[data fragments]

Zukunftsperspektiven des Datenmanagements

Dieses Bild erscheint, wenn man ausgerechnet diesen Link in einem NetApp-Newsletter anklickt:

"Das White Paper ''Zukunftsperspektiven des Datenmanagements'' diskutiert in einem Modellentwurf die Weiterentwicklung von Datenspeicherlösungen in den nächsten 20 Jahren und darüber hinaus.
http://communications.netapp.com/W0RT01237A179E47E4AD42B065D7D0"

The Top 10 Storage Inventions of All Time

The List:

* 1) The Fibre Channel SAN
* 2) RAID
* 3) Magnetic Tape
* 4) Robotic Tape Libraries
* 5) Virtual Tape Libraries
* 6) NAS
* 7) Solid State Disks
* 8) Data De-Duplication
* 9) MAID
* 10) Snapshotting

[more in Byte and Switch]

HP Duplicates Deduplication

"Like EMC, HP is offering different deduplication products to different backup markets, with a post-processing Virtual Library System (VLS), based on Sepaton's DeltaStor technology, and inline processing D2D systems for small and medium enterprises.

Deduplication strips out redundant data from files at the sub-file level. HP isclaiming it can provide a reduction in backup file size of up to 50:1; pretty ambitious. It assumes a standard business data mix and actual results will vary with data type, backup methodology and the length of time data is retained.
Inline deduplication is applied directly to incoming data. Post-processing deduplication is applied after incoming data from a backup run has finished arriving.

Dave Russell, a Gartner VP, said: “Deduplication technology is poised to transform the backup and recovery marketplace.”

HP's StorageWorks D2D 2500 and 4500 Backup Systems emulate up to 16 LTO tape autoloaders or libraries and can consolidate backup of up to 16 servers onto a single network-connected, disk-to-disk (D2D) device. These are not virtual tape library systems. They deduplicate data, using in-house HP Labs deduplication technology, inline, as backup data is ingested. HP calls this Dynamic Deduplication and notes that disk space is saved as no capacity needs to be set aside to hold incoming raw backup data."

[source: here]

Die Krise der Archivierung

searchstorage.de hat am 29. Januar mein Interview mit Michael Peterson zur Krise der Archivierung veröffentlicht:

"Michael Peterson, Präsident der Strategic Research Corporation und führendes Mitglied des SNIA Data Management Forum, sieht eine Archivierungskrise heraufziehen, wenn sich Unternehmen nicht ernsthaft um die organisatorischen und technischen Herausforderungen einer langfristigen Datenspeicherung kümmern. Es drohe ein Datenverlust, der nicht nur Unternehmen tangieren wird, sondern zu einem Verlust des kollektiven und gesellschaftlichen Gedächtnisses führen kann."

[more: here]

EMC includes Solid State Drives (SSD) into product portfolio

EMC press release from yesterday:

"HOPKINTON, Mass. – January 14, 2008 – EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today became the first enterprise storage vendor to integrate flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) into its core product portfolio. Solid state flash drives utilize flash memory to store and retrieve data, yielding response times that are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest hard disk drives and require dramatically less power to run. The EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system is the only enterprise storage system available on the market today to leverage this technology, which has been tested by EMC for the past year, to deliver ultra-high performance for mission-critical applications.

The flash drives for the Symmetrix DMX-4 system have been purpose built to EMC’s exacting specifications and use single-layer cell (SLC) flash technology combined with sophisticated controllers to achieve ultra fast read/write performance, high reliability and data integrity."

Writes analyst Fred Moore today about "A brief history of solid state disks":

"STK introduced the first solid state disk (SSD), the 4305, in 1978 at $8,800/MB - that's $8.8M/GB with an initial capacity of 45MB and then 90MB a year later with an access time of .6ms. Memorex, Intel and Hitachi also had SSDs. IBM's announcement of Expanded Storage all but killed SSD in 1985. This was the reason that IBM always said it would never do an SSD. Imperial and a few others kept the industry alive with small SSDs for Unix & Windows but they could never make it over a $20M/year business and spent nothing on marketing.

The Flash SSDs are one of the new and exciting products in the industry now. Flash has the same read time as a DRAM SSD at .02 ms today but the slow writes take 4-5ms compared to .02ms writes on DRAM SSDs. Prices for Flash SSDs are $25-$200/GB compared to $600-$800/GB for DRAM SSDs. A common analyst metrics error is to measure disk and SSD devices as if both are a capacity play. Disks should be measured on $/GB(capacity) and SSDs should be measured on $/IOPs (performance).

