Partners are also helping to lead VMware’s development of and transition to public and private clouds.  More than 7200 companies have registered as VMware Service Provider Partners (VSPP), and of those, 1500 are already generating vCloud-driven revenues.  That’s quite a leap over the past year, and as real a sign as any that cloud computing is beginning to find genuine interest.

Citing a statistic that only 20% of small to medium businesses (<1000 employees) have virtualized their infrastructures to date (vs. 95% among large enterprises), VMware is investing big in 2012 to grow its SMB business.  And once again, channel partners are the linchpin of the strategy.  VMware will back up and enhance partner-led selling into SMBs through targeted sales and marketing programs, and we’re guessing, some efforts on the product side as well.

As another key channel initiative in 2012, VMware is launching a new solutions competency around virtualizing business critical applications.  Channel partners will play a central role in helping users virtualize “money” applications such as MS Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle, which still tend to run more often than not on physical servers.

Probably the most impressive number at the show: based on third-party research, VMware has a customer loyalty rating of 68%, which is second only to Apple’s rating of 72%.  Given an industry average loyalty rating of just 22% among all software vendors, this number is an eye opener.  And here again, channel partners are on the front lines in driving customer satisfaction.

This has become my favorite VMware event – a great opportunity to chat informally with VMware partners of all flavors and sizes.  Their enthusiasm is palpable, and I must admit, infectious.  Let’s see how this all plays out for VMware in the year ahead.

EMC has recognized for years that to compete effectively against companies like HP, IBM and Dell, which sell complete solutions, it must deliver server-based technologies that impact storage. PowerPath is a great example of that, as is VFCache. EMC cannot let its system supplier competitors gain an edge just because they sell servers and it doesn't. Buying VMware was a fantastic example of how EMC stole the show against these systems suppliers. Delivering industry's second PCIe flash cache is yet another example of such bold ferocity. Fusion IO has been enjoying uncontested growth in this space for almost two years. Until now. EMC just one-upped them by a large margin. To be sure, there are other PCIe flash-cache cards in the market. For instance, Marvell has its DragonFly HBA that allows scalability by using up to 8 PCIe cards in a cluster for some very impressive performance numbers. We believe, however, at least for now, the major competition for EMC will come from Fusion IO.

The key difference between Fusion IO and EMC's VFCache is that VFCache offloads flash management tasks from the CPU - things like wear leveling, garbage collection, and such. These are heavy users of the CPU that by all rights should be dedicated to serving the application. According to EMC, for a 100% read applications (worst case scenario), Fusion IO solution could use up 20% of the CPU vs. 5% for EMC. When a customer had no alternative in the market any product that boosted application performance was a welcome relief. But giving up even 20% of the CPU is troublesome for most applications. If this difference between the two products pans out, it alone will make a huge dent in the sales of Fusion IO cards. Granted there is a built-in bias on the part of HP, IBM, Dell and other system providers to use a non-EMC product. So I am sure they will continue to suggest Fusion IO to their customers (HP has a deal to resell Fusion IO cards) but let's not forget that EMC sold storage into those same accounts to become the largest purveyor of storage. So let's not underestimate its ability to sell large quantities of VFCache into these servers, even if the storage is non-EMC. And for EMC's storage-only competitors (NetApp, HDS and others) the gap further widened.

But for now EMC will probably focus on its existing accounts and the lowest hanging fruit. We can safely say that we are not aware of a single enterprise account where there aren’t 10s, if not 100s of applications that are starved for IO. The opportunity is immense, especially given that the solution is transparent to an application and the customer doesn't have to do anything except decide which LUNs (and therefore, which applications) should be under the control of VFCache. All software interactions are hands-free and require no operator intervention. Note that VFCache only deals with reads and uses the write-through method for writes. Applications that are predominately write-oriented (backup, for instance) are not candidates for VFCache.

The caching game just changed big time. EMC continues to amaze us in terms of identifying new market opportunities and taking the lead by getting there first, relative to its main competitors. Either by developing a product like VFCache itself or buying the company with an innovative product before others do. In this case, they saved a few billion dollars (for not having to buy Fusion IO) and yet gained a serious advantage over their main competitors. Game on!

