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Tag: data-protection

  • Dell and Dropbox Partner on a Business Cloud Storage Push


    Hardware giant Dell has formed a partnership with cloud storage provider Dropbox to sell the business focused cloud storage product through its sales network. The deal aims at helping businesses "meet today’s employee’s expectations for cloud based services."

    Dell will bundle Dropbox’s corporate offering, Dropbox for business with its data protection cloud proposition. According to the company, the move will ensure that the IT Company meets regulatory requirements and also maintain control over sharing.

    Brett Hansen, the executive director of end user computing software at Dell noted that Dropbox was one of the fastest growing, most innovative and most popular solution of its kind. He further noted that through the Dell global ales team, both companies can help organizations of different sizes protect data while embracing consumerisation of IT.

    Global vice president of partnerships at Dropbox, Marc Leibowitz added that Dropbox has always focused in providing a simple and elegant way of accessing their most important stuff. He also noted that Dell offers scalable, innovative and back-end expertise that help to empower IT administrators as well as the end users. The shared values of manageability, simplicity and security make Dell an ideal strategic partner.

    Dell and Dropbox indicated that they will be announcing the developments across Dell’s commercial and consumer client platforms in the coming months. However, they did not expound on when the changes are likely to appear.

    Image: TechMalaysia

  • For Greater Insight And Control over Content, Cloud Storage Provider Box Buys dLoop

    Box, a cloud storage company has acquired dLoop, a data analytic firm. This acquisition is expected to add protection, enterprise content discovery and insight to Box’s platform that offers employees easy sync and sharing between several apps and devices and platforms.

    According to an announcement that was made this week, dLoop technologies is expected to provide permission level, control and visibility of files that enterprises require in order to trust cloud storage.

    The acquisition comes just a week following the announcement by Box of its intentions to raise another $100 million in venture investment that will be in form of Series E-1 Preferred stock.  This is according to a recent regulatory filing.

    Box had earlier developed a powerful admin tool that helps to protect business critical content. These tools are expected to expand following the acquisition of dLoop and offer administrators even greater safeguards on enterprise content.

    At the moment, dLoop is able to discover documents that would normally be unreachable by pattern matching solutions or the normal search. This is done by creating continuous documents graphs as well as clusters from unstructured content with the use of machine-learning algorithms that find related and relevant content.

    Following the announcement, dLoop co-founder Divya Jain will be joining Box in order to lead their efforts in advanced content analysis and data classification.

  • Nexsan and FalconStor to Deliver New Nexsan DeDupe SG Family

    Nexsan Technologies, the provider of disk-based storage and FalconStor Software, the provider of data protection solutions, announced a strategic venture to deliver a joint solution, which has resulted in the delivery of an integrated deduplication product family for high-performance, power-efficient data storage.

    Based on Nexsan’s storage systems and the FalconStor File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) software, the new, Nexsan DeDupe SG ("Speed with Green") product family will be delivered by Nexsan through its worldwide network of channel partners.

    "The new self-optimizing capability of this product will help companies realize benefits in both power and data efficiency while automating critical storage management processes," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

    Storage deduplication systems are primarily used as backup targets, operating only during the backup window. Even though the typical backup window is less than eight hours a day, the deduplication systems spin drives and burn energy for the remaining 16 hours, even while not in use. With Nexsan DeDupe SG, customers are supposed to get higher capacity and better performance during their backups and to save energy and reduce costs every hour that the system is not in use.

    Nexsan DeDupe SG leverages the green efficiencies inherent to its technology components: data reduction through high-speed deduplication, footprint reduction by utilizing space-efficient storage arrays, and substantial energy savings through AutoMAID technology.

    It also maximizes interoperability with all data sources, including disk-to-disk backup and archiving applications. It can be deployed in any physical or virtual infrastructure environment, offering file-level access to a central block-level deduplication repository. The product supports all major backup software, directly accepts Oracle RMAN, Microsoft SQL and other database dumps, and provides integrated data replication and deduplication.

