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NTP Software News & Events |
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NTP Software has announced a new product - NTP Software ODA™. This product provides Quota-Driven™ and User-Driven Archiving™ for Symantec Enterprise Vault™.
Click here to see the press release, and
Click here for more information on the product. Also read this edition's main article to understand the critical need this product addresses.
To build a bridge for Symantec's existing customers, NTP Software has created a migration utility that can automate the movement of policies from Symantec Storage Exec to NTP Software QFS®.
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Industry News |
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HP, IBM, EMC are proposing an encryption key management standard. The collaborating vendors would like to see their proposal become an industry-wide standard by the end of 2009. If adopted, it would mean users could attach almost any encrypting device to one preferred key management system, regardless of the vendors involved.
Click here for the article. |
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Tech Tidbits |
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NetworkWorld has an interesting article about how nanotechnology researchers say they have achieved a breakthrough that could fit the contents of 250 DVDs on a coin-sized surface.
Click here to view the article
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Patrick Hynds
Sr. Storage Architect, NTP Software |
Archiving is something that most organizations want to do to help maintain the heath of their storage environment. The problem is that like so many things in life it is often difficult to know exactly how to approach this venture.
Part of the problem is that since archiving is supposed to save us money in the long run, you have to make sure your decisions don't wipe out that efficiency and cost savings. As it turns out, all archiving solutions that are currently available have three cost elements - the cost of determining what to move, the cost of actually moving the selected data, and the cost of maintaining the archive once things have been moved.
Each of these costs is proportional to the amount of data involved in the process. The analysts tell us that first and last items in our list dominate the cost equation. In conventional archiving methods, the actual cost of moving the data is relatively small compared to the cost of finding what to move and maintaining it in the archive. To manage cost-effectively, it becomes important to go where the money is and to attack the cost of finding what to move as well as trying to reduce the amount of data that ends up in the archive.
Conventional archiving methods typically use an expensive strategy to determine which files should be moved. Specifically, they regularly scan the entirety of primary storage to find files that meet one or more simple criteria. If the file meets the criteria, it gets moved.
The problem with this is that the user organization is paying the same cost over and over again to repeatedly scan the same files and perhaps move very few of them. In addition, as primary storage grows over time, the cost of this repetitive scanning grows proportionately.
It is user activity that drives the need for archiving, not the passage of time. To improve on the conventional archiving method, what is needed is to integrate storage policies, user actions, and archiving.
To achieve this goal effectively your storage policy engine, such as NTP Software QFS® (file blocking, disk quotas, etc.), needs to be integrated with an archiving solution such as Symantec Enterprise Vault™.
For example when a user reaches their disk quota, you may want to automatically initiate archiving based on a predetermined policy for that user activity, or you may want to notify the user to take some action that results in archiving.
Here at NTP Software we have known about this critical need for a some time and have decided to weigh in with a solution to do something about it. The result is NTP Software ODA™, which provides for On-demand Archiving™ and encompasses the following:
Quota-Driven Archiving™ - real-time, policy-based quota policies archiving to Symantec Enterprise Vault based on critical areas of storage growth. These quota-driven policies allow for hands-off automation at an extremely granular level - down to the folder or even file level.
User-Driven Archiving™ - engages the end user in storage cleanup via archiving. Users can make archiving decisions based on the business value of the data. By connecting users to the process, they can add value and understand what's happening to their data and why.
Given the growth of storage, new approaches to archiving are needed. ODA™ is a creative and practical approach to addressing the critical needs of archiving in today's storage environments. In future columns we will discuss ODA™ further and help you understand how it can help reduce your costs and make your life easier.
To learn more
click here.
Suggest a topic for future editions of this newsletter. Email us at newsletter@ntpsoftware.com and let us know. |
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