"Enterprise storage used to exist in a relatively fixed, centralized, controlled environment where physical security, access controls and known administrative entities satisfied requirements for management due diligence. In the wake of greater demand for storage capacity, application availability and business continuity, most enterprises will migrate to networked storage. Storage implementers must address known SAN security challenges in order to realize the benefits of greater resource utilization and data accessibility. The most costly information technology security losses occur through theft of proprietary data, and backend storage resources represent prime targets. In addition, regulations governing finance, commerce, healthcare and government data use have created obligations to ensure data privacy at all storage levels. No security system is a "silver bullet." A tiered defense strategy incorporates system and device configuration, testing, auditing and monitoring, access authentication, LUN masking and port zoning, physical access controls, and data storage protection during transport, on the storage subsystem and on the media. To protect backend stored data, block-level data encryption can be employed to eliminate the risk of unauthorized access stored data "in flight" and "at rest." Storage security appliances can be a key part of a storage protection strategy."
"Myth #3: Online Backup can't handle a fortune 500 company's data. Handling large amounts of data over relatively small bandwidth is a popular feature of online backup. An initial backup or "seed" of the server's data is extracted. The Delta Processing technology then seeks out updated portions of changed files. Only the fragmented change of data is sent to the vault. Large-volume and highly redundant disk storage systems store the data online. Online backup providers service businesses with a responsibility to ensure that storage space is always available, no matter what the size. To further data integrity, reliability and recovery, the massive amounts of data online are backed up to tape on a daily basis, and shipped to an underground vault for safekeeping."
What are the legal regulations covering the type of storage system, backup and disaster recovery and encryption mandated for companies operating in the US? This article answers those questions and is a sound starting point for anyone having the duty of care and responsibility for their corporate data. Because regulations change so quickly it's worth considering the impact of these best practises on your own organisation even if you think you are currently outside the scope of these laws. That will reduce the level of panic when they creep up on you.
Surviving your own storage security disaster can be a harrowing experience. Not all disasters are avoidable. But you can learn from the mistakes of others. This article, which lists many bloopers, will make you think about new year resolutions connected with storage data security and compliance. But whatever the time of year this subject is worthy of your serious attention.
It's difficult enough protecting and archiving your data so that it's available to the right people at the right time (and cost). But now that's only part of the problem. With so many new rules and regulations which prescribe how you should destroy data records at the appropriate time - how do you guarantee that they stay deleted? Archiving data on the wrong kind of media could mean you run the risk of breaking the law. Advances in the data recovery industry, and the future cohabitation of storage search-engines both mean that Compliance Officers have to pay much more attention to the ways in which data is dispersed and disposed of in different types of media. This article summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently available market technologies.
Network connected disk to disk backup systems for the enterprise have come a long way since the first pioneering products started to appear in the pages of STORAGEsearch.com in the late 1990s. Some of the growing sophistication in the market can be seen by the way that the marketing terminology has morphed from the early D2d (let's kill tape backup) to the current VTL (Virtual Tape Library - let's just see if they notice that it's more reliable and works faster - and don't tell them that there isn't a tape in the box) type of approaches. But if you think that speed, reliability and cost are the only things you need to know about the "virtual" versus "real" tape library argument - take a look at this comprehensive article which shows there are a lot more benefits than that.
Digital Vaults enable users across the internet to share access to sensitive information in a simple secure way. This article by Cyber-Ark gives a brief overview on digital vaults and looks at why they are growing in popularity.
Will disk to disk backup make tape backup obsolete? That's a question that's been debated hotly here on STORAGEsearch for many years. At the extreme polarized ends of the argument are tape media makers like Sony, who made a case for the long term survival of tape, and at the other end of the argument are disk to disk supporters like STORAGEsearch whose editorial view has been that tape doesn't have a viable role the midsize market any more. In the middle of this argument are the moderates who say that maybe tape and D2d can co-exist. This article by Steve Gardner at Engenio takes the middle course line - and says why he thinks there's still a place for both. See if you agree.