However, there are the strong drivers for adopting archiving over using backup tapes for storage management, eDiscovery, governance and data migration. Backup exists for two reasons – disaster recovery (DR) first and long-term compliant retention second. But companies do not only require DR and provable retention; they also need searchability and recoverability. And without true archives, searching and recovering tapes on a per-file basis presents some serious problems: 1) The long-term cost of transporting and storing tape is not cheap, 2) remediating tape is a big job, and 3) most importantly, tape offers poor file-level recoverability and searchability, the two capabilities you absolutely must have for eDiscovery collections. True archiving adds tremendous value to the storage environment by meeting these basic challenges.

Our take: There is a huge cost and time difference between running eDiscovery against archives instead of backup tape. Organizations that already own archiving products need to put more emphasis on additional search and collection capabilities for their archives. Businesses that have not yet invested in archiving can get over the capital purchase hump by understanding the business need of archiving, and by finding archiving solutions that are highly cost-effective and simple to deploy and scale. Fortunately more organizations are recognizing how far superior archiving is to using backup tape as their “archiving” method. Which it is not.

Vendors we are following: IBM, EMC, Spectra Logic, Metalogix

This is not to say that these companies will necessarily do it well. I still don’t know what Iron Mountain was thinking when it released Mimosa and Stratify to Autonomy so soon, nor how HP intends to absorb Autonomy now. And Symantec and Clearwell? Their cultures may be friendly but their product lines and customers are very, very different. Having an API to Clearwell in Enterprise Vault does not a combined product line make. Also, with cloud and social media concerns growing – not to mention growing data of every type – the big guys will have to scramble to keep their acquired eDiscovery product sets current with marketplace needs.

Our take: Acquisitions and consolidation are a fact of life in a maturing market. I do not have a problem with storage and server companies acquiring eDiscovery vendors but there has to be a plan for efficiently incorporating them into existing and future product portfolios. Not to pick on Symantec, but they will never be an “eDiscovery company” like Clearwell was. What they can be is a storage management company serving data-intensive business processes like litigation eDiscovery and compliance. Now, that’s useful.
Vendors we are following: Symantec, HP, IBM, EMC, Oracle, Dell
 

Vendors we are following: Recommind, Catalyst

However, not all cloud-based eDiscovery is created since not all of it represents big challenges. eDiscovery in the cloud falls into three distinct camps: 1) using the cloud for eDiscovery application delivery (SaaS), 2) archiving data to the cloud and contracting with the hosting provider to run eDiscovery processes, or 3) companies who store active data in the cloud that are subject to security, privacy and other regulatory actions.

The first activity is low risk since data stays behind the corporate firewall. Software glitches happen and can impact productivity – for example Google Apps failures – but in the long-term customer impact is minimal. The second activity is also low-risk if the customer has done their homework and chosen an eDiscovery service provider with a secure data center and excellent track record. They are not storing primary data but archived data, itself single-instance copies of backed up data. The third activity however is riskier by far than the first two. Even where the cloud provider is trusted, such as Google or Amazon, service level guarantees for the enterprise are notoriously poor. And these services also have few mechanisms in place to report on physical data locations to their customers, which can be a serious defensibility issue.

Our take: Cloud-based application delivery and archival hosting with eDiscovery represent excellent returns on investment. However, multi-national corporations need to practice excellent data governance when data centers are located in different countries with differing privacy and eDiscovery laws. And organizations that are storing primary data in the cloud should very carefully consider security, longevity and service agreements when researching cloud storage vendors.

Vendors we are following: CaseCentral, HP Autonomy, Orange LT, Google, Amazon

In the past few months Nirvanix has been delivering one multi-petabyte customer win after another. What started in October with a 5-year, global OEM deal with IBM worth countless Petabytes has continued with a 2+ petabyte private cloud win at Cerner Healthcare, followed by a 8.5 Petabyte private cloud win at USC, with a true hybrid cloud at Hawaiian MSP DRFortress and film studio Relativity Media added to the mix as well. Nirvanix is banging out multi-petabyte deals and making it look like cloud storage has been around for decades, which, of course, it has not.

Following this flurry of customer wins, I had the opportunity to talk to two of Nirvanix’s most recent customers: Sam Gustman, CTO of USC in SoCal, and Fred Rodi, President of DRFortress in Hawaii. While very different, each of these is a showcase of what is happening in the world of cloud storage and how the concept of cloud is changing the way we think of application delivery and data protection. I was mesmerized by the USC story because of its historical significance so I ended up doing some further research into the topic. Let me share some of my findings. My next blog will cover the DRFortress use case.

