So why did Katie decide to leave Tom? Well, there are plenty of talking heads leading to uninformed conclusions. That mirrors the storage industry at times. In this case, the perceptions about what possibly could have happened were presented with such conviction that they must be true. The consensus conclusion was that religious differences were at the heart of this. There is no arguing with religion – just try and enter a discussion about Windows and Mac.

No matter how much “news” I hear, I know I can’t really believe what is being said, no matter how fervently. I do know that only a few people understand for sure what is happening, and the public will be told a variation of the truth. And, I do know I don’t really care. It is their personal problem and I don’t see that as a spectator sport. It’s not quite the same as watching “the big one” 27-car pile-up at Talladega in a NASCAR race.

Still, I can’t help thinking of the implications in the area of the digital information they have created and protected. Who gets the data? What information would they want individually that is in electronic form?

• Tax records?
• Business records?
• Wedding pictures? (I realize there needs to be multiple independent file system structures for these. This may be where we get into multi-tenancy isolation issues.)
• Pictures of children?
• I’m sure there are other types of important digital file as well that amassed during the marriage.

If they go to court — and it looks now like they won’t — some information could be part of a court order for discover. Other information is personal and while some of the information may be priceless to one person, it may not be quite so valuable to the other. But it is information that exists in digital form somewhere and has to be split up in some way. Where is the information and who parcels it out accordingly?

Were they practicing safe data protection? It is doubtful they were backing up to a cloud location because of security and privacy concerns for celebrities. Do they simply make a copy of all files and hand them over? Or, do they hide some data – delete files, digitally overwrite disks, send backup copies to the shredder? Emotion and lack of clear judgment (beyond normal operational failures that most business experience) may cause some data to be deleted or “lost.”

All these concerns have similarities to business issues. Many of them can be mapped to business circumstances. Getting access to the information could be made frustratingly difficult. In the words of the talking heads, “this could get ugly.”

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Symform is calling it an $11 million B round, but only $8 million is in hand. CEO Matthew Schiltz said he expects the other $3 million to come from a strategic partner. He said he’s still talking to possible partners, but expects the deal to include a business development deal as well as funding. When Schiltz was CEO of DocuSign, he secured a business development/strategic funding deal with Salesforce.com.

“We will be doing something similar this year,” he said of his plans for Symform.

Symform president and founder Praerit Garg describes his company’s Global Cloud Storage Network as “a giant RAID system over the Internet. It’s a distributed, decentralized cloud that’s more secure and reliable than a data center. People contribute part of their disks and we aggregate storage across these disks over the internet.”

Garg said the data is encrypted before it leaves customers’ computers. The encrypted data is striped over 96 disks – “we call it RAID 96” – and 32 of the fragments are redundant. That means data can be reconstructed even if 32 fragments are lost.

“We encrypt data, chop it up and geo-spread it,” Schiltz said. “We have our own cloud-controlled brain that manages the peer-to-peer network. We don’t have to build a massive data center to store massive amounts of data.”

Symform software comes preconfigured on QNAP NAS devices, and Schiltz said the startup has about 500 resellers for its cloud. QNAP customers pay $20 per month per bay for the Symform cloud if they contribute space from their device.

Customers who download Symform software on their computers get 10 GB of free cloud storage to begin with. They get another GB free for every GB they give up on their hard drive, up to 200 GB. Beyond 200 GB, Symform charges a subscription fee starting at $3.50 per month for an end-user license and $50 per month for a server license.

Symform also has a partnership with SMB backup software vendor StorageCraft for a Business Continuity Suite service that offers rapid data recovery.

Besides its venture funding – new investor WestRiver Capital led the B round with participation from previous investors OVP and and Longworth Venture Partners – Symform also launched an advisory board. That board consists of Quantum CEO Jon Gacek, DocuSign VP of Engineering Grant Peterson, and Dimitris Achilopta, professor of computer science at the University of Cal-Santa Cruz.

