Enterprise Strategy Group X Information Management Software & Services

ESG Webinar: Do You Have Big Data?

Julie Lockner — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:55:51 +0000

As organizations accumulate data in droves, if the underlying infrastructure is not designed to handle the volume, one of the first things to go is performance. This may be a symptom of Big Data.

Do you have Big Data?

If you are not sure, Julie Lockner, ESG Senior Analyst and VP of Data Management Solutions, will explain what “Big Data” really means and what all the hoopla is about – from its core definition to how it impacts downstream data processing.

Join Julie on Thursday February 23^rd at 2:00-3:00pm ET for the webinar, “Do You Have Big Data?”

Space is limited. Reserve your seat today.

Guidance Software Buys CaseCentral

Katey Wood — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:33:54 +0000

Guidance Software announced its acquisition of SaaS review provider CaseCentral today. Let’s look to the happy couple’s future. Now that they’ve found love, what are they gonna do with it?

Existing synergies

The companies’ recent roadmaps seem to have been on similar courses.

Guidance has been adding support for the cloud: available in March 2012, Encase eDiscovery 4.4 collects from cloud-based sources. New Collected Data Re-use (CDR) allows users to search data previously collected in EnCase from prior matters.

CaseCentral has long had evidence and work-product reuse from its unified repository as a value proposition, along with process analytics to clock productivity in case review – see ESG’s brief on its Q3 R5 release here. In December 2011 it added more self-service with CaseCentral CloudConnect, letting users securely upload data directly into its e-discovery platform (rather than packaging, shipping, and processing it).

Integration plans

Guidance plans for the products to be integrated in 3-6 months, eventually allowing users to send data seamlessly to CaseCentral for review through FTP. This raises questions about the viability of transmitting the largest e-discovery data volumes over a wire in an adequate timeframe, though Guidance points to its EnCase filters’ ability to winnow data down considerably prior to review.

Moreover, all “data about the data” from EnCase – such as legal hold status, collection time, etc. – will be mapped to CaseCentral’s platform and available to outside counsel, to improve collaboration between enterprises and law firms. This builds favorably on CaseCentral’s existing process analytics capabilities, for added transparency in project management and reporting.

Rationale

Cross-selling opportunities abound. Guidance is a well known quantity, boasting EnCase Enterprise usage by 60 of the Fortune 100. CaseCentral’s revenue base is largely made up of enterprise litigants doing repeat cases, unlike many other review vendors (but similar to an increasing number of service providers). According to a recent press release, “strategic enterprise eDiscovery revenue has been growing with a CAGR of 45% since 2009 and now represents over 75% of CaseCentral revenue versus single event, ad hoc business.” Both, too, have law firm traction: Guidance was used by 13% and CaseCentral by 8% in the 2011 AmLaw Tech Survey (competitor Clearwell Systems, at 46%, was the most-cited).

Other potential benefits:

The possibility of combined evidence re-use and end-to-end process analytics adds “stickiness” for Guidance (and potentially an up-sell from its “on-demand” offering), as enterprise companies reap added benefits from working with a single provider across cases.
Guidance now wins on both ends, collecting from the cloud and putting it back up in its own through CaseCentral. In the event of push-button cloud promotion or CaseCentral’s self-service capabilities proving inadequate, Guidance has a well-equipped services arm to pitch in.

Financial details

A look at the numbers from the press release:

“Under the terms of the agreement, Guidance Software will acquire CaseCentral for upfront consideration of approximately $17.1 million, consisting of approximately $8.3 million in cash, $8.3 million in Guidance Software common stock, and the assumption of $0.5 million of debt, net of cash. Depending on CaseCentral’s SaaS revenue growth, Guidance Software may pay up to an additional $33 million in cash over the next three years. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the first quarter of 2012. Guidance Software expects the transaction to add approximately $10 million in SaaS revenue in 2012, and to be slightly dilutive to slightly accretive to 2012 non-GAAP EPS and accretive to 2013 non-GAAP EPS.”

A possible long-term price tag of $50m (depending on revenue growth for the next three years) would provide more return on the total $22m in funding the company has received, but still puts the deal only a bit above Interwoven’s July 2008 acquisition of Discovery Mining for $36m, and well below more recent transactions.

CaseCentral’s revenue details are not available as of this writing to calculate a multiple. Guidance, which reported 2011 revenues of $104.6m, expects the deal to add $10m in SaaS revenue for 2012.

Banks Push Hadoop Envelope to Open Big Data’s Secrets – Bank Systems & Technology

cwhitehouse — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:19:44 +0000

Given the promise of new analytics technologies, becoming more data-driven is on the minds of most IT decision makers these days. In a recent report on the impact of big data on analytics, “More than half of the organizations polled identified analytics as among their top five IT priorities,” says Julie Lockner senior analyst and VP of data at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an IT strategic advisory firm based in Milford, Mass.

“With the promise big data is poised to bring,” says Lockner, “organizations are exploring their options for solving business challenges with emerging [data] technologies. It’s just not practical or cost-effective to use traditional [database] platforms and technologies that were designed before the big-data era.”

Enter Apache’s Hadoop, the open-source software framework named by its creator after his son’s toy elephant. According to Lockner, the highly scalable Hadoop permits running analytics on massive data sets effectively and efficiently, whether that data is structured or unstructured.

“Where traditional databases hit their limits, Hadoop starts to emerge as a much better fit for solving unique analytics challenges,” Lockner says. “Because data can be incorporated from multiple sources with varying types of data structures, Hadoop enables more analysis across multiple data feeds in a single platform — solving some of the toughest data integration challenges commonly associated with relational data warehouse architecture.”

via Banks Push Hadoop Envelope to Open Big Data’s Secrets – Bank Systems & Technology.

CommVault Simpana now offering “One Pass”

Jason Buffington — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:15:00 +0000

Today, CommVault is holding a virtual event to announce some of its latest innovations for the Simpana 9.0 product. I had the opportunity to do some early hands-on testing of a few of the new capabilities during an ESG Lab Review — including its new “OnePass” technology and its ability to integrate with Scale-out NAS.

