Seagate is a Top Five technology brand for a surprising number of IT end users
An end user IT survey by Everything Channel on CRN.com shows that disk drives aren’t as much a commodity as one might think.
When asked what five vendors are most important for their technology provider to have a relationship with, Seagate was mentioned by a surprising number of IT folks. All the more impressive given that Microsoft, HP and Dell take up 3 of the 5 spots for over 40% of the respondents.
For small businesses, Seagate was mentioned more than EMC, Sun, CA, SAP, Toshiba, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp. No other pure storage vendor (device or system) was on the list.
Seagate had an even higher ranking on the list for medium-sized businesses. (more…)
iosafe disk drives keep data safe in a fire or flood.
How good of a bank vault is your solution?
It’s a new way to think about what you do for your customers. You are processing and storing your customer’s liquid assets. Your solutions need to reflect that reality, or you may end up having to help them recover from a nasty surprise.
An alternative to “Old School” bank vaults and security guards for data is encryption. Seagate’s Maxtor BlackArmor drives are better than a loaded gun in keep thieves out of your stuff. Without the password, NO ONE can get to your data. Period.
Who’s had data irretrievably lost or stolen? How did you recover?
Even best-in-class rebuild times expose data to hours of risk
Blocks and Files points to an Demartek study (sponsored by Pillar) showing that the Pillar Axiom 500 rebuild times are much shorter on high capacity arrays that similar EMC or NetApp systems.
The glaring data beyond Pillar’s performance, though, is the teeth-clenchingly long times that data is one drive failure away from catastrophic loss in every case.
The tests were conducted with about 50 500GB drives per system using RAID 5 (RAID 4 for NetApp), meaning the arrays can be rebuilt if one drive fails, but not two. So during the rebuilds of from 3 to 23 hours, if another drive fails, all data is lost.
Insert 1 TB drives into the equation, and your rebuild time (and vulnerability) doubles.
RAID 6 and other dual-failure protective schemes make this problem go away, but cost a little in capacity.
How are you dealing with this? I’ve heard that RAID 6 is gaining traction for 7200 rpm high capacity enterprise drives like Seagate’s Barracuda ES that are less reliable than 15K SAS enterprise drives (see Seagate’s 3.5″ Cheetah and 2.5″ Savvio for reference).
Does your RAID vary by drive class? What other magic do you apply to make this work?
Deduplication is hip. It’s happenin’. How do you tout it/explain it in your solutions? The Backup Blog posted a thorough overview of the technology. Start cramming.
Physical theft is a relatively recoverable event. Data theft? Not so much
Why do you backup your data? In case your computer crashes, or there’s a fire, right?
Here’s a new twist on the benefits of backup - theft protection. Seagate received this letter from a customer recently:
I deployed a Linksys NAS200 solution with 2 raided Seagate 500g SATA drives a few months ago for my client. As fortune would have it when my clients’ office was burglarized the thieves took his server. Fortunately they did not take the NAS unit and I was able to restore the entire contents to a new server the same day it was discovered. Needless to say, dependable hardware and good planning saved the day and made for a satisfied client.
Best Wishes
Gary Popkin
Command Computer
N Lauderdale, FL
Losing hardware vs. losing business data? No contest. This holds true just as clearly for personal digital content. Gary was a hero for his customer, but dodged a bullet thanks to less than thorough thieves. Will your customers be so lucky?
Anybody out there lost your hardware, but not your data? I’d love to hear some happy recovery stories, but nightmares are instructive as well.
Disk is the new Tape, and Tape is the new Microfiche
Beth Pariseau at Storage Soup asks if tape is finally dead. Back in 2000 when I worked at StorageTek, that was the mantra from EMC, and we took it personally. There was lots of life left in tape then, and there still is today.
But life goes on. Tape continues to shift right in the scheme of things, storing data that is older and less active. The good news for tape is that even geriatric data is highly valued, and there’s a ton of it.