Sam Gustman is USC’s CTO for the Shoah Foundation Institute and Associate Dean of USC Libraries. He just made the decision to shift the university’s data to the cloud using Nirvanix’s private cloud storage solution. The private cloud scales to an initial 8.5 petabytes, with half situated on USC’s premises and half out of state--but all of it will be managed as a service by Nirvanix.

Shoah Foundation Institute is an organization whose charter  is “to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies.” Part of the focus is on the Holocaust and the Genocide of Armenians in 1915. There are approximately 52,000 testimonies from the Holocaust victims and witnesses alone. These have been preserved on video tapes historically and have been subject to media deterioration. USC is digitizing each one of these testimonials and saving them in a variety of formats that would allow their use by the largest number of individuals and universities around the world. The fact that Nirvanix’s cloud storage solution inherently allows a file to be updated in any location and the changes replicated to all other instantiations of that file in the cloud means that all changes made at USC will be immediately reflected across their entire cloud (wherever the files are located).

The objective of an organization like the Shoah Foundation is to educate the largest number of people in the world to ensure that such tragedies will never happen again. Cloud storage, especially one designed for high availability, security and worldwide access, is simply a dream come true for such a program. In one fell swoop, they can spread the message to every part of the world and allow access to the largest number of people. Imagine trying to do this before the development of cloud storage. Not only are these files now preserved for all posterity but they are widely available to the world at large. And look at it from Sam Gustman’s perspective. He pays for what he uses, he develops new services to deliver on top of the access to video files (new formats, for instance) but he does not worry about managing this storage. He is monetizing his private cloud and reselling it as a public cloud known as the USC Digital Repository. And he doesn’t worry about data protection and media obsolescence. All that is Nirvanix’s responsibility. Sam worries about placing the digitized video and image files on the private cloud in LA and he gets fully geo-diverse accessibility and data protection. This use case is an excellent example of what an enterprise caliber cloud is all about.

USC plans to scale out its private cloud in the coming year, to include additional university data and digitized content from customers of the new USC Digital Repository. We wouldn’t be surprised if this was a 40 petabyte private cloud in less than 24 months. USC is leading the rapid movement into cloud—a shift that we believe other universities will follow very shortly.

Workflow remains broadly categorized by search and collection, preservation, early analysis and processing on the corporate side; followed by review, production and presentation on the law firm side. But growing data and a dearth of in-house eDiscovery management tools are making supervising the process difficult. Today there are three general approaches to managing eDiscovery workflow -- as opposed to not managing it and hoping for the best.

• The first approach is to hire law firms or specialized consultancies to manage workflow. For large matters with high stakes, this is the right way to lower the risk of poor collection, preservation, timeliness and review.
• The second method is using technology tools that manage workflow in-house. These usually depend on operating within a single-vendor platform, since the more disparate the eDiscovery tools the less well the management tool will work.
• The third method of workflow management is based on internal eDiscovery best practices and methodologies instead of depending on outside consultants, law firms or vendors. This requires a tightly integrated workflow and project management process that operates across multiple departments. It allows corporations to leverage existing eDiscovery purchases.

Our take: Organizations must ask themselves what resources they need to manage eDiscovery workflow. Simple and infrequent matters can be handled internally with review passed on to the law firm. Workflow management can be done using an eDiscovery project manager and/or single-platform eDiscovery management software such as AccessData or Clearwell. Large and frequent matters are best handled by outside professionals from a consultancy or law firm. In all cases we strongly suggest that corporations develop internal eDiscovery best practices using cross-departmental teams. Just don’t leave eDiscovery workflow management to chance; this never turns out well.

Vendors we are following: Integreon, AccessData, Symantec Clearwell

When people think about social media they mostly mean Facebook and Twitter with an occasional nod to LinkedIn. With millions of people Face-booking, Tweeting and Linking away, information related to disputes and investigations is bound to end up online. In addition to the Big Three, specialized social media sites are proliferating and aggregators multiply large volumes of shared data.

The courts are not blind; they are aware that attempting to meaningfully search and collect data in social media is a huge challenge. They are generally sympathetic to proportionality arguments but not to the point that they allow litigants to simply skip social media searches. But traditional collection practices don’t cut it. Forget trying to image Twitter servers or getting Facebook to run collections on their data storage. Even Facebook’s self-collection tool is extremely limited and can only be run from a user’s own login account. Nor do third-party screen captures meet defensibility standards.