"Studies show that 80% of employees keep emails after reading them while 78% store attachments within the email system. Analysts estimate that each user will send/receive an average of 4.6Mb daily this year. Since the more popular email applications (e.g., Outlook) store emails in a single mailbox database file (e.g., the PST file), employees keep their emails within this single file rather than in separate directories on their computers. This causes severe problems for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB): Most of the backup and recovery management software available today are file-centric solutions that will backup single mailbox database files rather than individual emails. Restores equate to replacement of single mailbox database files resulting in losses of any incremental changes made since the last backup."
"In the case of contract negotiations, for example, numerous people will contribute information to a document, which in turn needs to be accessible to multiple users. Without an email management system in place, confusion can arise over the content of the document and subsequently result in a flawed contract. Or to take another example - an email detailing agreement on activity or budget between client and vendor might make the difference between a harmonious working relationship and a litigious one. Keeping sound records of business communications, especially email, is vital both for the smooth running of a company and to satisfy ever increasing legal requirements."
"Many companies associate disaster recovery with catastrophic events - earthquakes, floods, fires and other natural or man-made disasters that make data recovery from production machines nearly or totally impossible. While organisations must plan for such events, it's just as important to prepare for less cataclysmic possibilities, which can just as easily bring business to a halt. Many "non-traditional" disasters can impact the operations of your organisation. For example, gas leaks and other facilities issues typically don't cause permanent damage but they can easily make the entire building unusable for days or even weeks. Police investigations, fumigations and other unavoidable problems can arise without warning, prohibiting users from accessing data systems and possibly your entire office space."
"Although disk densities are continuing to rise, the rate of growth is expected to slow as disk recording nears a super-paramagnetic limitation. Due to a much lower areal recording density and much greater recording area, tape technology has the potential to grow at a faster rate and as a result improve its cost per gigabyte trends compared to disk. Therefore, when combined with disk in the enterprise storage environment, the tape industry roadmap currently maintains that tape capacity on a single cartridge must achieve 10 terabytes (uncompressed) per cartridge by 2011, and must reach 1TB (uncompressed) on a single cartridge by 2006 on its way to reaching the 10 year goal."
"A Disaster Recovery Plan usually cannot be written by the IT Deparment alone and should not be created for a given computer or data center. Typically, effective Disaster Recovery plans are a long-term project that cannot be attempted without standard operating procedures, logbooks, data flow diagra m s, problem isolation procedures and a reliable tape backup rotation schedule. Formulation of a corporate-wide standardized Disaster Recovery plan will result in faster isolation of application bugs, fewer operational mistakes, fewer support personnel and requirements, and overall easier system and application maintenance."
"Can You Find The Emails? Your purchasing department has been negotiating a vital contract and to speed things up a lot of the negotiation takes place via email. The negotiation is concluded over a period of one month. Two years later the contract is in dispute and a court of law asks for all evidence supporting your claims about the contract. Email is a critical part of your case and you need to find all relevant email."
"CDs have already been around for 20 years - so that may seem like forever and you may think that DVDs too will still be around just as long. But my own view is that these are merely short term stepping stones to something else in the same way that scrolls and loose collections of paper were a transient phase which gave way to the bound book."
"Being a good guesser is important for you too, whether you're a buyer, vendor or developer of storage systems and products. Investing time and effort into dead end technologies is wasteful of your time and money because if you choose a loser you may have to scrap your current strategy and start all over again instead of reaping the rewards of incremental improvements which you get by backing the winners."
"A NAS Data Protection Unit with bare metal restore capability can be redeployed as a system cloning tool to simplify the standardization and distribution of new applications, desktops and servers in heterogeneous network environments.
"When backup was initially designed, technology and cost limitations hindered the achievement of a zero data loss solution. Now, new technology developments have enabled software developers to rediscover backup software's original promise."