Action Item: EMC's announcement incorporating flash drive technology represents the possible resurgence of SSD in high end disk systems and will likely have ripple effects throughout the industry. Users should understand the benefits of the technology and apply it where appropriate. Comparisons with conventional disks are simple but not meaningful as value for performance (not value for capacity) is the key to understanding the benefits of SSD."

Storage Networking World in Dallas 2007

Gestern hat searchstorage.de meinen längeren Beitrag zur SNW in Dallas veröffentlicht: more here

Auszug: "Business und Spiele

Veranstaltungen wie die SNW USA oder viele Anwendertreffen der großen Hersteller finden in den USA fast immer in riesigen, ruhig gelegenen Kongresszentren mit angeschlossenem Fünfsterne-Hotel statt. Man muss während der Kongresstage das Gelände kaum verlassen, und Golfplätze finden sich meist in unmittelbarer Nähe. Diese Abgeschiedenheit hat mehrere Vorteile: Organisatoren, Besucher und Aussteller beziehungsweise deren Mitarbeiter hocken tagelang auf einem Haufen zusammen, alles ist zu Fuß erreichbar, zwischen den Vorträgen kann man mal eben auf sein Zimmer verschwinden und seine Mails erledigen.

Für das Networking zwischen den Beteiligten sorgen mehrere Abendveranstaltungen und Galadinner. Es herrscht insgesamt eine lässige Atmosphäre – mit Sakko, Anzug oder gar Krawatte laufen allenfalls die CEOs der Aussteller und Sponsoren herum, ansonsten ist jeden Tag „Casual Friday“. Sogar beim Galadinner zieht jeder an, was ihm gefällt. Insgesamt eine angenehme Atmosphäre, verglichen mit dem zwanghaften „Business-Charakter“ deutscher Kongresse oder Messen."

SMI-S: The Never Ending Story

A standard that leaves out the good stuff?

Bruce Hoard / Computerworld [Updated: 25 Oct 2007]

"A specification meant to bring together storage device management under one umbrella instead continues to be criticized for its innate inability to enable interoperable functionality.

The Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) is a lightning rod for controversy among both its supporters and detractors. It has been approved by the ISO international standards organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as a standard for interoperable storage management technologies. Yet detractors say SMI-S was overhyped and will never fulfill its original promise of integrating storage device management across the industry. Supporters continue to say SMI-S is opening storage resource management (SRM) doors that were previously locked by proprietary vendors.

SMI-S, now in Version 1.02, grew out of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI), which was created by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) in 2002. SMI-S is criticized for not being more open to smaller SRM vendors and failing to help end user IT organizations establish centralized control over their heterogeneous storage infrastructures because larger vendors will not port the most sophisticated application programming interfaces (API) to the standard's framework.

That criticism is countered by SNIA and many large members of the vendor trade group who say that even though SMI-S implementations have lagged behind the rapidly evolving standard, both vendors and users are benefiting from it.

The basic concept behind SMI-S is simple: Vendors translate product specifications into XML code for their specific storage management software, which creates a universal API that can be accessed by any other SMI-S-compatible products. SNIA says that about 450 products from 30 vendors have so far passed the SNIA Conformance Testing Program for SMI-S. Product types include storage networking components (such as arrays, switches and host bus adapters) and their associated management software, as well as client software.

Slowing down the development process?

Marty LeFebvre, Nielsen Media Research's vice president of technology and a member of the SNIA End-User Council governing board, says the problem with SMI-S is broad and one of vendor reluctance for interoperability.

"There's a certain amount of feeling among end users that if we had a more direct conduit to [vendor] product managers, we might be able to make more progress toward that," he says. "But part of it also is [that] instead of each vendor trying to solve the whole thing front to back, if there was a little of collaboration to where individual vendors could solve a pieces of it and then there was interoperability between the software, just as we're talking about interoperability between hardware, that might help advance that."

LeFabvre said when end users talk about SRM, it encompasses a broad range of functionality, such as provisioning, capacity planning, automated response to performance issues and load balancing. "To try to solve that front to back is a tall order," he recognizes.

Jon William Toigo, chairman of the Data Management Institute and CEO of Toigo Partners International LLC, is a frequent critic of SNIA and its SMI-S standard. He refers to SMI-S as a "golden dream" that will never come to pass and says that it is only being implemented on a small percentage of the 15,000 new storage systems released in 2006. According to Toigo, the unwillingness of vendors to share their most sensitive APIs is a major stumbling block to SMI-S.