Asigra has sold backup software to service and cloud providers for years. With its Cloud Backup 11.2 software, it is adding the NetApp-Asigra Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) bundle for providers.

The Asigra-NetApp deal is a meet-in-the-channel relationship that Asigra director of strategic alliances Doug Ko said can help service providers and telcos get cloud backup services up and running faster. Ko said engineers from the vendors have worked together to insure compatibility. CloudBackup 11.2 supports deeper snapshot integration with NetApp arrays.

Asigra also added support for VMware vSphere 5.0 and Apple iOS 5 and Google Android 4.0 to beef up support for virtual machine and mobile device protection in version 11.2.

Imation launched two new models of a DataGuard SMB backup appliance that use standard hard disk drives and RDX removable hard drives. Built-in replication lets a DataGuard appliance serve as a gateway to the cloud.

Imation says the DataGuard R4 and DataGuard T5R appliances are compatible with cloud storage APIs, including those from Amazon S3, Dropbox and OpenStack-based cloud providers. Imation doesn’t have deduplication in its DataGuard software yet, so customers need to use seed units for initial backups. After that, customers can set the appliances to automatically replicate data to the cloud.

Bill Schilling, director of scalable storage marketing for Imation, said the early target market is Imation’s SMB tape customers. “That’s the low-hanging fruit,” he said. “And maybe SMBs that aren’t backing up or need to be backing up better.”

Pricing ranges from $2,000 to $5,000 for the new DataGuard appliances.

CA launched ARCserve D2D On Demand with a connector to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud service. ARCserve D2D on Demand lets SMBs or cloud service providers keep data on premise while using Azure for backup and bare metal restore. A subscription includes 25 GB of Windows Azure cloud storage per protected machine.

Quantum CEO Jon Gacek teased what he called the “cloud offering” several times during the backup vendor’s earnings call this week but didn’t go deep into details beyond “our vmPro technology, along with our deduplication technology, is the basis of a cloud-based data protection offering that we will be introducing in the coming months.” In an interview after the call, he let on that the DXi would provide the backup, and there will likely be a service provider partner.

“We’ll probably launch with a partner first and go from there,” Gacek said.

Last October, Quantum revealed it plans to let SMB customers replicate data to the cloud from a new Windows-based NAS product. But that’s apparently not the same as what Gacek talked about this week. The SMB replication uses Datastor Shield software, which is different than the DXi software.

CommVault launched its Simpana Edge Protection in April, but CommVault CEO Bob Hammer said the release was limited to one large customer that implemented it on 20,000 devices. He predicts this is the beginning of big things to come from the remote backup market.

Hammer said the technology used for remote backup is trickier than backing up only servers. The software needs to be network-aware depending on whether it is connecting over WiFi, the WAN or LAN. It also needs to work with firewalls and other types of security organizations have for edge devices.

“There’s a lot of complicated technology here, and we wanted to work with this one large customer and get all the issues buttoned up,” Hammer said. “We’ve enabled a user to restore information directly without burdening IT. It’s not only about backing up the device, but getting information into an archive for compliance and search.

“It’s at the beginning of its lifecycle, but it will enable us to move that technology into other devices in the edge like tablets and smartphones.”

Hammer said backing up virtual machines, archiving and cloud backup were the major drivers that helped CommVault report $97.5 million in revenue last quarter for a 30% year over year increase.

“We see the cloud going mainstream now for backup,” he said.

He said the customers want to make backup and archiving one process, and that will be one of the focuses of the next version of Simpana.

“That’s a key fundamental technology going forward,” he said. “You have to do it backup and archive as one single process. You move data one time into backup, and create one copy of the data for backup and archive. That’s not a trivial move, but we believe that’s the way it’s going to go. We think it’s the only way to manage data – you have to move it off the front end quickly and store in in a low-cost index, or what we call a strategic archive.”

