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).

The growth in data that they will have to deal with comes from several areas:

• The natural increase of the amount of data required for business continuance and expansion of current operations. This data represents the normal business requirements.

• New applications or business opportunities. While this is a positive indicator for the business, it represents a potentially significant increase in the amount of data under management.

• The machine-to-machine data from pervasive computing generates an overwhelming amount of data that most IT people have not had to deal with before. The data is used for “big data” analytics or business intelligence, and it will be left to IT to manage for the data scientists.

The problem is really one of scale. Because operational expenses typically are not scaled properly to address the management required for that amount of data, there is insufficient budget to handle the onslaught of data.

Storage professionals are looking at different approaches to address the increased demands. These include more efficient storage systems. Greater capacity efficiently – making better use of capacity – is a big help. So are storage systems that support consolidation of workloads onto one platform.

Data protection is a continuing problem. The process is viewed as a necessary requirement but not as a revenue-enhancing area. Consequently, data protection needs are dramatic but often lack the financial investment to accommodate the capacity increases. This means storage pros must either find products that can be more effective while fitting within the financial constraints or re-examining the entire data protection strategy by using technologies such as automated, policy-controlled archiving and data reduction.

Exploiting point-in-time (snapshot) copies on storage platforms for immediate retrieval demands, implementing backup to disk, and reducing the schedule for backups on removable media to monthly or less frequently are considerations for stretching backup budgets.

Storage professionals need to be open to new ideas for dealing with the massive influx of data. Without addressing the greatly increasing capacity demand, managed storage becomes an oxymoron.

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

This really begs the question, “Why don’t we delete data when we don’t need it anymore?” When I asked this question to IT people, they had several reasons for keeping data.

Government regulation was the most common reason. Many of these regulations are in regard to email and associated with corporate accountability. People in vertical markets such as bio-pharmaceuticals and healthcare have extra industry-specific retention requirements.

Business policy was another top reason for not deleting information. There were three underlying reasons for this category. In some cases, the corporate counsel had not examined the information being retained and had issued orders to keep everything until a policy was developed. Others keep data because their executives feel the information represents business or organization records with future value. (It was not really clear what this meant.). In other cases, IT staff was operating off a policy written when records were still primarily on paper and had not received new direction for digital retention.

Another common response was that IT staff had no time to manage the data and make retention decisions or to involve other groups within the organization. In this case, it is simpler to keep data rather than make decisions and take on the task of implementing a policy.

The other reason was probably more of a personal response – some people are pack rats for data and keep everything. I call this data hoarding.

Rather than only listing the problems, the discussion about data retention should always include ways to address the situation. Data retention really is a project. To be done effectively, it usually requires outside assistance and the purchase of software tools. In every case, an initiative must be undertaken. This includes calculating ROI based on the payback in capacity made available and reduced data protection costs. The project requires someone from IT to:

• Understand government regulations. Most are specific about the type of data and circumstances, and almost all of the regulations have a specific time limit or condition for when the data can be deleted.
• Examine the current business policies and update them with current information from executives and corporate counsel. Present the costs of retaining the data along with the magnitude and growth demands as part of the need to review the business policies.
• Add system tools to examine data, move it based on value or time, and delete it when thresholds or conditions are met.
• Get a grip. Data hoarding is costing money and making a mess. The person who replaces the data hoarder has to clean it up.

Knowing when data can be deleted is good operations practice in IT. It is a key component of storage efficiency. The Evaluator Group has more on storage efficiency here and here.

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

Efficient storage systems control the placement of data within the storage system and the movement of data based upon a set of rules. The systems maximize capacity and performance in several ways:

• Data reduction through data deduplication or compression
• Tiering with intelligent algorithms to move data between physical tiers such as solid state drives (SSDs) and high capacity disk drives
• Caching to maintain a transient copy of highly active data in a high speed cache
• Controlling data placement based on quality of service settings for performance guarantees.

Efficient data management requires dynamically changing the data’s location. This may involve moving data beyond a single storage system. The initial data placement and subsequent movement is based on information about the data that determines its value. This information determines performance needs and frequency of access, data protection requirements including disaster recovery and business continuance demands, and the volume and projected growth of the data. Most importantly, the process takes into account that these factors change over time.

Managing data efficiently presumes that there are classes of storage with different performance and cost attributes, and a variable data protection strategy that can be adapted according to requirements.

When data value changes, it must be moved to a more optimal location with a different set of data protection rules. The movement must be seamless and transparent so the accessing applications are not aware of the location transitions.

Data protection changes must also be transparent so that recovery from a disaster or operational problem always involves the correct copy. Efficient data management must be automated to operate effectively without introducing additional administration costs.

This type of data management existed in the mainframe world for a long time as Data Facility Systems Managed Storage (DFSMS) before moving into open systems.

An interesting area that should be watched closely is migration capabilities built into storage systems that can move data across systems based on policies administrators set up. The IBM Storwize V7000 Active Cloud Engine, Hitachi Data Systems BlueArc Data Migrator and EMC VMAX Federated Live Migration are a few examples of these. The EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance also does this, but is not built into the storage system.