Click here to read the new ESG Lab Report on CommVault Simpana 9.0 “OnePass”

Click here to read a new ESG Analyst Brief on CommVault Simpana 9

With data growing at ever increasing rates, more data sets are simply becoming “too big” to back up — at least not in the traditional sense. To help combat this, Archive is becoming more and more the steady-partner to Backup, whereby once something is adequately backed up, dormant data can be archived off — making future backups better.

That all sounds like steps in the right direction, but let’s take a look using a “Good, Better, Best” perspective for how these come together:

	Good > Some IT environments are now doing Archive and Backup (and Storage Resource Monitoring), which is solving their tactical backup window and retention challenges — but they are using multiple point products; with each niche technology installing its own agent on the production servers, its own management console, and creating its own I/O/CPU impact on every production server.

	Better > Some data protection vendors have either built or bought complementary archiving and/or SRM functionality. Often this eases buying and evaluation cycles, as well as support resolution. But the multiple agents, back-ends, management interfaces, and I/O/CPU impact on the production environments still apply.

	Best > One agent … One back-end … One console … and (most importantly) One CPU/I/O stream on each production server.

In other words — One Pass on the data, which (not coincidently) is the name of Simpana’s new feature.

CommVault may not be the only vendor to have ever converged its software’s methodologies, but it is now on a very short list of vendors who are addressing multiple data management problems with a truly unified solution through an elegant architecture. And most impressively, they did it while not even asking for new licensing or deployment methods. That’s right, existing Simpana 9.0 customers can take advantage of this by simply applying the most recent quarterly software update and then doing their normal agent update process. After that, two simple checkboxes in the Simpana management console will enable the unified “OnePass” behavior within the Simpana system. (check out the ESG Lab Report on all of this)

While I would love to say that consolidating the 3 workflows of Backup, Archiving, and SRM into one process gives you 3X return for your backup window, there are too many variables to make that claim, including: file types and size, amount of redundancy, archiving retention rules, etc. But by only traversing the disk system once (instead of for each of the three processes) every Simpana customer should see an appreciable improvement in backup window SLA compliance, as well as the less quantifiable but more appreciable reduced I/O impact on production disks and networks and CPU — all of which will free the production environment to do less backup tasks and more production work.

As always, thanks for reading.

Click here to read earlier ESG coverage of CommVault Simpana

Building a Strategic Archive with CommVault Simpana Software

Brian Babineau — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:01:54 +0000

CommVault Simpana software, a data management platform that delivers backup, archive, search, and analytics capabilities, can be a viable cornerstone of an organization’s information retention strategy. Simpana provides archiving capabilities that organizations may not believe they need now but, given current archive market trends, will be extremely useful to them in the near future.

Introduction

ESG has long argued that it is not a question of if organizations are going to archive; it’s how. For years, organizations have reacted passively to digital information retention requirements by electing to put in place minimal resources to preserve information for compliance, legal, business reference, or system optimization purposes. Most companies have dealt with the archiving market’s evolving dynamics by addressing an immediate need rather than by building any type of long-term strategy.

For example, many companies have had to deal with growing e-discovery demands that make it imperative to retain select archived data online for easy retrieval and export. The short-term resolution is to store the information on faster (yet more expensive) media. Deploying such a strategy does address the short term challenge. But over time, putting all information on costly storage is likely to be very expensive.

It is hard to fault IT departments and their business customers for simply addressing archive-related challenges as they come up. After all, it is far too complicated to predict what retention issues will occur in the future. The concern with constantly executing archive environment “fire drills,” though, is that they run counter to the logic of an overall information retention process.

By nature, archiving involves long-term information retention. Shortsighted technology decisions usually end up costing a company more in the long run by forcing:

Disruptive data migrations
Unplanned purchases of additional systems
Increased risk because business users cannot properly address legal and compliance needs

Today, when a long-term archive strategy supported by adaptable technology solutions isn’t in place, potential costs rise even further: The already-flawed situation is exacerbated by explosive information growth (frequently called “big data” because the explosion is driven by higher content volumes and larger file sizes), increasing demand for end-user data access, tight budgets, and other factors.

Companies can continue to try to keep up by making tactical-level archiving process and technology decisions. Or they can embrace an archive strategy that balances solutions for today’s pressing issues and with flexibility to address future retention requirements.

For example, by applying a more strategic mindset to the e-discovery situation referenced above, a company might shift its archived data to disk—choosing a platform that supports heterogeneous storage solutions, a private cloud environment, and public cloud environments. Doing so would give a company more control over its archive storage costs: The strategy and the underlying technology would enable the IT organization to pick what storage it uses for archived data and introduce cloud options for data that must be kept for extremely long periods of time.

The same type of analysis is suited to many archive solution capabilities in the marketplace today. The capability in question may not solve an immediate problem, but having a strategy that centers on both adaptability and flexibility will be extremely valuable in a few short years.

Of course, changing one’s purchasing behavior relative to archiving is entirely dependent on the appropriate solutions being available. This paper discusses the reasons ESG believes CommVault Simpana software, a data management platform that delivers backup, archive, search, and analytics capabilities, could be a viable cornerstone of an organization’s information retention strategy. ESG specifically examines Simpana archiving capabilities that organizations may not believe they need now but, given current archive market trends, will be extremely useful to them in the near future.

Getting More Familiar with the Archive Market

In an organization, many constituents—IT, legal, compliance, records management, knowledge worker representatives, etc.—usually get involved in information retention process and technology deployments. One factor playing into tactical archive decision-making is a lack of baseline archive market knowledge across those groups. Many people know what “has to be kept,” but some don’t know how or respect why it would be accessed. In other words, few know what actually drives retention in the first place.

Improving organizational understanding of the archive market, especially in regard to the trends that have affected and could affect it, will help enhance the perspective of cross-functional teams responsible for archiving technology decisions and implementations.

What We Know

Data Growth—It Is a Given

There is a reason why the IT market is enamored with the term “big data.” The industry has rarely seen today’s combination of increasing manual and machine-generated data and exponentially larger file/message/database sizes. For a variety of reasons, a good portion of this data needs to be archived.

As a result of primary data growth and market drivers discussed below, ESG estimates that organizations will archive more than 700 exabytes of data between 2012 and 2015 (see Figure 1)[1].