    FalconStor FDS, the deduplication engine for the Nexsan DeDupe SG family, is a block-level deduplication software solution that presents a network share interface as a backup repository, offering space-saving option for writing data to disk.

  • Adaptec Introduces Greener More Efficient RAID Controllers


    Adaptec has announced the availability of its Series 5Z Unified Serial (SATA/SAS) RAID controller family.

    The company said these high-performance controllers integrate an industry first – a flash-based Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection module that provides data center managers with a single controller solution for data protection in the event of both power loss and drive failure.

    Designed to replace a current generation of Lithium Ion battery-based cache back-up devices, the Adaptec RAID Series 5Z is an integrated solid state solution designed to "significantly reduce" annual data center operating costs and environmental impact.

    The controllers offer an integrated, maintenance-free design, eliminating the need to monitor battery charge levels or shut down servers for battery replacement.

    Scott Cleland, director of marketing, Adaptec, said that as enterprise storage demands skyrocket, there is an enormous need for feature-rich, maintenance-free data storage I/O solutions that work to lower overall IT costs and provide significant environmental advantages.

    "For both SATA and SAS drives, the Adaptec Series 5Z family not only delivers the performance, scalability and power efficiency that our customers demand, but with Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection, it offers a simple, maintenance-free solution that provides a critical layer of data protection that is often overlooked," he said.

    All three Adaptec Series 5Z controllers are available now priced at the following MSRPs: Adaptec RAID 5405Z (USD $785), Adaptec RAID 5805Z (USD $965), Adaptec RAID 5445Z (USD $1,045).

  • Double-Take Announces Workload Optimization Products


    Double-Take Software is building on its current data protection repertoire by taking on the challenge of workload optimization, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Workload management encompasses the hardware, the operating systems, applications and data that underpin an organization’s IT-backbone.

    Southborough, Massachusetts-headquartered Double-Take has designed a workload optimization suite to cater to workload portability, backup and availability needs.

    Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software, said the move was to align the business to best meet its customers’ evolving technology needs.

    Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software

    "Our new Workload Optimisation suite exemplifies Double-Take Software’s focus on providing highly functional, non-intrusive software to an overloaded IT department looking to reduce costs," he said.

    "It represents our affordable approach to meeting customers’ migration, availability, backup and recovery needs."

    There are four products that make up the new suite:

    • Double-Take Move – as the name suggests, moves workloads between physical and virtual hardware within data centers for hardware refreshes. It can also move data across locations for data center migrations and consolidations
    • Double-Take Flex – is for managing workloads by booting from iSCSI SANs running on any kind of hardware
    • Double-Take Backup – backs up workloads continuously and recovers them on demand to new physical or virtual machines using CDP capabilities
    • Double-Take Availability – makes sure that critical IT workloads are available when disaster strikes for recovery and business continuity. It allows real time replication and failover for protection of individual applications, entire servers or virtualized workloads that run on VMWare ESX or Microsoft Hyper V

    Goodermote said all other Double-Take flagship products are built around the new workload optimization suite with new functionalities and licensing options.

    He said users can now migrate, backup, protect and flexibly operate physical and virtual workloads across the enterprise whatever the Operating system, hardware or location.

  • Kroll Survey: Employees Are "Wildcard" In Data Storage Practices


    While implementing data storage policies that mandate where company files are to be stored is a popular data-protection measure, employees are not necessarily complying.

    This is leaving organizations vulnerable to data loss, according to a survey.

    Kroll Ontrack found that 40 per cent of individuals surveyed said their companies had a policy regarding where data should be stored.

    However, the survey results also revealed that 61 per cent of respondents "usually" save to a local drive instead of a company network.

    While the risks associated with saving to a local drive could be minimized with an external backup drive or backup software, 44 per cent of respondents said that their preferred storage location was not backed up.