Quantum launched two NAS boxes based on the Windows Storage System OS. The NDX-8 is an 8 TB primary storage system that uses an Intel Core i3 3.3 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM with four 2 TB drives. The NDX-8d is a backup system based on the same hardware with Quantum’s Datastor Shield agentless backup software with data deduplication installed. The NDX-8d includes licenses to back up 10 Windows desktops or laptops and one Windows server or virtual server.

The NAS systems are available in 1U or tower configurations. Pricing starts at $4,029 for the NDX-8 and $5,139 for the NDX-8d.

Quantum also rolled out its RDX 8000 removable disk library, its first automated RDX system to go with its current desktop models. The RDX 8000 has eight slots for RDX cartridges, which range in capacity from 160 GB to 1 TB. The RDX 8000 comes pre-configured with Datastor Shield or Symantec Backup Exec Quickstart software.

The RDX 8000 costs $3,889 with Backup Exec and $4,999 with Datastor Shield. John Goode, director of Quantum’s devices product line, said he expects that customers will use two-third fewer cartridges with the Datastor Shield dedupe.

“We felt it was important with disk backup to use deduplication,” Goode said.

Datastor Shield has a different code base than Quantum’s DXi dedupe for its disk target systems. The biggest difference is it does a bit-level compare while the DXi software performs variable block dedupe.

Backup Exec Quickstart is good for one server. If customers need to backup more servers, they must upgrade to the full Backup Exec application.

Datastor Shield can replicate between NDX-8 and RDX boxes, and Goode said it will be able to replicate data to the cloud in early 2012. He said Quantum will offer customers cloud subscriptions and work with a cloud provider, and will also have cloud-seeding options.

Today, DataCore addressed that omission through a partnership with cloud storage gateway vendor TwinStrata.

SANsymphony-V virtualizes storage across pools of heterogeneous systems, adding management features such as thin provisioning, RAID striping, asynchronous replication, and snapshots. The new tiering feature lets customers dynamically move disk blocks among different pools of storage devices.

Beginning in late October, when a customer purchases SANsymphony-V — which DataCore calls a “storage hypervisor” — it will include a 1 TB version of TwinStrata’s CloudArray virtual appliance at no extra cost. That lets DataCore customers move data off to the cloud, although they need a subscription with a cloud storage provider such as Amazon S3 or Nirvanix. A DataCore customer can also go beyond a 1 TB gateway by upgrading the appliance through TwinStrata, which charges $4,995 for unlimited capacity. The CloudArray software deduplicates, compresses and encrypts data before moving it to the cloud.

TwinStrata also sells its cloud gateway as an appliance. DataCore CEO George Teixeira said SANsymphony-V will also work with the hardware appliance, using it as cache to speed backups.

“Now we’ve allowed a cloud tier to be part of our storage hypervisor,” Teixeira said. “When data gets to a lower tier, it can be put on an iSCSI device that is actually a cloud disk.”

There are other cloud gateway products on the market, but Teixeira said he picked TwinStrata because it supports iSCSI while most of the others are for files and backup. As the name implies, SANsymphony-V is a SAN application, so it required a block storage gateway.

“Most of them [gateways] are doing things at the file system,” Teixeira said. “These guys [TwinStrata] present an iSCSI disk. We can use storage virtualization across all disk and this looks like another disk we are auto-tiering, so it plays into our model. This doesn’t require a lot of thinking on the part of the customer. It’s just another tier, and you can choose to pick a pay-as-you-go model.”

Although TwinStrata can handle primary storage, Teixeira said he expects his customers to use the cloud mostly for backup and archiving. “I think we have some ways to go to get to primary storage in the cloud,” he said. “We’re looking mostly at backup, archiving and scratch storage. We think most production data will stay on-premise, but why not put non-production and backup data on the cloud?”

TwinStrata is looking to use partnerships to get its gateway into the market, even if it has to give it away at first. Last month the startup began offering a free 1 TB CloudArray appliance to Veeam Backup & Replication customers who want to back up to the cloud.

Gartner research director Gene Ruth said organizations are interested in moving to the cloud, but are still looking for the best way to go about it. He said storage virtualization and gateways are two potential starting points.