There are some social media tools that work in limited areas. Some collect using Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn’s metadata schemes (all of which are incompatible with each other) but their scope is limited. Other software products are set to regulate user-created data for compliance; useful but not data collection. This field is wide open to technical innovation and eDiscovery software developers know it.

Our take: Product development will be hot and heavy as eDiscovery vendors seek to develop products that will collect and preserve relevant data from social media sites. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that large matters require litigants to spend the money on social media collection experts. Their mix of proprietary technology and consulting expertise is the way to go for now while vendors develop more sophisticated in-house methods for social media searches.

Vendors we are following: X1 Discovery, FTI, Smarsh

Over the last decade, we all know about the macro trends that have driven new datacenter storage planning and design: rapid server consolidation enabled by virtualization, dramatic data proliferation and the rise of “big data,” solid-state drive technology advances, and an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce. Put simply, IT continues to consolidate, while business becomes more distributed.

This tension drives the search for ever-greater efficiency that's now at the heart of every IT decision. And nowhere is this pressure felt more acutely than in the storage layer. Virtualized and consolidated workloads create new types of storage I/O contention, which are costly to troubleshoot and repair. Storage costs continue to rise because capacity planning is harder in today’s dynamic business environment. Over time, performance limitations, wasted capacity, and complex operations eat into the bottom line and increase lifetime storage TCO.

What does this mean looking forward? Essentially, you need to demand more intelligence from your storage platforms.

Check out the report to see how Dell Compellent’s Storage Center is delivering storage intelligence today.

Why isn't this integration there yet? As pure speculation, I think it is mostly a matter of logistics. Moving that data back and forth between backup software and an appliance requires some sophisticated hand-off and data integrity control. The backup software needs to confirm that all data is in the StoreOnce repository, and it needs to confirm this efficiently. Then the backup software needs to stop thinking about it as deduplicated data, yet likely retain the option to stream it back and then use source-side horsepower to reinflate if the user so desires. And then HP needs to think about how the backup software ecosystem may interact with any of these mechanisms, and test for hiccups. All kinds of interesting possibilities here, but enabling the right workflows is the next step beyond the technology integration, and a complex logistical undertaking.

But just like all the other buzz, I'll give the announcement my "gee whiz, good job" from the propeller head side of things. But I'll also point out there's a bigger story here, and in my opinion it is one that should have the HP competition worried.

You see, the real story, is that this is a major coup for HP in terms of cross-product integration and proprietary IP development. In fact, I'd go so far as to reckon we could at least argue for a long time, if not definitively prove, that this is a bigger and more significant integration than HP has ever won a victory on before.

First, the task of integrating a single algorithm through product domains as big as backup target appliances and backup software is no mean feat. The respective technologies represent plays in markets that are some of the biggest slices of the overall storage industry market. And neither technology is greenfield or immature. StoreOnce has quietly been marching along for 18 or more months now, in the form of multiple different appliances, and HP Data Protector has been around longer than my 5 or 6 years as an analyst with Taneja Group. Moving similar product teams and finding similar technology integration points in similar sized operations has undone the best efforts of many other BIG name technology companies.

But it also isn't just two product integration, it is also cross-product vision integration. HP just turned a long standing one-trick pony into a versatile technology for the scale-out, cloudy infrastructure. Deploy it anywhere, access it from anywhere. Utility-like. Ready to integrate into pay-as-you-go services, conceivably, with more enablements likely to come in the future. The execution seems worthy of the original Bill and Dave, and the B6200 moniker, except maybe back in those days it would have been 6200B.

HP has just shown that they can out play the competition by leveraging unique IP with more precision than anyone else (another interesting tribute to the company's roots, but I'll resist the temptation). And therein is the biggest missed point. HP has just played a hand built on well-engineered extensibility - and the lack of extensibility has long undone the infrastructure, especially storage, and the many vendors that try to innovate around infrastructure. The infrastructure vendor's answer, point products. The StoreOnce answer? Extensibility, integration, vision, and execution.

HP's been suffering for months from the HP-induced turmoil around WebOS. Why? Because the market was excited, and thought a broader integration of HP services - an integrated HP experience across many devices - was about to be unleashed on top of a technology that was unbeholden to any other vendor; maybe just a momentary experience, but it would have been an HP dominate the world moment if you would. Look closer. StoreOnce. Better than WebOS. More important than WebOS. Going to succeed where WebOS didn't stand a long term chance (sorry WebOS guys). But I think it is just a first glimpse of what will come from StoreOnce, and what may come from the variety of technologies that HP is now sitting on. If executive management can stay out of the way.

