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09-02-2012 - Numbers don’t lie
I have been going through my annual ritual of checking all of the published statistics from industry ...
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Jon Toigo  |
 |
Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners
en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC. |
01 december 2010 - The grand strategy
Two European data management software vendors have made their entrée to the US storage market in the past few months: UK-based BridgeHead Software and Germany-based dataglobal. They are taking distinctly different approaches to the core problems of data archiving. Both businesses may actually help companies on my side of the pond begin to get their storage junk drawers into some semblance of order.
BridgeHead
Let’s start with BridgeHead. When I first visited this company several years ago, they were endeavoring to create some kind of middleware glue. It would tie together myriad archive products that were focused on specific data types, such as email, user files, database output, and electronic content management (ECM). I characterized them as a MoM, a manager of managers that might just provide the Rosetta stone of policy-based data management and unite those archive stovepipes under a single-pane-of-glass policy manager.
BridgeHead has since scaled back this grand strategy and focused instead on a specific vertical industry segment: healthcare. From what I have seen, they are succesfully connecting the data from healthcare information management systems (HIMS) and electronic picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) to a virtualized and well-managed storage infrastructure. This is possible due to the standardization around certain healthcare applications. Another factor that enables this is the tendency of healthcare service providers to use name-brand storage gear that can be managed by BridgeHead’s software.
I especially like the fact that they have done their homework in defining what the market needs. They have mapped their product positioning to the top IT investment priorities of their potential customers: data protection and disaster recovery, digitizing analog files, and archiving.
dataglobal
On the other hand, dataglobal is entering the US market with a mantra that I fear will have less appeal. The German firm, which recently acquired long-time partner inboxx, is selling information life cycle management (ILM). They are doing what BridgeHead originally sought to do: providing data management on a horizontal basis, across all industry segments and data types. They’re just doing it with their own robust set of software utilities rather than the ecosystem of proprietary archive software that’s already on the market. They describe their solution as a unified storage and information management (USIM) platform. At its core is a Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) server, installed to manage agents that run on a broad range of hosts. They, in turn, provide a range of services including archiving, storage resource management and data management. Instrument your infrastructure with their agents, hook your application outputs to their model, set some policies and you’re ready for the wonderful world of ILM.
I see numerous potential limitations in the dataglobal model that their spokespersons have not been able to offset. For ILM to work, you need to be able to classify data, classify and monitor targets for data moves, create policies and execute them through rock-solid data migrations. dataglobal tells a good story in each of these areas, of course, provided you use storage gear that can be managed via SMI-S management standards. They also require you to invest some time in getting to know your data and the kinds of management it needs, so you can write effective policies for it.
There is another key hurdle to any effective ILM play: managing changes to infrastructure- and to data-handling requirements that crop up as business rules and regulatory requirements change over time. The capabilities that I have seen in dataglobal’s solution seem to provide the minimum required functionality, but I am not at all certain of their robustness in the long term. One big miss is the lack of a coherent way to implement a global retention−deletion strategy that is capable of identifying data assets—not only those on primary disk storage, but also on archival and backup storage such as tape and optical.
That said, dataglobal is gutsy enough to try and re-energize the holy grail of ILM, a concept for holistic data management that lost its luster when EMC tried to force an ill-conceived variant on its customers in the late 1990s. It will be interesting to see whether the Germans can resuscitate a concept that was done so much violence by marketeers who last tried to sell it in America.
Both dataglobal and BridgeHead succeed in one important goal: they are raising awareness of the need to manage data better. If companies fail in the effort to organize their junk drawer, they may well find the cost of storage overwhelm their efforts to make technology return its investment to the business.
22-02-2012 - Europees MKB benut opslagcapaciteit onvoldoendeVan alle kleine Europese bedrijven met 100 of minder werknemers heeft slechts 2 procent alle bedrijfstoepassingen naar de cloud gemigreerd. 85 procent heeft bedenkingen over een dergelijke stap. Dit blijkt uit gezamenlijk onderzoek van Dell en Intel.
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