This will be a competitive area because there is great economic value in managing data more efficiently. Watch this area for significant developments in the future.

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

IDC forecasts that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created and replicated this year – enough to fill 200 billion two-hour high-definition movies, 57.5 billion 32GB Apple iPads or the amount of storage required for 215 million high-resolution MRI scans per person per day.

In other words, a really lot of data, and it’s doubling every two years according to IDC’s numbers. And metadata is growing twice as fast as the digital universe.

Looking farther out, IDC forecasts that by 2020 IT departments will have 10 times as many virtual and physical servers, 50 times as much information, and 75 times the number of files or containers that encapsulate information than they do today.

And there will be 1.5 times the number of IT professionals to manage it all.

As you would expect, EMC global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis hit on the “big data” theme in discussing the results, but also suggested the findings could serve as a wakeup call to change the way people manage data.

“I would use this as evidence to go to senior management and say ‘We need a new game plan here,’” Hollis said. “Simply expanding five percent year-over-year on storage costs, taking the machines they have and tuning them up – that’s not going to keep up. I meet a lot of storage people who think they’re like the people with their fingers in the dikes, the water keeps coming and they’re running out of fingers and toes. Maybe it’s time to think about this problem differently.”

Hollis said “a lot of people are looking at this as an opportunity instead of a problem,” and those people are what EMC refers to as the “big data crowd.” They consist largely of media and entertainment companies and researchers who use data to make money for their employers.

“There are actually two kinds of IT organizations we see often in a big company,” Hollis said. “One is the traditional IT guys who deal with shared services, e-mail, Oracle and things like that. The big data crowd is usually a separate IT structure, usually researchers or business guys who have an idea and they handcraft the environment in such as way that makes the money or provides the value they want. The technology is different, the organization is different, and the thinking is different. At what point does this big data IT start looking like mainstream IT? Certainly not this year, but if this data growth keeps going, in three or four years it will be a lot more complex.”

IDC group vice president for storage Dave Reinsel said data growth is fueled partly by the low cost of disk. But he agrees with Hollis that organizations need to take a different look at how they deal with the data.

“We’ve made it dirt cheap to store,” he said. “If costs were going up like gasoline, people might change their behavior. But storage cost per gig is going down every year, so people have more. But data centers aren’t cheap to run. You have to justify building another data center. We’re getting to the point where we need to enable companies to extract the value out of that information.”

So far, Reinsel said, cloud storage isn’t playing much of a role in storing that information. Today, all cloud computing accounts for less than 2% of IT spending.

“Only 20% of information will be touching the public cloud by 2015,” Reinsel said. “People aren’t just jumping to public clouds. Hybrid clouds are out there and social networks are driving growth to public clouds, but there are still security concerns.”

Their company, Actifio, today closed an $8 million A funding round led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. CEO Ashutosh, who also served as chief technologist for HP’s StorageWorks after the AppIQ deal, says Actifio will ship its first product around October. He’s not giving much away yet, except to say the market his new company is addressing is Data Management Virtualization. Acitifio’s press release says its patent pending technology “delivers unified data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity across the data lifecycle for virtual and physical IT environments.”

Ashutosh says Actifio will start out completely channel focused for sales, and has been working with five large resellers for months. But he says his startup will partner as much as possible with storage array vendors. “Our goal is to completely change — yet co-exist with — what is out there” he said.

The 50-person Waltham, MA-based company has been in stealth for 18 months. It’s other executives include VP of products Chang, VP of marketing Steven Blumenau (formerly at EMC), VP of sales Rick Nagengast (former of EMC, DEC and Compaq) and customer operations manager James Pownell (formerly of EMC and founder of ExaGrid Systems).

Avere CEO Ron Bianchini, who held the same title at Spinnaker, says the new company began in a coffee shop after he and other Spinnaker execs left NetApp in late 2007. “Initially, Spinnaker was a separate group [within NetApp],” he said. “There was a huge process of merging the two technologies, but after that there was less and less for the Spinnaker business unit to do, and the three of us left NetApp.”

The other two former Spinnaker founders now with Avere are CTO Michael Kazar and VP of engineering Daniel Nydick.

The startup today disclosed a $15 million Series A funding round. It’s preparing to roll out what it calls Demand-Driven Storage, which Bianchini described as “looking at an application workload and looking at the types of storage available, then matching the workload to the storage media.” He said the idea sprang from increasing diversity in the types of storage media available, whether SAS and SATA drives or solid-state disks (SSDs.).

So is this going to be something along the lines of EMC Corp.’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and Compellent’s Data Progression? “That’s very good directionally–we go in that direction, but much further,” Bianchini said. “When we finally can talk about the technology in detail, we’ll differentiate against those products with something broader and with more efficiencies.”

Will the product also draw on Spinnaker’s scale-out heritage? What market will it address? Is the product primarily software-focused? “All will become clear in three weeks,” Bianchini said.