StoreOnce: HP's claim that innovation is built here. I'm looking for a response from the competition; don't have one yet. If you're an HP customer, take a moment and feel good about the future potential of your infrastructure investments.

Good job Donatelli and StoreOnce team. Power on. And the rest of you guys too - there's lots of peripheral DNA in this one (wink-wink to the vision-influencing 3PAR and P4000 guys especially).]]> Taneja Blog, Systems and Technology, 2011-12-05T15:13:50+00:00 http://tanejagroup.com/news/blog/ediscovery/daegis-ediscovery-platform http://tanejagroup.com/news/blog/ediscovery/daegis-ediscovery-platform#When:17:31:19Z The background of the trends discussion is a significant shift in eDiscovery – which incidentally is always shifting around, and eDiscovery vendors need to stay ahead of the changing curve. The three trends that Daegis called out include: 1) whopping cloud/social media search, privacy and security issues; 2) litigants finally understanding that it would be a really good thing to leverage eDiscovery for multi-matters; and 3) eDiscovery pricing models are morphing all over the place. I’ll detail these trends and more in an upcoming post on eDiscovery trends for 2012. Yes, it’s that time of the year again.

For now let’s look specifically at Daegis and their new-as-of-August-2011 eDiscovery platform offering. A couple of years ago Unify and Daegis merged. (The actual deal was Unify acquiring Daegis and taking their name.) Up until then Unify provided database management and data migration software, and had acquired the AXS-One email archiving business as a wholly owned subsidiary in 2009.

AXS-One survived the merger and is now a Daegis company that archives email (Exchange, Notes and others), SharePoint, file systems and some social media content. AXS-One has native capability for regulatory content scanning and a legal case manager for search, review and production within the archive.

In 2011 Daegis used AXS-One and other technologies to create a hosted eDiscovery platform specializing in multiple matter support. The new platform serves serial custodians and serial litigants where the same ESI and attorney work product are produced for multiple matters. Daegis stores collected ESI in a hosted repository and enables users to re-purpose the attorney review work product for additional matters. The major results are: 1) lower review fees from outside counsel who do not need to re-review the duplicate work product and 2) manipulating less data, which lowers the risk of spoliation. Only delta changes to the collected ESI are stored and newly reviewed.  

Multi-matter usage is not new; some eDiscovery service providers have been doing it for years. Daegis’ distinction is multi-matter work product support along with sophisticated reporting, processing to review, project management, collection and analytics. Daegis’ deep team roster of experienced eDiscovery project managers and consultants sure doesn’t hurt either.

Daegis/Unify intends to break into the very profitable corporate archiving and eDiscovery space. It is however a crowded space with many well-known competitors, and now more than ever the merged company must prove clear differentiators. They have made a good start by building on previous acquisitions and development, and by standing ready with professional services. The trick will be to mold IT and GCO awareness around Daegis as an eDiscovery platform and consulting company. Daegis will also benefit from marketing AXS-One as an archiving product without leeching from the wider eDiscovery platform that employs its technology.

Octane’s unified search function runs across Exchange, Notes and unstructured files; a good fit for departmental positioning. Octane provides a simplified graphical user interface, also good for non-IT usage. Typical usage cases include:

1. New customers may purchase an affordable archive at $50K for 100 accounts/data custodians. This is a very good price for Octane's archiving features, which may be all that many mid-tier companies and enterprise workgroups need.
2. Existing Index Engines tape remediation customers may now place remediated data into Octane’s archive repository.
3. Enterprise groups may use Octane as a staging area for intermediate indexing to corporate archiving. This becomes a nice introduction to a bigger archiving project.

Index Engines bills itself as an enterprise eDiscovery leader (actually “the” discovery technology leader) in press releases. This ambitious positioning aside, Index Engines is first a top vendor for legacy tape remediation, which is no joke in an eDiscovery environment where most relevant data still sits on tape. Now Index Engines has added another promising product for departmental archiving with some nice indexing, collection, and defensible deduplication features; not to mention the flexibility of an Octane repository or leveraging backup storage targets.

We have monitored Virtual Instruments pretty closely from the outset and have believed that their product provides unique real-time insights into the FC environment on a real time basis. These insights are used by the customer for diagnostic purposes, proactive problem avoidance, as well as deciphering application performance degradations. There are many other uses, including identifying configuration issues in the SAN when elements of the SAN are changed. Granted one can get rudimentary information from the switch itself, but there is no way one can get the microscopic real-time and historical data that the VI solution provides.