Figure 1. Total Worldwide Digital Archive Capacity, 2010-2015

Staple Market Drivers

There is no foreseeable reprieve in reasons companies must or should archive. In the “must” category, electronic records management to satisfy compliance and corporate governance mandates won’t subside unless the business world suddenly reverts to creating relevant documents on paper or if global governments and industry regulatory bodies relax specific rules requiring data retention.

In the “should” category, e-discovery continues to force companies to centralize critical data sources and place a subset of corporate information on indefinite retention until matters are resolved or disposition is legally acceptable. Most matters now involve electronically stored information, and it is unfeasible for companies to manually print out, preserve, and review all relevant digital data. Also, rampant data growth is stressing primary application environments and slowing response times. Shifting data from a primary environment while keeping it accessible is an effective way to balance application response times, data accessibility, and IT cost-control efforts.

Resources Are Limited, Not Infinite

Everyone talks about flat budgets and headcount freezes. We have to look at how those issues pertain specifically to archiving. Some companies have stretched backup environments too far to support meaningful archiving. Others have deployed separate, purpose-built archive solutions for every content type they need to archive. Still others are using a combination of backup and archiving solutions.

Which one is right? It depends on the IT staff’s skills and the budget. Some companies save all data. Others delete nearly everything. In both cases, they often don’t know to identify and save only what is dictated by business policy. A company should strive to be more efficient in executing archiving because based on underlying market drivers, the process isn’t going away and in fact will get harder due to the expected data growth.

What We Can Expect

Requirements/Drivers May Arise or Change

It is impossible to know what governments and industry regulatory bodies may do in dictating what content must be saved and for how long. But it is safe to assume that existing mandates will evolve, new ones will appear, and few are likely to disappear. e-Discovery requirements are influenced by local and national judiciary bodies as well case precedent. Any legal matter can result in a new opinion or sanction that influences how electronically stored information has to be managed.

And cloud computing, too, is dramatically altering how companies tier their infrastructures, offering an entirely new way to cost-effectively optimize IT environments. Data already stored in the cloud may later be mandated for archiving. Clearly, cloud could be a great place to store archival data.

Different Content Types Will Have to Be Retained

Too many people think archiving applies only to e-mail because that was where the focus of “electronic” records management and “electronic” evidence started. Today, though, we have to account for data repository sources such as SharePoint that we didn’t have a few years ago. Cloud applications are on the horizon as well. In addition, industry-specific data—such as healthcare medical images, telco call detail records, and oil and gas-related seismic imaging data—are (or could be) subject to retention requirements. Or, a business may simply want to keep this newer data for business-reference purposes.

Archive Access Will Evolve

Just a few years ago, access to archived information still had to go through IT, which meant access delays. More recently, IT organizations worked to offer broader, faster access to compliance, legal, and other groups. Today, many employees need ready access to what’s been archived.

And the process now has to work without IT’s involvement. It is even better if the archived information is available through the application that was originally used to create it (a native access experience). It is easy to envision external constituents such as contractors, service providers (external law firms or auditors for instance), and suppliers who may benefit from archive access. And, just as what happened with other corporate applications, archive access has to be extended to mobile devices (which have become integral to maximizing people’s productivity).

What It Means and How to Prepare

Bigger Archives, Bigger Challenges

A bigger archive creates multiple challenges, including the challenge of accurately identifying what data has to be saved and how long to keep it. With a bigger archive, it also becomes more complicated to:

Analyze the data and determine where to store it during its archive lifecycle
Apply and update retention policies
Delete all copies of data when retention requirements expire
Properly secure data to allow only authorized access
Find relevant information in a timely manner

Archiving Will Always Be a Moving Target

There is no wrong way to solve information retention challenges. However, it is smart to admit that room for improvement exists, and such improvements, if executed properly, can have financially positive benefits.

For example, most companies still solve archive needs with backup processes and technologies. This isn’t wrong. But most of these approaches make it hard to archive individual files. (You either backup an entire data set and save it, or you don’t copy it all.) These approaches also make it hard to alter retention policies upon receiving a discovery request.

A better way might be to use a platform designed to analyze, archive, and subsequently manage individual files. The savings manifest in faster e-discovery response times, reduced burdens on IT (if the archiving platform is self-service vs. requiring IT involvement), and lower storage costs because only a subset of data (vs. an entire backup data set) is actually kept. Companies can spur even more improvements if they can combine common backup and archive processes (such as file scanning and data deduplication) in a single operation while still supporting the two functional use cases (recovery and retention).

Apply a Strategic Perspective to Archive Decisions

In short, organizations have to be aware that information retention is unlike other IT back-end processes due to the lengths of time involved. Companies may need to or want to save data for many, many years. Investment decisions have to be based on today’s problems and on future readiness. Otherwise, a company will be making archive-related purchases every time the market changes or evolves which, if history is any indication, will be frequently.

CommVault Software’s Viability as a Strategic Archive

Known primarily for helping companies protect their critical business data, CommVault is quickly gaining momentum in the archive space. The rapid expansion—CommVault boasts thousands of archive customers—is attributable to the unique Simpana software platform. The Simpana Archive module runs on the same technology platform as the CommVault Simpana data protection offering and utilizes extended content capture options, a sophisticated search engine, and e-discovery and compliance information management workflows to support customers’ long-term information challenges. These feature sets are the foundational elements of traditional purpose-built archive solutions. Yet many do not give CommVault credit for being a visionary in this market.

Customers using Simpana software for data management, that is, for both backup and archiving, will attest that they have actually separated these processes. They have just chosen to do so with a single technology platform, which has obvious economic and operational benefits.

This thoughtful approach to backup and archiving will be more valuable to companies as they optimize their archiving strategies. The Simpana software feature-set, which supports the cost-saving, risk mitigation, and process improvements discussed below, is becoming too hard to ignore for those that traditionally bought or upgraded archiving solutions to only solve an immediate need.

A Strong Architectural Foundation

Simpana software is built on a single platform. It provides a virtual information retention repository called Content Store, combined with an intelligent index that simultaneously supports data protection, archive, and storage infrastructure reporting operations.

Customers can achieve immediate savings by having only one solution to manage—there is no need to have separate application “silos” for archiving and backup. Instead, customers can set retention policies for backup and archive in one place. For legal purposes, a single query data repository to obtain the most comprehensive results in the least amount of time streamlines discovery. The legal department will also appreciate a central place to delete data, reducing the risk of lingering copies.

