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.
Everyone asks, “Is tape dead?” Personally, I think that question is ridiculous. There will always be a demand for tape. The better question is, “How is the tape industry evolving to ensure tape remains relevant as a solution to address current technology trends such as “Big Data,” “the Cloud” and virtualization?” This is the more pressing question regarding tape’s future to which Spectra Logic provided some excellent answers this past week at its first ever analyst and press event.
Over the past 15 or so months DCIG has released a multitude of Buyer’s Guides on topics ranging from Midrange Arrays to Virtual Server Backup Software to Small Enterprise Storage Arrays to Midrange Array Snapshot Software. As DCIG has done so, it has learned a great deal about what it has done right and areas where it can improve. But the general feedback is that the Buyer’s Guides provide users valuable insight into different technologies and help them understand the market landscape. So today DCIG is announcing the topics for its Buyer’s Guides that it plans to release for the remainder of 2011 and the first half of 2012.
To say that tape is currently viewed as a strategic initiative in most organizations could at best be described as optimistic and at worst a fabrication. But the continuing growth of rich media (social media in particular) and unstructured file data, much of which appears to be destined for the cloud, are creating an unprecedented demand for economical back end storage on which to store it. Tape is now better poised to become that storage media of choice but it still has a lot of growing up to do in order to gain broad market acceptance.
Yesterday the first ever Tape Summit kicked off at the Sunset Station Hotel and Casino in Henderson, NV, which is about 15 miles southeast of the Las Vegas strip. The opening night began with a keynote by Spectra Logic’s VP of Marketing, Molly Rector, who cited a recent article by Storage Switzerland’s George Crump where he said (paraphrasing) that what is saving tape is the same thing that saved Apple: innovation. I agree with his sentiments in part but I see innovation as only part of what is spurring tape’s growth.
This past week I have been in Palo Alto, CA, attending the ExecEvent. The focus of the ExecEvent is to facilitate conversations and meetings between storage industry executives, analysts and press who are there primarily to explore new ways that they can work together and partner on initiatives. It was during this event that a group of us had an interesting conversation on how to automatically, cost-effectively and safely manage virtual machine (VM) sprawl.
It is funny how this industry changes almost from week to week. Sometimes there is so much activity going on you do not even know where to start. Other times (like during holiday shortened weeks such as this one), it is difficult to find anything really noteworthy to write about. In light of the fact that this week was a bit quiet from a news perspective, I wanted to reflect on some innovation occurring in the area of LTO-5 tape and how this might lead to a renewed interest in tape media in the years to come.
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).
Maybe it is just me but 2010 has, up until now, seemed pretty slow on the news front. Or maybe it is just that much of the news released did not really pique my interest. Regardless, the last two weeks a number of news items jumped out at me that I wanted to spend a little time commenting on today in my weekly Friday recap blog.
This week I am going to hearken back to a conference call that took place a couple of weeks ago on the morning of November 3, 2009. This is a new quarterly conference call that CommVault is sponsoring. This particular call was hosted by its Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, David West and was intended to provide some insight into CommVault’s Q209 successes. But, to my surprise, Tyco Electronics’ Scott Zeiders who heads its UNIX Tech Support, also joined the call and commented on Tyco’s experiences with implementing CommVault® Simpana®.
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