My team has talked to many Virtual Instrument's customers in the past few years, most of whom had (and have) Brocade switches. 100% of the customers we interviewed in 2010 were absolutely thrilled with the insight they got from the combination of Brocade switches and Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom software, hardware probes and fiber-optic TAPs. We have not heard of any information to the contrary since then. So why does Brocade want to "kill" a much smaller vendor (who has jointly sold a ton of equipment) by essentially trying to make them an "outcast." It makes no sense. The products are complementary and each adds value to the other. The only rationale that makes sense to us is that Brocade has a competitive product in the works. We are certainly aware of SAN Health and Net Health software products from Brocade but they only go so far without the accompanying hardware. May be Brocade has a hardware probe in the works? But if this is true why would Brocade not wait until it is ready to ship? At least until then the VI solution would best meet customer needs. And in any case, Brocade would have to deal with the questions that always come with rev 1 products. Net Net Brocade's strategy makes no sense.

Could there be another reason? May be it is personal. I hope not but if it is I hope both parties will remember that the customer is bigger than both of them. Yes, the customer is bigger than Brocade. I know it is hard to believe when you ship a ton of products and have 1000's of employees but we have all seen this movie before. Ultimately, the customer dictates what is right for them. And based on the information currently available we believe the customer is being short changed. And that is not good for Brocade or Virtual Instruments or anyone else, for that matter.

• Compliance checking. These are the products that crawl employee posted content for potentially compliance-breaking content. The products usually work with FB, Twitter and/or LinkedIn which all store content in very different ways and require specific code development. This approach is the most common one for social media. Smarsh is a common example.
• SharePoint collaboration. Not all social media exists on the web but also exists within companies. SharePoint collaborative applications are prime examples. StoredIQ is one of the few companies that provide SharePoint searches into the collaborative environment as well as the content blobs.
• Consultant-driven social media eDiscovery. For large and complex social media eDiscovery, eDiscovery consultant services such as FTI provide customized social media search capability. This level of social media search is geared to hundreds of social media sites across dozens to hundreds of data custodians. It is invaluable for large matters with hundreds of thousands to millions of pages of documents. It has a price tag to match.

The fourth sector is in-house products for social media eDiscovery. This is where X1 Discovery falls, and in some ways they are creating the market. The product is highly cost-effective, covers the Three Usual Suspects social media sites, and offers very fast search and collection. X1 Discovery maintains authentication with MD5 hashing techniques. X1 also applies its existing ECA technology to the resulting social media collection results, thus doing a very nice job of leveraging features in an expanding product push.

In contrast, ad-hoc social media searches are barely able to search a few FB pages an hour and can never reach the level of speed and defensibility that X1 Discovery is able to do. For an in-house solution on straightforward matters and investigations – including native ECA and contained document review -- X1 Discovery is creating a very nice position for itself.

This week Nirvanix announced that IBM Global Services will be launching its own public cloud storage service based on Nirvanix's Cloud Storage Network (CSN) technology. This is a major coup for Nirvanix, to say the least. IGS plans to make the cloud available to the public for placement and access to archival and backup data and for content collaboration. Targeted industries are healthcare, media and entertainment and financial services. IBM also plans on integrating this cloud storage service with its proprietary compute cloud at the software layer; both offerings will be sold by IBM under the SmartCloud banner.

This relationship positions Nirvanix not only as a purveyor of an established enterprise-caliber public cloud (CSN) but as a supplier of private cloud storage for other vendors. In the span of only 48 hours, Nirvanix announced that it was building a private cloud for Cerner Healthcare—who is reselling that as a public cloud to more than 2,500 healthcare organizations—and that it is also building a private cloud for IBM—who, again, will offer that as its public storage cloud for its enterprise customers.  These companies are essentially white labeling Nirvanix private cloud storage nodes and deploying them as their own public cloud services, a trend which we expect to continue across multiple industry verticals. This is very different from other vendors in the cloud space as Nirvanix is managing these private clouds as a service for these vendors—not just giving them raw iron and software discs and telling to manage them on their own accord.

To understand the fuller picture of the cloud landscape today we need to look at what is happening amongst the big storage players.