The centrality helps customers who are preparing for the future: Organizations running archiving as a derivative to backup today can make an easy transition/addition. Customers wishing to consolidate two separate processes can do that if they wish. And customers wanting the benefit of a purpose-built archive without the separate environment get what they want as well.

Because Simpana technology is a data management software-only offering, customers have the option to choose their own storage, avoiding hardware lock-in and potentially higher costs. Support includes immutable storage for those customers with unique legal and compliance requirements, lower-cost tape devices, and cloud storage. That option may not be needed (or even desirable) today, but it will be very good to have over the next five years, as companies look to reduce archive capital and operating expenditures, and as cloud offerings mature and become more central to mainstream IT.

By supporting both backup and archiving, CommVault has a unique engineering design point, especially when it comes to supporting new content types for either function. From a data-protection standpoint, all business information, no matter what application created it or where it is saved, has to be protected.

As result, the product has to find ways to identify and analyze the data so it can be managed under the Simpana platform. Many of the techniques, including snapshot management, application-aware data-management copy operations, and file system analysis techniques, can be used to bring data into the Simpana platform so that data-protection or archive policies can be applied.

Additionally, the company has architected unique archiving capture capabilities, such as e-mail journaling and SharePoint Blob Storage integration, into Simpana software. CommVault has also established partnerships, such as a relationship with Informatica, to add optimized functionality to identify database record archive candidates and help move data into the Simpana software. The result is that customers should be extremely comfortable that Simpana software will handle any current or potential content needing retention for data protection or archiving purposes.

Optimizing Data Management Functions

Information capture is just one of the data management functions that can be converged with Simpana software. Creation and enforcement of retention policies is another. Customers can establish rules that determine what must be archived and protected, the specific retention policy, and what happens when the data is deleted (automatically expired, notification before expiry, etc.).

The centralized, automatic management of retention and disposition eliminates redundant administrative efforts and provides business users, especially records managers and legal staff, with comfort that data is being properly managed and retained and that the policies can be easily audited.

Another set of efficiencies resulting from the single Simpana information management platform manifests in the storage process. Data is deduplicated globally across both data protection and archive functions, reducing the amount of information that needs to be physically stored. The capacity-reduction benefit is obvious, but it may be unappreciated in terms of what it means for deletion purposes. Once all retention policies for a file have expired, the content can be deleted. There is no risk that another copy of that file resides elsewhere in archive or in the data protection environment.

Companies will undoubtedly need CommVault’s storage resource management capabilities as both primary and archive environments get larger. Right now, IT departments do undertake some form of resource management, trying to figure out what type of data they have, where it is, and when it was last accessed. Such an exercise is extremely helpful to optimize storage. Simpana software allows customers to take the next step and archive data after the resource management analysis has been done.

IT is also able to leverage the product’s resource management capability—analyzing data managed by Simpana software to determine if they should shift some data to a lower-cost storage platform or delete it because the retention policy expired but customers configured the system to “not automatically delete.” Having direct insight into the archive enables customers to manage it intelligently from a single console while taking advantage of a heterogeneous storage hardware environment.

Simpana OnePass represents an even greater level of data management function convergence. From a single scan across the file system, customers can perform backup, archive, and reporting functions without redundant operations affecting resources. Multiple agents installed on file servers and multiple file scans supporting these processes are not needed. This is an example of an ideal future-friendly feature. File capacity is growing exponentially, and scale-out systems (file systems spanning multiple physical devices) are more common. Moving data once, customers can eliminate redundant process and reduce the frequency in which these large quantities of data have to be analyzed in order to be properly managed.

Extensible Archive Access

Simpana software’s archive capture techniques leverage unique integration points such as SharePoint Blob Storage from Microsoft. It enables archive data to be accessed from within the application in which it is created, minimizing the need for end-users to go to separate environment to initiate a retrieval. This type of access is possible via Object-Based Retention, a feature within Simpana software that facilitates intelligent stubbing. A link (stub) is left in the primary application environment, yet the data is stored centrally. Users enjoy a native access experience, and retention policies can be applied in a single location.

It is also much easier to delete content after retention requirements expire. And the operation can be executed with confidence that no other copies exist. The resulting benefit: Both IT and end-user productivity are boosted.

Companies will find that the extremely sophisticated search engine within Simpana software—supporting both auto-classification and manual tagging/classification of data—will be of great benefit to attorneys and compliance officers. Today, they have to search large volumes of data specific to a topic, and they need it to be organized in order to make critical legal/compliance decisions. It will also be very useful for employees in future years who are looking for that “needle in a haystack” without even knowing where to start their searches.

With role-based access to search, companies can set up any number of secure roles with unique permissions. Employees can search their own data across backup and archives. Legal can search all content. In the future, organizations may want to create roles for partners or outside counsel or other external constituents. Today, this may seem like a strange concept. But keep in mind that requirements are going to evolve. In addition to defining access, Simpana software supports retrievals without IT intervention, speeding-up “time to information.” IT gets tapped to set up the roles, but that is far less of a burden than servicing backup/restore requests and old-style daily data retrieval requests.

Simpana software has planned support to allow access to managed data via mobile devices running on the Windows, iOS, and Android platforms. The benefit of that capability is self-explanatory. Empowering a distributed workforce is key to productivity because archive is becoming a business-reference, quasi-business-intelligence application for many. Access from anywhere is crucial to keeping knowledge workers connected to information.

The Bigger Truth

When IT application infrastructures are overloaded with data, or when records managers need to extend retention requirements to a new digital data source, or when attorneys have to quickly search and preserve data for a “make or break” case, it is very hard to think about anything but the problem at hand, which can be solved by an archive solution.

Unfortunately, a hastily made technology purchase may not adequately address the next retention fire drill. Or, when IT departments evaluate financial and operational resource allocations for the upcoming year, they may realize how expensive a tactical archive decision really is, whether it involves using an aged backup process or an non-scalable purpose-built solution. These realizations are exacerbated by the longevity of the information-retention process and the market drivers that evolve over that time frame.