Toigo also believes that smaller storage management software vendors in particular are feeling the lack of cross-platform functionality as they try to plug their products into larger vendors' consoles. Other industry observers have said this problem is so bad that up to 50% of the capacity-related fields in the SMI-S framework are empty because vendors have not filled them.

"That's absolutely true," Toigo says. "They tried to come up with a much more complicated version of the Storage Management Initiative, and major vendors balked because they did not want to reveal that much of the internal goings-on inside their platforms, so what they did was create a generic, very inconsequential amount of status monitoring that would go into every SMI implementation and then opened the door to do customized additional builds."

Bob Laliberte, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., agrees that SMI-S has put restrictions on smaller SRM vendors, saying the situation slows down the development process and forces them to only support one or two vendors to start. They are continuing to add more vendors as they get access to APIs and test equipment, he says.

"But this same challenge also becomes a competitive differentiation for these companies as they grow and add new devices," Laliberte declares. "Other independent software companies like Symantec and Tek-Tools that have been around longer and have broader support use this to their advantage."

Smaller vendors weigh in

Rick Clark is president and CEO of Aptare Inc., a private vendor that sells a Web-based storage monitoring tool, says that four or five years ago, many SRM vendors were hoping for technology that would provide homogeneous, centralized management, but even in the wake of SMI-S, "monolithic SRM is dead." Clark blames that situation on the inability of SRM proponents to create anything beyond a very thin veneer over the top of heterogeneous storage systems.

As a result of that situation, the storage industry looked to large vendors in the hopes that they would open up their proprietary APIs. The large vendors were reluctant to comply because doing so would undercut their bottom lines, Clark says. "If you open up and expose the same interfaces that you're using to manage your arrays," he notes, "all of a sudden, your revenue associated with your management software are going to diminish significantly, and all of a sudden, your competitors are going to start managing your arrays."

Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing at Onaro Inc., a software vendor that extends data center automation to storage, says that most customers -- even if they have single-vendor storage environments -- don't want to rely on single-pane provisioning because most of it is still script-based and they don't trust it. That being the case, he says that he doesn't know if SMI-S will get those customers past that point of reluctance.

Nonetheless, Semple states, "We're big fans of SMI-S here because it will make our lives easier." As he explains it, Onaro "interrogates" storage switches and arrays in real time to come up with the most accurate, heterogeneous picture of the services delivered by the storage environment back to an application. Toward that goal, Onaro's products use a variety of interfaces, including command-line interface, HTTP, SNMP and, where possible, SMIS.

"The broader SMI-S gets adopted, and the more robust the standard becomes, the less we will need to maintain these other interface mechanisms into the server and switch arrays," Semple says.

SNIA chief says improvements coming

Vincent Franceschini, chairman of SNIA, says that the problems experienced by smaller SRM vendors who attempt to plug into SMI-S-compliant consoles of larger vendors are well-known to SNIA, adding it is important to note that the leading storage vendors have invested for years in proprietary interface technologies, and when SMI-S is not ready to fulfill all the management requirements, alternatives are developed with those vendors' unique approaches.

"Smaller and/or new storage software players don't have to deal with such issues and would love to see SMI-S fields utilized consistently across all platforms," Franceschini says. "The SNIA Storage Management Initiative is attempting to gradually improve this situation by prioritizing so the SMI-S issues can be fixed with feedback from developers, product managers and IT users. SNIA SMI is also looking at the introduction of vendor-unique elements in SSM-S in future versions -- possibly Version 1.4. This open access to management capabilities across platforms is also an important topic at SNIA."

As a former two-time SNIA chairman, Wayne Adams -- who is currently senior technologist and director of standards at EMC Corp. -- is intimately familiar with SMI-S. According to him, SMI-S is not a magical key to SRM success. "It's just an enabling technology to get your information from the devices, so the value-add or secret sauce of storage management still comes from vendor innovation," he says. Take away that proprietary innovation, he adds, and vendors lose their unique competitive advantages.

According to Adams, part of the problem with SMI-S can be attributed to the gap between the relatively rapid writing of new SMI-S versions and the slower development of the enabling technology. "The development has been working at a conservative level to ensure that whatever has been defined is implemented and tends to be more bug-free than just implementing something because that's what's been written this time around," he says. "So I would say in a rearview-mirror perspective, in some feature sets, it may be two cycles of the standard before there are enough vendors who have implemented it and deem it to be stable."