Each major storage company has some form of plan for ushering its enterprise customers into the cloud era. For private compute clouds where latency-sensitive, mission critical applications will run, each is extending its current product portfolio, embellishing it with namespace capabilities (VPLEX from EMC, for instance), partnering with a server virtualization vendor (VMware, mostly) and a networking vendor, such as Cisco, to complete the picture. Each is trying to figure out what to do with the Pay As You Go (PAYG) software, as this would be a key functionality required over time, particularly as customers want to move to a IT acquisition model based on consumption economics to shift to OpEx from CapEx. I see such private compute clouds to be the next generation of these IT vendors' products. They are evolutionary in that regard. Same hardware, same software, but implemented in a way that is more flexible, manageable and cost effective (better utilization).

The more revolutionary part is what is happening on the object storage side.

EMC (ATMOS), NetApp (StorageGRID) and Dell (DX) have an object-based software product that allows the development of private or public clouds, mostly for archival-type data. All three vendors are selling this software to service providers and enterprises alike. EMC earlier created its own cloud, based on ATMOS, and presented it as a public cloud in the form of ATMOS Online. It quickly withdrew its offering, however, based on cries of "foul" from its service provider partners, who were developing their own public cloud, based on the same ATMOS software. EMC also likely withdrew the offering due to fears of margin impact from a storage as a service model. NetApp and Dell have not fully played their cards yet. A dark horse in this category is Data Direct Networks (DDN) with its WOS (Web Object Scalar) that has also not played its card completely yet.

But Nirvanix is the King of this space. Its Cloud Storage Network (CSN) is a public cloud, based on its own proprietary software IP, designed to deliver an enterprise-caliber cloud for storing massive quantities of unstructured data, on a global basis. It comes complete with support for unlimited file sizes and what it’s CTO refers to as “the only consistent storage on the Internet,” meaning when a file is upload to the Nirvanix cloud and changes are made those changes are immediately reflected and available across its whole cloud—not eventually or tomorrow, but immediately.  This is a very unique capability. Nirvanix has been selectively selling their cloud services so that enterprises could create their own private or hybrid clouds or service providers could create public clouds to deliver specialized services. IGS just became the latest and the game-changing partner for them. This makes Nirvanix's lead in the market even bigger than before. I would estimate it puts them 18+ months ahead of their competition.

And where is Amazon Web Services' S3 offering in all this, you ask? Well, at least for now, that is more of a consumer-level cloud offering, designed for developers and consumers, when availability and global access are less of a requirement. If Nirvanix maintains its current lead it certainly has the potential to become the de facto standard for enterprise class cloud for long term archival, backup and collaboration of enterprise data. The next 18 months will be very telling as all these products mature and all the majors play their hands.

Let’s take a look at three basic sectors of social media eDiscovery: compliance checking, products for internal use, and consultant-driven services.

1. Compliance checking. These are the products that crawl employee posted content for potentially compliance-breaking content. The products usually work with FB, Twitter and/or LinkedIn which all store content in very different ways and require specific code development. Smarsh is a common example.
2. In-house products for simple social media eDiscovery. These products are newer than compliance checkers and can discover online content in response to queries built from metadata fields. They typically work by indexing some combination of FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. I won’t name the example in this category since they’re not quite ready to announce (they will within days). Suffice it to say that they provide a desktop application that accomplishes fast indexing using metadata across FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. This product serves relatively simple and straightforward social media eDiscovery searches and produces defensible results for collections and ECA.
3. Consultant-driven social media eDiscovery. For large and complex social media eDiscovery, one really needs to hire professionals or engage consultants who really, really know what they are doing.  Because in reality, shared content gets shared all over the digital universe. Searchers must know where to look to find relevant content, must be able to collect it once they find it, and must know how to render the process defensible. You might not think that sharing is a huge problem since the original data might be simple to find. But what if the same post was shared in a number of forums and comments are discoverable? Or the content was changed by the employee sharing it? In these cases a straightforward social media eDiscovery product is not enough. The company or its consultants must be prepared to interview data custodians and follow their digital history through some very deep rabbit holes. This level of social media eDiscovery really requires services like FTI’s consultant branch with their technology and social media eDiscovery methodologies.

The upshot is that eDiscovery in social media actually means a great many things. So when it comes to discovering social media do me a favor – don’t think of it as friending some employee on FB so you can view their smoking-gun photo album. Think of it instead as trying to grab onto a highly complex and perpetually shifting cloud-based entity. Now you’ve got the right idea.