It is time for organizations to start to strategically evaluate archive solutions for capabilities they need now and feature sets that are likely to address to future needs. It is hard to predict the future. But as an industry, we already do know some things about archiving. Clearly, it is wise to focus investments on platforms with value, ones that have:

A history of supporting new content types
A plethora of storage options including cloud
Access capabilities that are prepared to organize large quantities of data
An ability to reduce IT management needs

CommVault is well positioned to meet these needs and, while no technology solution is future proof, Simpana software can make customers “future ready.” Even if an organization doesn’t need all the capabilities Simpana software has to offer (which are far too substantial to cover in one paper), they should consider ones that may be useful and beneficial to them down the line.

[1] Source: ESG Research Report, Digital Archive Market Forecast 2010-2015, July 2010.

Lab Review: CommVault Simpana 9 “OnePass” Including Integration with HP X9000 Scale-out NAS

Jason Buffington — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:39 +0000

This ESG Lab Review documents hands-on testing of Simpana 9 software from CommVault, specifically its “OnePass” data change gathering and retention mechanisms as well as its integration with HP X9000 (IBRIX) scale-out NAS.

The Challenges

Companies of all sizes continue to struggle with the various aspects of data protection. A great deal of attention is paid to solving not only traditional backup/restore, but also adding archiving and storage resource management to their infrastructures. Along with improving backups of virtualization platforms, laptops, and key workloads, ESG research[1] found that IT end-users planning to implement new data protection initiatives had other goals as well:

19% plan to implement data archiving
19% plan to implement data deduplication
18% plan to re-architect their backup processes
13% plan to implement reporting of backup/storage

Users attempting to address diverse backup, archive, and reporting needs often employ technologies from multiple vendors—each with their own agent technologies on individual production servers, as well as their own server back-ends and management interfaces. Each point solution performs its own operations on every production server, including traversing the disk, consuming memory/CPU cycles, and contributing to network traffic.

The Solution: CommVault Simpana 9.0 with “OnePass”

CommVault customers running Simpana software have already learned to appreciate something better than a myriad of point solutions. Simpana software’s common platform delivers backup, archive, search and storage resource management administered from a single console. While built on a single software code base, Simpana software modules have previously utilized separate processes and index databases to run archive jobs, followed by backup and, finally, reporting.

Throughout 2011, CommVault regularly added incremental features to its Simpana 9.0 platform—one of which is a new operating methodology referred to as “OnePass,” which enables backup, archiving, and analytical reporting from a single traversal of the file system. By only reading and/or moving data once, redundant backup, archive, and reporting processes are eliminated to speed operations, reduce storage costs, and simplify management.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested the new OnePass functionality at a shared CommVault and HP test facility located in Denver, Colorado. The ESG Lab test bed consisted of a typical Simpana software configuration of one CommServe and two MediaAgents, each configured to protect three HP X9720 scale-out NAS nodes sharing a single file system, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The ESG Lab Test Bed: CommVault and HP Scale-out NAS

The test bed was provided by HP to assess Simpana 9.0’s ability to protect a high-volume of unstructured data.

ESG Lab investigated how CommVault consolidated data protection methodologies using the OnePass architecture. The left side of Figure 2 shows the typical IO patterns of three related data management workflows, including traditional backup, file-archival for reducing disk consumption, and reporting services. The right side of Figure 2 shows the combined workflow of the OnePass-enabled agent in Simpana 9.0.

Figure 2. Comparing Three Traditional Data Protection Workflows to “OnePass” within CommVault Simpana 9.0

Figure 2 shows how “OnePass” traverses the production storage only once, thereby eliminating significant IO redundancies on the primary server, which should dramatically reduce backup windows and the IO penalties associated with data protection and management tasks.

In a traditional environment using three data management tools, ideally with some level of integration or at least reporting, one might:

Perform a traditional backup for data recoverability using traditional incremental methods.
After the backup is complete and therefore recoverable (just in case), determine if any files are candidates for archive (hierarchical) management. These files should be “stubbed” to save space, meaning that the original file is replaced with a “stub” pointer referring back to the original file held in near-line storage. This ensures that the actual contents are able to be retrieved transparently when the file is accessed.
With the backup finished and the appropriate files migrated to near-line storage, update the reporting system for usage and capacity.

In the case of Simpana OnePass functionality, the operating methodology is similar … yet optimized:

The agent conducts a backup of changed files.
With the backup changes successfully committed on the media server, the same agent then assesses the files as candidates for archival, and, if so, stubs the file.

No additional file system traversal is necessary because it was done during the backup.
No additional disk “read” or network “send” operations are performed during stubbing, as would be required by a separate archival product. The archival process knows that the backup process already read the file and sent it during the backup operation—so it already exists within the Simpana unified storage pool.
Either way, the archival routines within the OnePass agent simply perform the stubbing operation of replacing the actual file with a stub—after which the file-system driver will handle retrieval requests in case the file is accessed.

With the backup complete and the appropriate files archived, the reporting mechanism updates its information. Again, this occurs without any incremental disk traversal or network operations because Simpana OnePass uses a common index and reporting mechanism from a single collection.

ESG Lab tested the unified OnePass operating model by first conducting separate backups, archives, and report generation using Simpana 9.0 without the OnePass methodology at work. The files were spread across six nodes of an HP NAS and were backed up in parallel by one of the two Simpana media server nodes seen in Figure 1. After the initial testing, ESG Lab audited the results of a similar prolonged test provided by CommVault.

ESG Lab found that the overall backup time was reduced anywhere from 30% to 200% based on three key factors: data types and sizes, amount of redundancy among stored files (e.g., versioning), and archival retention settings that will vary by company. At the low end, even a 30% time savings may mean the difference between compliance with backup window SLAs or not. At the high end, the incremental nature of these backup processes, coupled with nearly transparent archival and SRM functionality, may make the entire backup tax nearly vanish for some production environments.

While less quantifiable, ESG Lab noted that by 1) only traversing the file system once, and 2) offloading the analysis processes to the Simpana MediaServer seen in Figure 2, an appreciable amount of disk IO and CPU processing should be relieved from the production server(s). This means that the production platforms should spend far fewer resources on data protection/management, reserving resulting in more IO and CPU for production purposes.