“It’s hard for people to get their arms around the idea that they’ll put all their data out on the cloud, but they know they have some data they can put out there,” he said. “I see storage virtualization in general as one of those building blocks to help consolidate a cloud storage environment around a common provisioning point. It’s not the end-all, but it’s a good start.”

Ruth said he also sees gateways as key enablers of cloud storage, and not just as standalone devices.

“It seems a pretty obvious step for major vendors to put that [gateway] functionality into disk arrays and file servers,” he said. “I don’t think it’s that difficult to add a gateway to their arrays.”

Arkeia began delivering its backup software on appliances four years ago, and this week launched its third generation of appliances. They include the data deduplication that Arkeia added to its software a year ago, solid state drives (SSDs) to accelerate updates to the backup catalog, and up to 20 TB of internal disk on the largest model.

“Since 2007, we’ve been telling everybody that appliances would be big,” Evans said. “Symantec has validated the market for us.”

Evans said about 25% of Arkeia’s customers buy appliances. Because they take less time to set up and manage, he said appliances are popular in remote offices and among organizations without much IT staff.

The new appliances are the R120 (1 TB usable), the R220 (2 TB, 4 TB or 6 TB), the R320 (8TB or 16 TB) and the R620 (10 TB or 20 TB). The two smaller models include optional LTO-4 tape drives while the two larger units support 8 Gbps Fibre Channel to move data off to external tape libraries and RAID 6. They all include Arkeia Network Backup 9 software and built-in support for VMware vSphere. Arekeia’s progressive dedupe for source and target data is included with the R320 and R620, and optional with the R220. Pricing ranges from $3,500 for the R120 to $47,000 to the R620 with 20 TB.

The R620 includes 256 GB SSDs, enough to manage the backup catalog. “We would never put backup sets on SSDs, that would be too expensive,” Evans said. “But it makes sense to use SSDs to manage our catalog, which is a database of our backups. The catalog is random, and updating the catalog could be a performance bottleneck.”

“If we were simply a cloud gateway and combined SSDs and disk in a single package, we wouldn’t know what incoming data should live on SSD and what should live on disk. It all looks the same. Because we wrote the [backup] application, we could say ‘this data lives on disk and this data lives on SSD.’”

For disaster recovery, the appliances can be used to boot a failed machine by downloading software from a backup server to the failed machine. The appliances can also replicate data to cloud service providers.

Previously, LiveVault’s “sweet spot” was protecting servers up to 1 TB, according to Jackie Su, senior product marketing manager for Iron Mountain Digital. The new version will protect up to 7 TB thanks to beefier processors and memory in the LiveVault TurboRestore on-site appliance, and the Data Shuttle option becoming a built-in feature. Previously, if users wanted to transport large data sets on portable hard drives, it was done only on request in special circumstances. The new TurboRestore appliance can now hold up to 24 TB of disk, and has a 64-bit memory cache.

Iron Mountain claims it’s seen growing adoption of cloud data protection in midsized enterprises among its customer base for LiveVault, citing this shift as the reason for its scalability updates with this release, but did not provide a specific number of midsized customers, percentage of growth in those customers compared with last year, or average deal size, though chief marketing officer TM Ravi said deal sizes are growing, which “indicates we’re covering larger and larger environments.”

Online data backup so far has been among the most popular uses of cloud data storage, particularly among enterprise users, but according to Storage Magazine’s most recent storage purchasing survey, “it’s still more hype than happening”.

Fibre Channel Industry Association

Despite the rise of iSCSI and the emergence of 10-gigabit Ethernet, enhanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is charging ahead on its road map for at least the next decade.

The FC storage networking vendors who make up the FCoE say 16 Gbps FC products are just around the corner, with demonstrations anticipated by fall SNW, a 16-gig plugfest by the end of this year and shipping products by late 2011 or early 2012. The FCIA roadmap also calls for 32 Gbps devices by late 2014.

And it won’t stop there. QLogic director of technology Skip Jones, who chairs the FCIA, says the goal is for 1 Tbps FC interswitch links (ISL) by around 2000.

