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 to Las Vegas to catch one day of the Symantec Vision conference. While I normally do a detailed recap after each day’s activities, two full days at SNW and today’s early morning plane flight precluded me from accomplishing that. However there were a couple of quick thoughts I wanted to share after yesterday’s meetings at SNW.
First, one of my biggest surprises at SNW came from SGI who was attending the conference. SGI was in the news in mid-February after it acquired COPAN System’s intellectual property and assets.Prior to that, I had even blogged about COPAN’s rumored demise and that it would leave Nexsan as one of the last providers of VTLs that offered MAID technology.
After talking to SGI yesterday, turns out there is life in COPAN’s MAID technology after all. In discussing the matter with SGI’s Product Manager, Kurt Kuckein, he shared that in the 6-8 weeks since SGI acquired what was left of COPAN, SGI has already recouped its investment in COPAN just by selling upgrades to existing COPAN clients plus it retained 40 or so of COPAN employees and kept their office in Denver. Kuckein also shared that COPAN had sold 4 systems in the past week so it looks like SGI is officially now a VTL vendor.
However it appears the real reason that SGI purchased COPAN’s technology had less to do with SGI wanting to get into the VTL business and more about SGI wanting to address the concerns of one of its bigger customers: Amazon. Since Amazon uses lots of storage (no surprise since I can only assume Kuckein was referring to Amazon S3 in that context), Amazon was looking for ways to reduce its disk drive power requirements.
So when COPAN’s technology became available, SGI swooped in and picked it up with the intention of not only selling VTLs but it appears to also port COPAN’s MAID technology into some or all of SGI’s InfiniteStorage systems. SGI did not provide any time frame as to when this might occur or if it would but since it retained many of COPAN’s engineers and Amazon uses lots and lots of storage, I would assume this might happen sooner rather than later.
The other interesting bit of news I picked up at SNW came from Index Engines. Index Engines has been around five (5) years or so but has been quiet for the last couple of years. However Jim McGann, Index Engines’ VP of Marketing, was present at SNW and had some really good insight to share on how organizations were becoming much more proactive about their eDiscovery efforts as a result of Judge Scheindlin’s seminal decision back in January of this year.
While I touched on that opinion in a blog I wrote earlier this week, McGann explained that it has resulted in a dramatic improvement in the business for Index Engines. While Index Engines does index data on NAS filers, one of its defining features is its ability to index almost any type of backup software format (Symantec, CommVault, ArcServe, etc) on physical tape.
The problem is that eDiscovery has until now been a difficult to define metric in terms of what benefits it provided to companies that proactively managed their data. This resulted in a hit-or-miss business model for companies like Index Engines who were only called when a company was reacting to a legal eDiscovery request.
However Scheindlin’s detailed opinion laid out many more specifics that will likely become the default expectation of courts across the US when it comes to court expectations for doing eDiscoveries and preserving information. To meet these new demands, organizations must move from a reactive to a proactive model.
This fundamental shift in how companies manage data has helped Index Engines tremendously. Since that decision, McGann said that business at Index Engines has exploded with Q1 2010 being its best record in the history of the company and Q2 humming right along.
He said that companies can no longer come to court with the argument that “the burden is too great” as the burden argument is starting to fail. This means that companies can no longer pretend that tape does not exist or treat it as some type of Pandora’s box. Companies now need to get in front of it, index it and get it under control which is resulting in a substantial increase in the demand for its software.
That’s it for now. I have Vich Mulchand from 3PAR waiting to take me to lunch and, being one who loves to eat, I hate to keep a good man waiting. Check in Friday for a few more thoughts that I want to share about SNW as well as whatever information I glean while here at the Symantec Vision show.