    Jeff Pederson, manager of operations for Ontrack Data Recovery, said saving to a local hard drive on a desktop or laptop more often than not contradicts data storage policies.

    He said regulations usually require employees to save to a network folder.

    "With the majority of employees saving to unprotected, local drives, companies could be at risk for losing anything from project plans and spreadsheets to customer data and financial information," he said.

    Pederson added that having guidelines to save documents to a network better ensures employee data is regularly backed up in accordance with company data retention procedures – and reduces the chance of data loss.

    Brian Lapidus, chief operating officer of Kroll’s Fraud Solutions, a practice of the Background Screening division, said the survey results confirmed its findings.

    "Employees are the wild cards in policies and procedures, he said.

    "Companies must ensure that employees receive ongoing education to understand the risk of actions that do not follow the plan."

    To help businesses avoid losing critical data, Ontrack Data Recovery specialists recommend that companies have a clear, well communicated data storage policy in place for their employees.

    Companies should also ensure that data recovery is included in their overall disaster recovery or business continuity plan.

    To this end, they should identify and partner with a data recovery provider that is able to quickly respond to any type of data loss scenario.

    Pederson said the survey showed that data storage polices do not necessarily safeguard a vast quantity of critical company data.

    "This fact, coupled with the vast number of information-oriented regulations that have been enacted reinforces that companies need to be prepared to respond to data loss at the individual-employee level," he said.

  • Overland Storage Launches Tape Libraries With Embedded Functionality


    Overland Storage has announced the availability of the first models in its next-generation NEO SERIES line of scalable, automated tape libraries.

    The NEO E-Series libraries, which provide embedded functionality, are geared at meeting a wide range of demanding data protection and long-term archive requirements.

    According to Overland, the new NEO E-Series enables embedded SCSI, FC and SAS connectivity, easing installations while ensuring connectivity with future interface technologies. Other embedded capabilities include:

    • Improved performance and feature support with enhanced processing power,
    • Further investment protection via Integrated partitioning,
    • More efficient data access due to improved mailslot functionality,
    • Ease of management via remote diagnostics with proactive monitoring,
    • Superior reliability and serviceability through the use of enhanced robotics, more efficient power supply and innovative library/drive interface.

    The new NEO E-Series has been designed t integrate easily with Overland’s REO SERIES of disk-based backup and recovery VTLs, Snap Server NAS appliances, ULTAMUS RAID SAN storage as well as other disk-based products.

    Ravi Pendekanti, VP of worldwide sales and marketing for Overland Storage, said the latest enhancements to the NEO tape family provided mid-range customers with affordable, scalable end-to-end data protection solutions.

    "Over the past decade, the NEO tape libraries have proven themselves as important assets in our customers’ end-to-end data protection and archiving strategies," he said.

    "Therefore, it is imperative that we continue to add new features and functionality while leveraging NEO’s highly regarded and trusted tape technology and proven product architecture."

    The NEO E-Series adds support for LTO HH tape drive technologies and direct-connect interfaces, which Overland said lowers initial expenditures and enables customers to add new capabilities over time while protecting their investments in tape-based backup and recovery.

    Overland’s NEO 2000E scales from 30 to 240 cartridges per module while the NEO 4000E scales from 60 to 240 cartridges.

    NEO2000E and 4000E can be scaled with each other in an almost limitless combination, providing a variety of capacity points to meet end user needs.

    Both tape library models are available now from Overland’s channel partners worldwide with a starting MSRP of USD $12,333.

    Robert Amatruda, research director at IDC for tape and removable storage, said the mid-range tape automation market is expected to exceed USD $1 billion in annual sales, with more than 100,000 units shipped in 2008.

    "The majority of companies still depend on tape for long-term archive and disaster recovery," he said.

    "Overland’s new NEO E-Series, with its increased functionality, should integrate well with a company’s existing disk-based solutions, and help companies meet recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO) in both SAN and NAS environments."