You can live forever digitally for a “nominal price”.
Here’s another contributor to the growth of content in the world: information immortality.
nEternity is offering to keep your digital life – photos, music, your blog – alive and available online forever – independent of your domain or the photo sharing service you’re using.
nEternity may or may not take off. More significant is the trend it points towards: the extension of the lifetime of digital data. Businesses will continue to lengthen their data’s life from here on.
The rules for data retention are changing as digital copies are increasingly the only copies that exist. This will create a new set of businesses focused on extending the life of digital records beyond the current technology on which they are stored. It makes today’s digital archives look downright transitory.
And you thought those backup tapes were troublesome…
As digital content moves into every corner of our lives, the winning products will be those that meet us where we are, and don’t try to turn us all into techno geeks.
Data growth and data value trump need to cut costs
Sepaton surveyed enterprise customers and found that data protection stays in the “have to” pile when it comes time to choose which bills to pay in these tough times. A summary of Jon Toigo’s summary of Sepaton’s report:
Nearly 75% will maintain or increase data protection budgets in 2009
Investments are focused on reducing the cost of data protection
Large and growing volumes of data are becoming the business status quo
Virtualization is increasing data protection demands
A majority are using tape today; a minority expect to be using tape in 12 months
When times are tough, true priorities emerge. The care and feeding of business data makes the list, it seems.
Seagate recently launched two portable drives with very different personalities. Why? One size no longer fits all. But which drive is right for you?
Seagate FreeAgent Go - a great personal drive. It’s the thinnest portable drive in the world, with up to 500 GB and a desktop dock.
I use the FreeAgent Go for my personal data. I can drop the Go into a dock at work and easily use the files on my work PC. I don’t have to mix my personal and work content, but have access to both.
Maxtor BlackArmor – a great business drive. It’s the safest drive in the world, with government-grade 128-bit AES encryption and up to 320 GB.
I use the BlackArmor for backing up my work files. I keep it at home as a simple disaster recovery scheme. There is absolutely no risk of anyone accessing the data without the password, even if it were to fall out of my bag at a hacker’s convention.
Unlike traditional storage solutions that are add-on afterthoughts and don’t always work well together, CentralAxis BE puts the content first. It’s a single central storage solution that makes managing the changing demands for storage simpler and safer as a business grows:
Easy to install and manage with a compact design and anywhere access. Staff can access and share data from anywhere via the web.
One system for the entire company with up to 2 terabytes of space. One system works for all employees across Windows and Mac OSes.
Safety for all a company’s data with automatic backups for up to 20 PCs that save up to ten historical versions of information. Backups are mirrored across two drives for added safety. Plug an external drive into a USB port for rotating backups offsite.
Need more space? Add another CentralAxis BE.
At some point you’ll probably need a more complicated solution. You can put your IT department on that task…once your big enough to hire one.
My first blog post a year ago was about my full drive on my work PC. Since then I’ve expanded to 100 gigabytes. Nothing like my home PC, but work space requirements tend to be lower.
I’m in the midst of changing my backup method from a local desktop backup drive to a BlackArmor portable drive. It allows me to backup my work remotely. It’s got Seagate Secure technology, which means it’s hackproof – no worries about losing sensitive information.
I expect my next laptop to have a Seagate Secure encrypted drive inside as well.
Someday it will be considered stupid – and maybe illegal – to use a hard drive that’s not self-encrypting in a business PC.
One of the biggest inhibitors to Cloud Storage for backups has been that businesses don’t want to lose control of their data. Drunken Data mounted the soapbox on this topic Monday. No matter what assurances a Cloud service makes, it’s hard not to feel safer with data on-site.
The EVault Express Recovery Appliance stages backups locally, allowing transfers to the Cloud over time. The incremental costs for the appliance are small compared to conventional 100% on-site backup. Near-term recovery time is quicker, but maybe more important is the emotional benefit of having recent backups within the company walls (locally or at a remote facility).
This pragmatic tweak to the Cloud Storage model could open up the business market for SaaS in a big way. What do you think?
More video + more unprotected content = new products
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins spent 3 1/2 minutes with MarketWatch talking about the new FreeAgent line and consumer storage trends. Two takeaways:
It’s all about video. This is a recurring trend here at Storage Effect. When Seagate developed a storage calculator for PCs, it was immediately clear that video swamped all other forms of content for consumer storage.
People aren’t backing up their content. Bill said 17% of U.S. consumers aren’t backing up their content. Is this a “sub-prime mortgage” kind of thing where people don’t realize the risk they’re taking? I think it’s more that they just don’t know how exactly, and it’s not at the top of the list in a busy world.
Takeaway 1 will eventually overcome Takeaway 2. Hopefully it happens via easier-to-use products like FreeAgent and not as a response to a painful content loss.
Data Domain, Avamar and ExaGrid all report strong sales growth
Byte and Switch profiled three separate data deduplication vendors: Data Domain, Avamar and ExaGrid. Each is having a great quarter, with sales up significantly.
Dedupe is still young, but it’s accelerating fast into mainstream enterprise traffic.
