Keeping Tabs On Data

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