Many storage platforms simply weren't designed for the workload variability and rate of change that are the new "normal." Companies I speak with now demand storage that handles all types of server virtualization, rapidly expanding and massive data sets, and performance-hungry, business-critical database and productivity apps--simultaneously.

Server virtualization has made some promises that traditional SAN, NAS and unified solutions haven't been able to keep. It has promised that we can have it both ways: consolidation and simplicity, flexibility plus efficiency, mobility without downtime. There's a lot of intelligence in your hypervisor to deliver these benefits.

But how intelligent is your storage?

We've just completed a review of the essential elements of intelligent storage, and how Dell is building intelligence into the company's EqualLogic storage portfolio. I encourage you to check it out. And you can also read Dell's take on our research.

We bought the vision hook, line and sinker. But we felt that the concept of CDP was incomplete. That there was a bigger play here that vendors were not embarking on.

That is why we titled our paper, "Continuous Data Technologies" rather than Continuous Data Protection." Our argument went as follows: Once you have captured ALL changes to application data as they happen, why stop at data protection only? Why not create images from the captured data and use that for disk-to-disk replication? And how about using images of the data at specific points in time for test and development? And how about making an image of live data available to the support group? We described these new uses of the same data as CDI (for image) and CDR (for replication), etc. Once source, literally tens of usages! How much would it cut down on storage costs? How much would it simplify storage management? Why do we continue to make separate copies for backups (fulls and incremental), snapshots, business continuity, disaster recovery, test and support groups, and so on? It is not unusual to have 10-30 copies of the same data in the organization. Why? Because that is the way we were taught to do it by the big, tape-based data protection vendors. That was state-of-the-art. We knew CDT was the way to go. But CDP was a good start. Unfortunately, the early pioneers of CDP didn't survive. They all got picked up for asset value by the big guys. The CDT vision was dead.

And today all that changed.

Enter Actifio. Today Actifio is announcing a product that could not be a clearer reflection of our CDT vision. But it goes even further in that data deduplication and compression have been added for even greater storage efficiency. And the implementation uses the principles of virtualization that remove the need for LUNs, volumes, and RAID. Now the system administrator does not have to worry about provisioning storage on secondary storage side. Ever. Only one source of secondary data (vs. primary data which stays in primary storage), only one-time, non-disruptive data capture. Forget backup and backup windows. Not needed. Want a specific SQL Server volume as of 2:31 PM. No worries. Ask for it. Want a point of consistency across 10 different volumes. Ask for it. Recover a file from yesterday? No big deal. Want to ship a volume as of 12 midnight to the support group? Ask it and it will create it on the fly. All from one source.

Actifio has been shipping the product since last September and fine tuning it based on customer feedback. We believe it is ready for prime time. We think it will cause serious waves in the market. Today all the big guys have CDP products, along with the legacy products that continue to satisfy traditional needs. In fact, the sales of the latter products still dominate their revenues. If Actifio has its say all that will change over the next three years. Frankly, it is time traditional backup, replication and DR methods die. They are already crumbling under the pressure of server virtualization. Actifio's product will hasten the demise even faster. Finally, RIP, backup!

• Security applies to both digital and physical security. Digital security is protecting against data loss both from outside sources (such as hackers) and from internal errors (such as clueless storage admins). Physical security depends on strong data center protections against human intervention and natural disasters.

• Activity support is the ability to run operations against the stored data. Eli Lilly’s data analysis is a good example. Another popular usage is running eDiscovery and compliance searches, preservation and analysis against stored data. The services might come from the data owner, service providers, law firms, or even the hosted vendor.  

• Availability includes both uptime and longevity. Requirements differ according to backed up or archived data. Backup availability should center on fast disaster recovery. When a company also uses backup for long-term data retention, they commonly tier their backup infrastructure. They will retain current backups on site or replicate to a company remote site, and will upload copies of backups to the hosted site. Instantaneous availability for archives is not critically important but the cloud vendor should provide good-to-excellent uptime, especially if email archives remain available for transparent end-user access. Vendor longevity is vital so customers can be certain their archives will remain safely stored and available long-term.

Corporations cannot be shy about demanding service levels from their cloud vendors. Granted that companies need to understand what is and is not reasonable when dealing with cloud vendors, who have to maintain profit and lower their own risk. But the corporation is absolutely driving storage and storage application development in the cloud, and cloud-based vendors need to provide service levels accordingly.