ESG Lab was impressed by how simple the process was to enable OnePass for Simpana customers. As is typical, the actual agent software components are upgradable through either a push from the Simpana administration console or an .MSI through the customer’s typical software deployment tool. The software can be deployed at any point even if the OnePass functionality is not immediately enabled.

Figure 3 shows how enabling the Archive or SRM reporting functions within the unified agent (i.e., enabling “OnePass”) is simply a matter of two checkboxes within the backup configuration in the Simpana administration console.

Figure 3. Enabling “OnePass” via Two Checkboxes within the Simpana File System Agent

Why This Matters

Most IT professionals instinctively hope for a unified data protection approach. Historically, they looked for a single backup solution that protected the range of devices in their environments. With continually growing data sets, systems are often becoming “too big” to back up with traditional methods, so solutions for archival and reporting are becoming equally sought after. And while those are good goals, the reality of running at least three different data protection, retention, and analysis agents and processes on a production server is highly undesirable if it means managing multiple tools, supporting many agents, and continually switching between tools due to various financial, environmental, or workload-specific constraints.

ESG Lab found that, with its most recent innovations in the 9.0 Simpana platform (which could arguably be called R2), CommVault seems to have achieved something that most suite-based or pseudo-integrated platform products strive for and that so many backup administrators with multiple products have longed for: not just interoperability across data protection and management processes, but actual unification with a single agent per production platform, running truly combined processes to reduce its disk/network/CPU footprint while still accomplishing multiple protection and management goals.

Simpana Archive Integration with Scale-out NAS

“OnePass” is not the only innovation recently delivered for the Simpana 9.0 customer base. Along with backing up large file systems, CommVault now also offers its archival capabilities as the near-line extension of scale-out NAS platforms, including the HP X9000 (IBRIX) product family.

By integrating the Simpana software’s archival ability with scale-out NAS, CommVault software is able to offer an additional tier of near‑line storage, enabling organizations to leverage a wider range of storage options at a better price point.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab initially treated the HP X9720 platforms as the production server farm being backed up by Simpana. By reconfiguring the test environment, ESG Lab was also able to test Simpana archival storage as a near-line expansion of a scale-out NAS appliance.

Figure 4 shows the reconfigured test bed with the production NAS being archived by the recent enhancements in Simpana 9.0, using the HP X9000 (IBRIX) platforms as a recent example.

Figure 4. Using Simpana software’s Archive as Near-Line Extended Storage for Scale-out NAS

In Figure 4, files accessed from the X9000 platforms can be either taken from their own storage pool or transparently retrieved from the Simpana Archive. While the user “sees” all files just as they would expect to within the NAS, those files may be within the primary storage of the scale-out file system or within the Simpana archival storage pool (using any storage that Simpana software supports).

While some NAS vendors provide their own “archival” capabilities through storage tiering and near-line capacity, it doesn’t always align with the “unified” data protection benefits described above unless 1) backup and reporting are also performed within the NAS/SAN and 2) the NAS/SAN platform is common across the entire corporate environment. Using a software-based approach, customers may be able to leverage the unified data protection/management capabilities of CommVault software across a wide variety of production servers and NAS platforms consistently—and as a complement to any data management functions that may be offered by the NAS itself.

ESG Lab tested this by enabling the Simpana Linux file server agent on each of the HP X9000 NAS nodes. While many data management products purportedly present challenges when integrating with IBRIX platforms, CommVault is able to use its standard agent with the addition of a registry key on each IBRIX node.

After enabling the agent, ESG Lab tested the user experience by defining archival policies within Simpana software for various files and then retrieving them from an NFS client workstation.

Figure 5 shows two files used during testing of the archive integration with scale-out NAS:

The top file listing shows the files were originally 100 MB.
The left statistic reveals each file consumes 102,512 KB.
The right statistic reports each file’s size as 104,857,600 bytes in the directory listing.
The middle of the screen reveals that the files were stubbed after archive—consuming only 20 KB each within the NAS, while still displaying 100 MB in the directory listing.
The last file listing shows that after accessing one of the files, it has been retrieved and thus consumes its regular capacity within the NAS while the other file remains archived until first access.

Figure 5. NFS Client’s Experience in Retrieving Files from an Archive-Enabled NAS

Note, that while Figure 5 shows the attributes from an NFS perspective, Windows (CIFS) users would have a similar experience where the actual consumption size is masked and the user perception is all files being offered and stored on the HP NAS.

After enabling archival, ESG Lab configured recurring jobs to enable migration of data from the shared file system within the six IBRIX nodes to the Simpana ContentStore. Files that have been migrated will be returned to make file requests from a client workstation accessing the NFS shares on the X9000. ESG Lab observed no appreciable lag in performance or changes in the users’ experience as file requests were routed to the Simpana platform and transparently retrieved from the CommVault software-powered archive.

Why This Matters

ESG research[2] shows that scale-out NAS is no longer just for extreme usage scenarios; it is becoming more and more mainstream. And while platforms like the HP X9000 (IBRIX) offer significant storage performance, they sometimes require proprietary data protection methods and often lack the extensibility to be protected by more typical third-party software solutions. CommVault and HP/IBRIX have partnered in such a way that a simple registry key enablethe Simpana archive capability.

By combining the archive (and backup) capabilities of Simpana with the scale-out NAS functionality of HP’s X9000 series, CommVault customers can not only achieve their performance goals for NAS, but do so while managing costs and capacity through Simpana software’s archive ability.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

ESG Lab examined and tested the combined methodology of “OnePass” with appreciably reduced overall data protection jobs, as well as reduced impact to the production servers due to the consolidated network and disk operations of “OnePass.”
ESG Lab observed how easy it was to enable Simpana software as an archive to a scale-out NAS, without perceivable changes to the end-users’ experience.

Issues to Consider

ESG Lab found that while it would be easy for an experienced Simpana operator to add the OnePass functionality to their environment, the Simpana administration console may appear complex to someone new. This is a reasonable result of a very mature ninth-generation codebase that continually adds new features and options based on feedback from over 15,000 customers.[3] Those considering converting to Simpana for its OnePass functionality, its other workload-specific capabilities, or its ability to provide an archival store for scale-out NAS should be prepared for a learning curve which can be offset by training.
While the HP X9000 is just one of the scale-out NAS platforms supported by the Simpana software archival function, customers will want to ensure that their specific platform is currently covered. With CommVault routinely producing updates and incremental functionality, those not directly supported today may be supported later in 2012.

