If you want a good summer scare fest, don’t bother with the latest Batman movie. Just read the headlines. Oil prices are up. Stock market is down. The mortgage crisis is crippling global banks. And let’s not forget global warming.

That’s why I couldn’t resist the urge to ask for a little free advice from a friend who is a financial planner. I just wanted to know if I should cash out the kids’ college fund and invest in ocean-front property in Vermont. Or maybe buy a few shares of the latest solar-powered car technology. And selfishly, will I be older than rocks before I can afford to retire?

Her answer was simple. First, think long-term. What are you trying to accomplish? College tuitions? Early retirement? Second, do your homework. Make sure your IRA, 401K, college funds etc. are diversified and in well-proven funds. Don’t fall for fads or hype. Third, if an investment scheme sounds outlandish. It is.

I supressed a yawn and continued my questioning. But, what about the headlines? Shouldn’t I be scared? Aren’t they trustworthy?

Headlines, she countered, are for ratings and readership. Imagine what the news would sound like if every commentator gave the same advice that she did? Boring. That’s not to say that news stories aren’t factual. But you have a responsibility to put them into context and understand the bigger picture.

In the storage industry, headlines, vendor hype, even analyst sound bites can be pretty scary too. They’ll have you convinced that if you don’t dump all your physical tape, virtualize everything that moves in your data center and deduplicate, deduplicate, deduplicate, your data center will explode before your eyes.

Worst of all, they don’t have time or column space for in-depth analysis. You have to a pay an analyst or a consultant for that. They just pick one feature or functionality in a given technology and go to town on it. They tell you that everyone everywhere needs the deduplication feature or functionality du jour and anyone using a different method or technology will suffer dire consequences.

SEPATON has been on the positive side of all this, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. But don’t spend hours down in the weeds comparing deduplication ratios that are each calculated with a different methodology, digging into the benefits of inline vs concurrent vs post process; and decyphering the relative speed of capacity recycling in isolation.

At the end of the day, you are better off applying my friend’s advice.

Think big picture. Everyone wants to store backup data in less space, but what technology has the most positive business impact? Lower labor costs? Less capital expense? More end-user productivity? Investment protection? SLAs on operational performance

Think longer term. What will your data center look like in a year? Two years? Five years. Are you focusing on automating more manual functions? Managing data in a more integrated way? Providing more end user access? Higher levels of availability? Lower cost per GB stored? Evaluate whether your deduplication technology will be a step in that direction or be a future “rip and replace”.

Do your homework. Don’t get bogged down in the minutae, but understand the fundamentals and facts about how different technologies move you toward your end game.

Don’t panic. Forget the hype. When the dust settles there are only a few technologies that can do the heavy lifting needed to protect and deduplicate data at the enterprise scale.

Do you have any good advice to add to this list? Let us know.

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?