makes migration of virtual machine datastores from one location to another simple, providing the foundation for cloud bursting applications leveraging multiple locations.
Reduce Cost and Simplify Deployment of Backup and Disaster Recovery
StorSimple’s hybrid storage appliance provides cloud elasticity and economics with primary storage performance and is the perfect complement to your deployment of VMware data protection and disaster recovery solutions including VMware Data Recovery, Veeam Backup and Replication, and VizionCore vRanger. StorSimple allows backup copies to leverage the cloud, allowing you to realize the lowest cost and greatest degrees of portability and protection.
Brian McCarthy is CTO of a Cloud Caboodle, and a 30+ year Storage Veteran. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Cloud Caboodle specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection products and advanced services. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte vCloud best practices Riverbed Whitewater Equallogic, EVA,iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, SNIA,Nasuni, Sonian,Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Cloud Gateway, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, disk to disk, Symantec, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup appliance, Veritas, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Big Data, SLA, Steelhead, storage appliance