Deepfile Simplifies Enterprise File Management Tasks
Published for the Week Of September 6, 2004
Three years ago, Deepfile co-founder and CTO Jeff Bone was searching for a more efficient way to manage his personal data.
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With so many different devices--cell phone, PDA, laptop, desktop PC--capable of accessing and storing data, why duplicate information on each device? Wouldn’t it make more sense to create a central repository with one set of data for all these devices to pull from?
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That idea would lead to the creation of Deepfile, an Austin, Texas-based developer of what it calls network file-management products. Bone and co-founder Jeff Erramouspe, chief marketing officer, brought in Bob Fernander as CEO and launched Deepfile’s first suite of products in March 2003, comprised of Sentinel, Enforcer and Auditor.
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Deepfile’s timing seemed impeccable. Erramouspe said businesses were faced with growing compliance issues and, from an IT perspective, efficiency issues: “The old storage reasoning was, ‘Disks and media are getting cheaper--let’s just buy more.’ But the backup, restore, recovery, management and maintenance burden got ridiculous,” he said.
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Sentinel is the most unique aspect of the suite. The product distributes responsibility for files across an enterprise and generates reports to users about files they own. Based on this information, individual users can perform many administrative tasks, relieving IT of the burden.
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Enforcer takes action on files based on rules and policies, relying on user-defined meta-data based on the files’ contents and importance to the business. It can, for example, delete inactive files. Auditor, meanwhile, performs assessments on a company’s storage and file-management system.
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Another unique feature of Deepfile’s solution is that it comes as a platform-independent appliance, making it an easy-to-deploy information life-cycle management (ILM) solution, according to George Crump, vice president of technology sales at Sanz, an Englewood, Colo.-based storage integrator.
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“Like everybody else, we are trying to apply ILM strategies for our customers, and what we’ve struggled with is finding a product to cover most of the platforms at an affordable price that implements simply,” Crump said. “Deepfile gets us there.”
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Deepfile has only four reselling partners so far, among them Sanz, but plans to unveil partnerships with six or seven more in the near future.
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