"Sisk drives have long been a preferred media from an ease-of-use standpoint because of their random access file structure. For example, backup is made much easier with hard drives compared to tape by reducing both the cataloging process from hours to minutes, as well as dramatically reducing restoration time from hours to minutes (no more cartridge shuffle when disk drives are used)... While other external disk-based data storage solutions typically cannot withstand a drop of even 3 inches, the Olixir Mobile DataVault withstands up to 7-foot drops on concrete."
"The need for these fault tolerant near-line storage solutions is because digital records are prone to becoming lost or damaged just like paper. It is all too easy to misplace a single bit, even erase or damage it unknowingly during the life of the stored data. If this happens there is the chance that the software's ability to retrieve and read that data accurately is lost, and thus the record could be lost... Forever! Archiving is not solely about saving space on your RAID system. Hard disk storage is becoming very affordable. The point of archiving is to retain your data for future use. It is pointless to archive if you cannot retrieve any piece of your data quickly and efficiently."
"This section outlines the major symptoms of data loss. What to do and what NOT to do when experiencing data loss is covered under the heading - Data Recovery Process: What to do first."
"Today, a number of storage and communications technologies have converged into the backup applications area. The result is that data users have a wider choice of backup options than ever before."
"Historically there have been inherent performance problems with tape backup over distance that limited its role in Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery planning. The primary reason for this limited role is the sequential nature of tape I/O operations, which makes tape backup highly sensitive to the latency that accompanies distance. Unlike disk-based operations in which blocks can be written in parallel, tape I/O for a single block must complete before the next block can be written.."
"It is a fallacy that hard drives do not fail in array products. In fact, RAID exists because hard drives do fail. Simple statistics show that a 50-device array will loose on average three drives per year. If the system is a RAID device, chances are the data can be reconstructed or is mirrored on another drive, but if the device is a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) the data will be lost."
"Until recently, it was rare to find someone with the title of storage administrator within enterprises. But the rapid implementation of storage systems and their complex nature has presented the need for IT personnel with specialized skill sets. Unfortunately, some businesses are approaching this challenge the wrong way. In today's competitive economic climate, there has been a focus on cost-cutting, and IT is no exception. As a result, many network or system administrators are increasingly being charged to take on the role of storage administrator as well."
"On March 8th - a quiet Saturday, the systems administrator wrote a script to perform the migration and then decided to test the script with the actual copy commands "commented-out". He made a typo error in the copy command, in effect instructing the main data storage to copy onto itself, and then compounded his mistake by commenting-out the wrong line. He initiated the test run which then attempted to copy each file over itself. Under the Solaris/UNIX file system this over-wrote the file inodes - erasing all file allocation information and truncating each file to zero length. Overwriting directory information, unlike the actual copying of data, is a very quick process and the damage was done almost instantly."
"The Futurologist: The CIO has to be up on all new technology trends, understanding the credibility of emerging technologies for their IT landscape."
This is the 5th annual edition of this popular report (published January 18, 2006). The ranking - based on analyzing millions of pageviews from over 640,000 readers during 2005 - shows what readers are actually interested in.
"Times have changed and today's system/drive designers have significantly reduced the cost of disk drives making them more competitive with tape systems. Even more important is the fact that tape is slow and sequential making it difficult to find files quickly. Disk drives on the other hand, offer direct random access, significant time saving (time = money), and read/write efficiency that translates into increased productivity and lower operating costs."
"The art of anticipating disaster is often built in response to close calls, and the hospital was recently struck by power failures of different scales. As Connor recalls, "During the Northeast Blackout the hospital was affected, though our systems were not compromised. We get our power comes from Rockville Centre, which has its own generators. The hospital was down for about four hours, but we were running off our own backup generators. The hospital is a high priority for restoring electricity, so compared to other businesses the impact was minimal."
"WORM Hard Disk Drives will be coming to the market in a year or so. Remember where you heard it first. The same place which predicted the convergence of services, online content and storage which became embodied as Apple's iPod and iTunes."