Enter flash
Meanwhile, the young whippersnapper flash is just starting to replace disk in applications needing the highest performance or the lowest capacity. That’s the way it begins - that’s how disk started out vs. tape decades ago. It’s the natural order of things - the circle of life.
Dream about the future but act on the present
This trend will take years - probably decades - to play itself out. So while it pays to respect your elders and encourage the youngest generation, disk should be in no hurry to make reservations at the retirement home.
Disk is the breadwinner of the family, in its prime earning years. Make sure you’re fully employing it in your solutions.
Comments please! How are you using tape and/or flash today, for work or play?
Where to look when times are tough? Two words: SMB storage. Why?
SMB tech spending remains strong. VARBusiness’ Robert C. DeMarzo quotes Goldman Sachs: “…SMB spending will not be impacted by economic slowing to the same degree as large corporations…”
Storage continues to expand in all segments driven by the digital explosion we’ve all seen. I’ve posted on this many times because it just keeps coming up as a major, persistent trend.
Take advantage of hungry vendors
So check in with your favorite SMB customers today and find a way to meet a few more! Don’t think that the storage vendors won’t help you, either. For example, here’s a current offer in the States and Canada on Seagate external storage , one of the hottest and easiest sells for SOHO and small business storage.
Help your customers get control while helping yourself!
As always, comments are welcome. Do you see your SMB business remaining strong? What’s driving external storage sales most - backup or application storage?
Deduplication prevents businesses from repeating themselves
Clever marketing from Overland Storage: contrasting their de-duplication solution with a copy machine. For me it brings home the essence of what de-dupe is all about.
As I posted yesterday, a major headache and expense for business data protection today is redundancy, meaning copying the same files over and over and over again. Deduplication is one of those technologies whose value is pretty easy to explain: it makes only one copy of everything, reducing the capacity required by 10 to 20X.
Management is limited, data is not
Rather than reduce capacity requirements, that frees up more data to be created, used, saved, distributed. Storage demand is not limited by the amount of data created, but by the ability of consumers and businesses to effectively manage it.
Case in point: according to EMC and IDC, 2007 was the first year that the data generated and replicated in the world exceeded the storage available to keep it.
Less data leads to more storage
I’ll say that again: Deduplication leads to more storage. Agree or disagree? Tell me why.
Persistent data can overwhelm archives if not treated differently
Heidi Biggar hit a nerve with her stories on a growing problem in backup and recovery for businesses: backing up the same information over and over. Backup technology and practices have improved greatly over the past few years, while simultaneously data volume has continued to expand every year. So more companies are backing up, and have more to backup.
Problem: too much of the same data on all of those backup drives:
ESG estimates that 60% to 80% or more of the data on primary storage systems today is static (or persistent). In other words, this data has not been accessed at all 90 days or more after its creation.
Is persistent data a large-scale problem? Heidi’s solution is basically tiered storage, but I’m not convinced that’s being done widely today. I’d like to hear from people successfully (or unsuccessfully) addressing this issue.
Your customers need online backup or data recovery services. Offer both.
My friend Bret Rohloff at Microsoft calls the loss of computer data a “digital house fire”. Well put. There are lots of parallels, and the results are often the same: the permanent loss of precious, priceless keepsakes.
One big difference: unlike physical possessions, “priceless” digital possessions can be replicated and stored somewhere else to keep them safe.
Uberpulse’s Data Recovery Services tour
Uberpulse visited Seagate’s Recovery Services team. Some interesting takeaways:
Cost to store data locally: ~$200
Cost to back it up online: ~$50/year
Cost to recover lost data: at least $500, often thousands of dollars
I’ve been meaning to sign up for online backup…I’m motivated to get it done now!
Solution providers can offer these services
Seagate has programs that allow solution providers to offer Seagate Recovery Services and Evault (Seagate’s online backup service) to their customers.