The Bigger Truth

Most environments struggle with a myriad of data protection and management technologies, perhaps because of workload-specific requirements, data center solutions that are less ideal in remote offices, or simply different data management goals (e.g., backup, archive, and reporting). For many, the sentiment has often been “If there was a unified solution that did everything well, then we would all own it already.” For others, the potential interoperability of suite-based software or simply complementary products from the same vendor have left customers disappointed as they discovered that each product operates as if it were the only tool that matters.

By simply enabling the “OnePass” capabilities within Simpana 9.0, CommVault customers can enjoy something that many others should find very enviable: a single agent that backs up, archives, and reports on each production server, with only one network stream and significantly optimized disk-IO impact. The result is something that appears so intuitive that it should be the measure by which other unified products aspire—where functions/technologies may have originally been developed or even acquired separately, but eventually become folded into a single agent talking to a unified back end.

Along with observing the before and after effects of “OnePass,” ESG Lab also tested integration of the archival capabilities of Simpana software with scale-out NAS, showing an appreciable benefit to customers with applicable platforms. Without changing the client experience or installing client-side software, even the most advanced NAS platforms can take advantage of an additional tier of storage through the near-line capabilities of Simpana.

If you are currently using a variety of data and management technologies for different purposes and have been disappointed by the lack of integration or coexistence supportability, then Simpana may be exactly what you have been looking for. While individual test results will vary, the fact that common disk reads and network operations are unified should be a valuable optimization method that all environments can take advantage of. Looking at the unified workflow of Simpana software’s OnePass methodology should make you ask, “Why doesn’t everyone do it like that?”

[1] Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 Data Protection Trends, April 2010.

[2] See: ESG Research Report, Scale-Out Storage Market Forecast 2010-2015, December 2010.

[3] CommVault press release, November 2011

ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about emerging technologies and products in the storage, data management and information security industries. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab’s expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by CommVault.

When shopping for a ‘big data’ analytics platform, talk the talk

cwhitehouse — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:07:50 +0000

The term big data is typically defined as data multiplying in volume, velocity and variety. According to new research by the Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group, big data analytics platforms are mimicking that definition: Vendor product releases are growing in number, product enhancements are multiplying rapidly and a variety of deployment options are now available.

Julie Lockner, a senior analyst at ESG and author of the firm’s Big Data Analytics Platforms, said businesses are asking how they can integrate big data technology into their architecture — especially as it becomes more affordable and scalable — but they don’t always understand what their options are.

via When shopping for a ‘big data’ analytics platform, talk the talk.

Summation Aims for a Second Act

Katey Wood — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:44 +0000

After 25 years in the market, AccessData has put its acquired review tool, Summation, on steroids in the hope of locking in its market leadership.

Overview

AccessData is reintroducing an industry classic—Summation—to its traditional and loyal attorney-review customer base, and, it hopes, to a new generation of customers looking for integrated functionality and improved usability. Summation has been streamlined, made more intuitive and user-friendly, and enhanced with integration to a powerful processing engine: AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit (FTK).
Summation is offered in three new configurations that are distinguished by capacity rather than features.
Summation, in its new guise, seems to offer strong price-performance benefits and a compelling integration story with AccessData’s in-house e-discovery platform.

What’s Old Is New

Long a favorite because of its client-driven development, Summation suffered from a lack of R&D through several acquisitions. Although highly functional, its complex user interface obscured some of its capabilities. That complexity created a love/hate relationship among users, who will appreciate the overdue overhaul. Besides better usability, Summation boasts new front-end processing and early case assessment (ECA) at a flat subscription rate with no per-gigabyte rate.

AccessData hopes this will help Summation regain footing against long-time rival Concordance (now under LexisNexis) and kCura’s Relativity—a product that leapfrogged both historic market titans in recent years through an aggressive channel strategy, agile development, and an emphasis on high usability. Roadmap integration with AccessData’s in-house e-discovery platform aims to result in an end-to-end stack to rival established enterprise platform players as well.

Release Details

Technology

The redesigned Summation has new ECA functionality, including integrated front-end processing with more comprehensive final review and production features. New web-based deployment parallels the capabilities offered with AccessData’s iBlaze and WebBlaze, including an offline feature that automatically updates to the network case once a user rejoins (much like an Outlook PST).

Until now, Summation did not have a robust forensic processing capability built in, although it could be used with several of AccessData’s products. The new Summation has been upgraded with built-in processing from AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit. FTK is recognized as a standard in computer forensics software. It provides massive processing scalability, works with more than 700 data types, and offers many modifiable processing options.

New ECA includes search with real-time status, filtering, threading, and dedupe. Summation now includes what AccessData calls 4D search, namely: indexing , filtering, and keyword searching on filtered data sets, then on column-level Excel-like filters “at the top” to reveal every value in the columns.

Classic Summation functionality such as transcript management remains. But it now resides on a completely rewritten code base with a more efficient, modern, and intuitive Silverlight interface. The company stresses that the focus of the recode was not simply on modernizing, but also on leveraging 25 years of user-focused development to make the functionality more accessible.

Summation features include:

Handling for process data (dedupe, index, expand, archive, and optical character recognition).
Filtering, tagging, and culling for effective first-pass review.
Export to industry-standard load files (Concordance, iCONECT, Introspect, Relativity, Ringtail, Summation DII, and Electronic Discovery Reference Model XML).
Advanced search and analysis for legal review.
Transcript support and production sets.
Mobile and offline capability.
Processing features, including the ability to import custodian evidence; modifiable processing options (OCR deduplication, and deNISTing); integrated near-dupe and e-mail threading; and reporting of processing, deduplication, export, and search with real-time status.
An interface that includes a new tagging and coding palette, which is customizable depending on permissions. This feature is both movable and dockable. Preconfigured layouts are available, or layouts can be easily customized.
New reporting dashboard to track jobs and progress.

In 2012 (targeting Q2), the company also envisions adding predictive coding based on internal proprietary development. In addition, look for more advanced review features, such as concept clustering and data visualization.