Jones also says the FCIA is committed to optimizing FC’s role in emerging FCoE technology although he says FCoE so far is mostly hype that has created “a trough of disillusionment that’s bigger than the Grand Canyon,” Jones said. “We’re pushing storage networks, regardless of how you pipe them. We want to see a good user experience.”

The FCIA is also working on a projected proposal called FC-SCM (simplified configuration and management), which includes a limited set of capabilities aimed at making FC easier to manage for remote offices.

One FC roadmap has hit a dead end, though. Development of FC disk drives has stopped at 4 Gbps. “That’s becoming uninteresting to us,” Jones said. “What we care about is having more spindles to manage.”

Sepaton

Sepaton’s backup boxes have been virtual tape libraries (VTL) from day one, meaning they use Fibre Channel connectivity and sell primarily to enterprises. But that could be changing with the vendor’s embracing of Symantec’s NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) API. Symantec hasn’t certified Sepaton’s OST support yet, but Sepaton did a demonstration at Symantec Vision this week running backups directly to disk without tape emulation by using OST on a S2100-E2 VTL running DeltaStor deduplication software.

Sepaton VP of worldwide marketing Jay Kramer says OST support will open the door for Sepaton to run over 10-Gigabit Ethernet, and eventually NFS and CIFS NAS protocols.

“OST is a great complementary technology to the direction we’re going,” Kramer said. “OST treats disk as disk, rather than as a tape cartridge. This is a start for us to move to open formats, and we have other things coming.”

Kramer says Sepaton still expects a strong demand for FC VTLs, but NAS support will make it more competitive with EMC’s Data Domain in midrange shops. Data Domain’s NAS interface is one reason it has dominated that market.

Kramer says he’s not impressed with Data Domain’s new Global Deduplication Array, calling it a “bolt-on” product and pointing out that Sepaton supports eight clustered nodes with full dedupe and replication. Data Domain’s GDA clusters two nodes through OST.

Ocarina Networks

While Ocarina Networks is known as a primary data deduplication vendor, its vice president of products Carter George says there are customers using Ocarina for backup. George also said Ocarina is pursuing OEM deals with major vendors to use Ocarina reduction technology in NAS, iSCSI and object storage array systems, as well as on backup appliances.

“Our strategy is to get our stuff built into end user products,” George says.

CommVault

While tape vendors are pitching their medium as the best way to archive, CommVault direct of cloud solutions Jeff Echols says tape will get a run for its money from the cloud.

Echols says a good deal of the interest in CommVault’s Cloud Connector option is from customers looking to archive data.

“We’re seeing a lot of interest in archiving to the cloud instead of tape,” Echols said. “Long-term, this is going to be real interesting for tape.”

Avere Systems

Avere CEO Ron Bianchini says he misread the market when first launching his tiered NAS systems last year, but he doesn’t regret it.

Avere first came to market with two boxes containing SAS and flash solid state drives (SSDs) last year, and planned to follow with a bigger version of those systems. But Bianchini says talking to early customers and potential customers changed his mind, and the FXT 2700 that Avere came out with in January consisted of only SSD and RAM without any spinning disk.

“About 85 percent of the people we talked to already have Fibre Channel spindles and the system runs great the first and second months of the quarter, and rolls over and dies in the last month when orders come flooding in,” he said. “They wanted only SSDs to improve performance. I went to market expecting to sell one thing and got pulled in a completely different direction.”

Bianchini says Avere will issue a software upgrade this year improving its management features and user interface.

LSI

LSI demonstrated new software capabilities for its MegaRAID SAS controllers to optimize performance of direct attached storage (DAS) systems running SSDs. FastPath is designed to improve transactional application throughput to up to 150,000 IOPS while CacheCade is tiering software that turns SSD into a secondary tier of cache to improve transactional I/O performance. LSI claims CacheCade will significantly improve performance of OLTP and server workloads, and other read-sensitive applications.