Regarding the frustration of smaller SRM vendors who find it difficult to plug their products into larger vendors' SMI-S-compatible consoles, Adams calls it a "vendor-by-vendor adoption decision," saying he will not try to "sugarcoat" the fact that the smaller vendors lack the installed base necessary to create leverage with their larger counterparts.

Hey, EMC supports it

Adams says that EMC has been a leader in SMI-S implementation, noting that the company has been among the first vendors to implement the most recent versions of the specification. That has included using SMI-S to enable performance metrics and some of the new block interfaces that manage larger devices through block services. As evidence of EMC's proactive attitude toward SMI-S, he pointed to the company's April announcement of v1.2 support for 36 models of its Symmetrix and Clariion storage arrays. "I would say that we've been out there at least at the 95% level saying this is what's ready to be tested and demonstrated, and then we have implemented it."

So far, SMI-S has not been viewed as a direct aid to users, although Laliberte says that on a scale of 1 to 10, he would give it a 5. According to him, many companies are providing SMI-S support, which provides a baseline of support for a variety of different vendors. This, Laliberte says, creates some visibility into heterogeneous devices and accelerates the introduction of more products that can work cohesively in a data center with multivendor storage devices.

Laliberte elaborates by stating, "The ability to leverage SMI-S to accelerate getting products to market will provide more competition and help drive innovation because companies can spend more time developing advanced analytics or automation instead of support for different arrays and switches."

Franceschini acknowledges that SNIA has not gathered a lot of information relating to how SMI-S has helped IT shops in user organizations gain more control of the heterogeneous storage infrastructures. According to him, SNIA intends to improve its industry feedback in this area, adding that SNIA's requirements-gathering process for future SMI-S versions already involves product managers and the SNIA End User Council, a group that meets regularly to provide feedback and direction on storage technology.

"As SMI-S is deployed in production environments, it helps approaching the overall management requirements differently by enabling the setup of a broader framework to discover and manage heterogeneous resources," Franceschini states. "It is particularly true when introducing new resources and for getting support with storage management applications. SMI-S has allowed IT organizations to be more focused on storage management requirements."

Despite his sometimes strident criticism, even Toigo pays a complement to SMI-S, saying, "The specification itself is great. If it was fully implemented in full flower by every vendor, you would have all the information at your fingertips not only to monitor status, but also be able to handle the configuration and management of the capacity of the array or the device in question. It would be a boon to every consumer on the planet." "

[source: here]

Song Contest

To store or not to store? The universe of storage compressed and non-compressed:

[Read more: here]

The fine art of data destruction

"Feature By Michele Hope, Network World, 04/11/07

Peggy Jones, a business manager for the information-management team at the College of Southern Maryland, was asked recently to help dispose of what she now estimates were about 1,200 old backup tapes and cassettes her IT organization had been storing in a relatively well-fortified walk-in vault.

The issue of what to do with the old tapes came to a head when renovation was scheduled for the building where the vault resided. "We had already moved to another backup system. So, these old tapes didn't work in our current system anyway. Now it was just old data we needed to figure out how to dispose of properly," Jones says.

Her research led her to Data Killers, a media-destruction and computer-recycling firm in Maryland that could shred tapes and hard drives securely, and provide a certificate affirming their destruction. It would even let you stay and watch the shredding process, if you wanted. Then the media's "remains" would be delivered to a smelter for melting and recycling its various metals.

With its 6,600-pound shredder, Data Killers is able to take just about any storage medium, such as the college's tapes, and turn it into particles the size of a thumbnail, owner Elizabeth Wilmot says.

Jones and a co-worker soon found themselves loading the tapes into the back of one of the college's vehicles and driving to Data Killers. After spending what Jones recalls was "a little more than an hour" watching the shredding, they were able to report back that the deed had been done.

Setting policy is the first step

Enterprises such as the College of Southern Maryland can face high stakes when they recycle, donate or throw away end-of-life IT assets.

Amid mounting legislation and a steady flow of horror stories -- about identity theft, lost tapes, stolen credit-card data, and the unintended exposure of private data after used hard drives, cell phones and PDAs are sold on eBay -- it behooves companies to protect sensitive or government-regulated personal information throughout its life cycle.

Experts maintain that, just as it is developed for data in flight and data at rest, policy should be developed for end-stage data disposal or data destruction. Randy Kahn, owner of Kahn Consulting, says data destruction and disposal can be viewed as part of a larger corporate-governance commitment to proper information management.