Product Line

The revamped Summation product line includes three versions. Unlike so many software offerings, they are not differentiated by features; all have the same basic capabilities. Instead, licensing is based on the volume of cases and data. For example:

Entry-level Summation Solo is targeted with a low price point primarily to single academic users and has a limit of 15,000 documents per case.
Summation Express is targeted at smaller teams with moderate data storage and handling requirements.
Summation Pro is targeted at the largest legal organizations and cases and can scale as needed, including scalable ECA. Summation Pro is also aimed at service providers with massive processing requirements and many CPUs.

Summation will be previewed publicly starting February 2012, and will be generally available soon afterward. Pricing is yet to be released. As a concomitant to the rework of Summation, AccessData plans to curtail further development of iBlaze, Summation Enterprise, and Summation CaseVantage. However, the company says it plans to support those products “indefinitely.”

Broader AccessData Integration

Still on the roadmap is full integration with the AccessData platform, including increased support of other DBMS systems. (Summation is now built on SQL.) The company aims to offer a modular system fully integrated in the AccessData product suite, but “database agnostic” with export at any phase of the process to play well with others.

With the addition of AccessData Early Case Assessment (AD ECA) in Q3 2011, the company now has three options in its e-discovery toolbelt.

AD eDiscovery, its in-house enterprise platform, covers identification through processing on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, with ECA, analysis, and export to further review.
AD ECA performs processing, ECA, and export of pre-collected data.
Summation performs processing, review, and production, with ECA capabilities.

Market Analysis

Competitive Context

AccessData acquired e-discovery vendor CT Summation from Wolters Kluwer in July 2010, with the aim of offering a fully integrated enterprise review stack. The purchase added Discovery Cracker processing and Summation’s review and production to AccessData’s existing FTK forensic technology and enterprise e-discovery platform. The company claims 300,000 customers overall (inclusive of forensics and Summation customers), and 60% of the Am Law 200 using Summation.

AccessData is well-known for its popularity with forensics experts and law enforcement due to its proprietary FTK Imager. The company introduced e-discovery and cybersecurity platforms in recent years as well. That effort is happening in parallel with that of archrival Guidance Software, which owns the popular EnCase image format and accompanying e-discovery and cybersecurity products aimed at the enterprise. Other competing e-discovery platforms for collection through data export or review include Autonomy, Clearwell Systems (now owned by Symantec), EMC SourceOne eDiscovery-Kazeon, Nuix, Recommind Axcelerate, StoredIQ, and ZyLAB.

On the review-tool side, Summation from AccessData competes for legal-sector sales against long-time rival Concordance (owned by LexisNexis). Both Summation and Concordance lost traction in recent years, first to iCONECT for web deployment, then to comparative newcomer Relativity from kCura, which boasts agile development for superior usability and a large indirect channel through service providers such as the Big 4 accounting firms, Applied Discovery, EPIQ Systems, Fios, RenewData, and dozens of others. Thomson Reuters’ 2010 purchase of CaseLogistix for its West Notebook could provide additional competition, as could Kroll’s introduction of SaaS-based option Verve for attorney DIY. Still, the old favorites maintain strong traction in desktop sales to small law practitioners—whom these vendors would like to upgrade.

Other review tools at varying price points and functionality include Autonomy Introspect, Catalyst, CaseCentral, FTI’s Ringtail, IPRO Tech, and Recommind Axcelerate. Service providers with proprietary tools of their own include Applied Discovery, EPIQ Systems, FTI, Kroll Ontrack, RenewData, Stroz Friedberg, and Xerox Litigation Services.

The Bigger Truth

Through several acquisitions, Summation has survived because of its early commitment to customer-driven development and the strong loyalty that commitment produced. AccessData has carefully distilled its strengths with long-overdue updates reflecting the shifting nature of the legal sector, specifically, the importance of the web and mobility, front-end processing and compatibility, commoditization of processing fees, and the influence of the enterprise and in-house use.

Executing beyond Summation’s existing loyal base will require the ability to out-maneuver titans of both the legal and enterprise e-discovery spheres: LexisNexis, Thomson-Reuters West, Clearwell-Symantec, EMC-Kazeon, Guidance Software, and, increasingly, Relativity. With a compelling price point, improved usability, front-end processing, and evolving platform integration, Summation is ready to be back in the game.

LegalTech 2012: The Eagle Has Landed

Katey Wood — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:33 +0000

A few of today’s releases (and some I missed!) for LegalTech 2012. Believe it or not, the best is (still) “yet to come.” …Think bigger!

Software

AD Summation upguns Summation with scalable ECA and new front-end processing from AccessData’s FTK engine, full AccessData integration and predictive coding on the roadmap–see our brief today for details.
BIA’s Cloud-based collection from TotalDiscovery.com adds support for iPhones and iPads, and social media.
Equivio, long an OEM-provider to other tools, releases its own unified Zoom platform for predictive coding and e-mail analytics.
iConect releases its HTML5-based Xera platform for better collaboration with support for iPad.
kCura releases Relativity 7.3 with native application-based imaging, Review Manager, a reporting dashboard application for forecasting the time and cost of review, an App Store, and, of course, Relativity Assisted Review, released last year for automated review.
Venio releases FPR 3.5 with statistical sampling.

Service providers

Daegis replaces DocHunter’s database for cross-matter management, adds support for Lotus Notes.
Integreon’s eView 4.0 adds predictive coding.
Orange Legal Technologies announces integration with OrcaTec’s predictive coding.
RenewData‘s RDC Analytics debuts its content analytics consulting offering, leveraging language experts and a large analytics toolbelt to tackle big data problems.
TCDI ‘s CV5 review and production software lets users automate and customize workflow.

See you at the show!!!

www.iconect.com/home.asp

Second Wave of E-Discovery Products Targets LegalTech

cwhitehouse — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:51:57 +0000

Overall, there will be several major discovery themes at the show, including the debate between on-premise software and its cloud-based cousins, how to collect data from cloud systems, usability, and product compatibility plus integration, Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Katey Wood wrote in her Information Asymmetry blog Thursday.

“Consider your requirements carefully and arm yourself with information in exploring options, before and after the show,” Wood noted.

via Second Wave of E-Discovery Products Targets LegalTech.