Keeping Tabs On Data

So, not surprisingly, Los Alamos, which develops and applies science and technology to ensure the nation's security, faced a storage-management situation that required more than throwing more hardware at it. Like many other federal government agencies these days, Los Alamos turned to a solution provider to come up with storage-management software tools that could address its long-term needs.

"Scientific applications rarely get smaller," says Ashby Lincoln, CEO of Duluth, Ga.-based VeriStor Systems, which took on the Los Alamos project.

The challenge faced by Los Alamos is a common one these days, both within the federal government channel and in private industry. As a result, the need for distributed storage-management solutions is rising sharply as research demands increase, new tools for transmitting data launch in the market and the federal government user becomes increasingly mobile.

Framingham, Mass.-based researcher IDC projects that worldwide sales of software storage-management solutions will grow to $2.34 billion by 2011, up from $803 million in 2006. The driving force behind the demand--which amounts to a nearly 24 percent compound annual growth rate--stems from the need for e-mail and file archiving to satisfy legal and business-compliance standards. But IDC also indicates that demand will rise significantly because of the need to effectively archive other forms of content, including file systems, desktop content and enterprise content-management applications.

For many of the same reasons, solution providers and vendors that target federal customers see similar growth in demand for distributed software storage-management solutions.

"The agencies we speak with are generally looking to do two things with respect to their storage infrastructure: Take costs out of the storage budget and make their people more efficient," says Sean Derrington, director of storage management at Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor that sells hardware-independent storage software products to both federal and commercial customers. Symantec is finding high demand for its Veritas Software Foundation software product, which satisfies storage needs through application clustering, multipathing, local and remote storage replication and other features, while allowing agencies the flexibility to use whichever server and storage hardware that's appropriate for them.

Symantec addresses the storage needs of a number of national security-level projects with Herndon, Va.-based DLT Solutions (2007 GovernmentVAR 100 No. 32).

"There are many buzzwords out there, like storage virtualization, data lifecycle management, data de-duplication, etc.," says Rick Marcotte, president and CEO of DLT. "With lifecycle management, customers are better determining the types of storage that data should be directed to, including tools to move data from higher-end storage to lower-end storage and, ultimately, archiving."

For Los Alamos, VeriStor needed to address the monster load of data that the laboratory had stored on eight storage filers of data. The system had grown too large to be backed up, and design bottlenecks emerged. Also, the system didn't allow for load balancing, so some parts of the system were idle while others were backed up with data.

VeriStor used a NetVault solution with BakBone Software to redesign the laboratory's storage network for the more than 10,000 employees, providing the capacity to handle 166 TB of data that runs up to 31 MBps. This was several times faster than the previous system allowed. It also provides for what's called "direct access restore" to quicken the backup process and, with a SAN virtualization solution, allows users to designate any one of 16 storage filers to increase flexibility, redundancy and failover capability.

Next: LeftHand Networks In another example, LeftHand Networks, a Boulder, Colo.-based SAN vendor, recently worked with the U.S. Army Fleet Support unit to come up with a remote copy and disaster-recovery solution, helping the Army better manage its data by using virtual machines. In defense agencies, and homeland security in particular, deployments are boosting the need for scaling capacity and redundancy on the fly with no downtime, because of unpredictable data growth and limited storage-management skills and bandwidth. To meet that requirement, LeftHand offers a SAN/iQ product that can replicate data across a campus to a remote location more than 100 miles away.

"Budgets are often unconfirmed until very late in the cycle, and these users need rapidly deployable solutions that can be expanded on the fly without 'big-bang, all-or-nothing' installation processes," explains David Bangs, vice president of sales at LeftHand. "Homeland security initiatives, in particular, have driven huge data retention and analysis projects."

Fairfax, Va.-based provider DS3 DataVaulting recently supplied the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with remote office distributed backup/recovery data protection delivered as a service. DS3 uses Toronto-based Asigra's backup service software platform to provide managed backup services to organizations with multiple remote sites. DS3 de-duplicates data--meaning that only one copy of the data is stored, then transmitted across the WAN to the consolidated backup storage site. The technology provider behind the project, Asigra, estimates that de-duplication can reduce backup storage requirements by as much as 400 percent because only the unique data is stored on the network.

"Data storage growth continues to skyrocket, driven in part by the decreasing costs of disk-based storage systems," says Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. "This is pervasive, whether at the data center or across distributed sites. Storage software technologies that deal with the explosive growth in storage in a variety of ways are also becoming more prevalent to minimize the data load on large distributed enterprises."

"Having all of one's eggs in one basket makes them easier to manage and [allows for] economies of scale. From what we're experiencing, the opportunities in distributed environments are data protection and data consolidation," says Stacy Hayes, co-founder and COO of DS3. "The increasing availability and affordability of high-speed communication links--coupled with WAN acceleration technologies--are driving data consolidation. This, in turn, is allowing customers to address a more pressing need for stronger disaster-recovery solutions."

Security continues to be a major driving factor for the demand. Redundancy, backup, recovery and other catchphrases of the 21st century have forced federal customers to focus on how safe their storage systems are. According to the InfoPro's latest Storage Wave Networking Study, Fortune 1000 organizations indicated they are spending, on the average, 15 percent of their storage budget on redesigning their growing backup infrastructures. Given the rash of laptop thefts in recent years--the Internal Revenue Service lost nearly 500 in three years and the Department of Commerce more than 1,100 since 2001--federal customers are focusing on better storage-management software.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor Atempo is developing sales opportunities to help government buyers secure their stored data. The Huntington, Ky., District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently turned to Atempo to more effectively archive and protect high-value data spread over 1,000 workstations. Hardware products didn't effectively address the situation, the Corps concluded. Atempo's LiveBackup was implemented to help manage data on laptops without the need for users to back up to hard drives on their own. Today, Atempo is finding a spillover effect, with sales prospects from Corps buyers in Cincinnati and Buffalo, N.Y.

"Storage hardware investments do nothing to protect the high volumes of unprotected information on employee laptops and desktops," says Marylise Tauzia, director of product marketing at Atempo. "Requiring employees to manually back up their data on a regular basis--even if users comply, which is questionable--still leaves data that has changed since the last backup at risk."

But these solutions are far from an easy sell to federal clients that are used to throwing hardware at storage problems. Unfortunately, it may take more worst-case scenarios to change agencies' mindsets.

"One of the most significant challenges is showing the return on investment and the critical need to protect end-user data," Atempo's Tauzia says. "Unless a key executive had a hardware failure or a laptop stolen, it's hard to make federal government customers invest in such solutions."

Next: Weighing Out The Storage Options