Storage management—inside and out - I/O with Mark & Hal

Computer Technology Review, March, 2002 by Mark Ferelli, Hal Glatzer

HAL: I haven't seen much that's really "news" this Spring. Have you?

MARK: Well, there's some movement an evolution, if not a revolution--in storage management. Products are more application-oriented, now.

HAL: What does that mean? I always think of storage management as an application in and of itself.

MARK: True. But storage management increasingly ties into other activities in the enterprise.

HAL: Of course it does. But aren't those "activities" within departments or workgroups managing their own storage, nowadays'? It's not an e-volution or a re-volution. It's devolution--away from centralized IT, and toward departmental and workgroup IT. Most of the new storage management products seem to be aimed at enabling less-technically-sophisticated people, especially users themselves, to manage their own data storage.

MARK: Yes and no.

HAL: Good answer!

MARK: Sate answer. But seriously, many of the new e-commerce apps are, indeed, oriented toward workgroups and departments. However, there are some significant applications that are storage-sensitive, IT-wide.

HAL: Give me an example.

MARK: Okay. Email. I've read analysts' predictions that the daily volume of email traffic in the United States alone, could grow from ten billion messages a day, last year, to 35 billion a day by 2005.

HAL: That's a lot of spam!

MARK: I hope not. I prefer fresh meat. But what this illustrates is the need to proactively manage that important application. I've decided, by the way, to abandon the old buzzword for that: remember "mission-critical"?

HAL: It's still an expression worth using, but you've got to be careful what "mission" is really "critical." I'm sure that the folks at Enron, whose "mission" was hiding the company's losses, now wish they'd been more "critical" about wiping out their emails! Those messages have come back to bite them on the--

MARK: Keep it clean, Hal. This is a family magazine.

HAL: The bottom line--pardon the pun--is that email can be construed as a "document" in what used to be strictly a "paper" trail.

MARK: True, true. We're entering a new frontier, where data protection, electronic communications such as email, and cybercrimes--including cyberterrorism--all intersect. And storage, of course, is at the heart of data protection.

HAL: So are new storage management products capable of dealing with these new threats?

MARK: Some are actually optimized for that purpose. I can think of two, off the top of my head: StorageTek's new EmailXcelerator, and the software that Maxtor is working with OTG Software--

HAL: Which was just acquired by Legato Systems--

MARK: It's a NAS device that's an email "engine" with OTG's email management suite.

HAL: I have to wonder if there are internal as well as external safeguards in products like those. I mean: what's going to keep unscrupulous managers from deleting or scrambling emails that could be used against them? In these email management tools, is there a functional equivalent of a paper-shredder?

MARK: No. There aren't too many safeguards that can be programmed in. The problem with data security is that it needs procedures to cope with both internal and external threats.

HAL: And typically, everybody's so fixated on keeping out hackers or competitors that they overlook threats from within. It's a little like merchandise tags in a department store: they're pretty good at catching shoplifters, but they don't stop what retailers call "shrinkage"--meaning theft by employees.

MARK: Let's check with our readers. What's more important? If you think that IT ought to focus on keeping unauthorized people out, email me at mark_ferelli@wwpi.com

HAL: And if you think it's at least as important--if not more so--to keep internal people honest, email me, at hal_glatzer@wwpi.com