Kahn, a lawyer and author of Privacy Nation and Information Nation, advises companies about issues related to information management, compliance and technology.

"Proper information management impacts the entire life cycle of information, from making sure employees understand policy surrounding how to manage the creation and storage of that information to how to properly dispose of it at the end of its useful life."

Steps in the right direction are developing a media-sanitization or data-destruction policy, making an effort to educate users about it and selectively testing or auditing the policy's effectiveness.

Policies about data destruction often deal with organizations' decisions about how best to dispose of IT assets they are replacing or retiring, according to Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). He also sees this type of policy applied to archived data that has passed its required retention date.

"As it stands right now, in many corporations, data destruction is on an ad-hoc and as-needed basis," says Robert J. Hansen, a voting systems security expert and security researcher at the University of Iowa. "That just doesn't cut it. You need to think about this in advance before it becomes an issue." Hansen maintains a blog on software engineering topics that includes his own "Ten Commandments of Data Destruction." Creating a policy for data destruction ranks high on his list.

Yet many IT organizations wait until they need to do their own spring cleaning before they decide what to do with data on older storage media that usually have been sitting around a while gathering dust, Data Killers' Wilmot says. "A lot of times, the first call we get is that they have several thousand tapes, and they don't know what to do with them," she says. "It's a lot like spring cleaning at first . . . then they tell us they'll be better about this in the future, destroying the media on more of a regular basis like quarterly or biannually."

Pulverize, then liquefy

Fauquier Bank maintains a strict policy about protecting and restricting access to its sensitive bank and customer records, says Josh Brown, director of security for the Warrenton, Va., bank. Yet even here, a detailed data-destruction policy and schedules have had to evolve for what Brown estimates now amounts to about 30 hard drives per year.

After several computers were upgraded last year, the bank began looking at whether to donate the old computers that then were taking up a good amount of storage space. As a precaution, the bank's previous IT manager decided to remove and store the old hard drives separately, to avoid potentially proprietary data falling into the wrong hands. Brown believed that just overwriting or wiping the hard drives didn't go far enough to guard against the risk of exposing the bank's data.

Already accustomed to the bank's use of a weekly, on-site document-shredding service, Brown liked the idea of reformatting the hard drives, then driving to a local company himself to have them shredded. That way, he could ensure a solid chain of custody between leaving the building and getting the drives shredded. "Now, when it leaves here, it's pulverized, then it's liquefied," he explained, noting that as a bank, he thinks it makes sense to take a few extra steps.

Data-destruction services also offer customers the option to view their media's destruction remotely, and ship double-locked "storm cases" to protect remote customers' media in transit to their facility. Wilmot says this is a popular option, but the local bank and college both preferred to deliver the media themselves.

Without a trace

There are a number of methods for destroying data, each with pros and cons. People may dispute the benefits of one method over another, but most agree on one thing: Using simple deletion or disk-formatting commands is not enough to destroy data unequivocally. These methods leave too many traces of data behind. With simple utilities, it is easy to recover files deleted from the file system. It's a lot like tearing out a book's table of contents but leaving the rest of the book behind.

Beyond the obvious deletion functions, you start getting into secure deletion, the act of clearing, overwriting, wiping or "scrubbing" the data once or many times with a string of 1s and 0s. In the middle of the spectrum are devices, such as degaussers, that purge data from a variety of media. At the far end of the spectrum is what Hansen refers to in his blog as utter annihilation. This is where you get into the more visceral acts of shredding, pulverizing, incinerating or melting the media.

Hansen maintains that heating a hard drive past the Curie point (the point at which metal loses its magnetic properties) and melting it into slag are the only sure ways never to recover what once was on there.
Jesse Kornblum, a computer forensics researcher with ManTech SMA, isn't so sure you have to go to quite that length to render data immune to most random attackers.

Kornblum, who spent a good deal of his former life trying to uncover computer data for various criminal investigations, maintains that a single software overwriting often will suffice. "In general, one pass or one wipe is sufficient to frustrate any ordinary forensic analysis that might take place from outside of the hard drive," he says. "Now, you have to get someone to crack open the drive and look at it with a [magnetic force] microscope. That can cost hundreds of dollars."

If you want to be really sure the data is destroyed, Kornblum says melting the drive down to slag may be the best (albeit somewhat costly) way to do it. Asked to view data destruction from the eyes of a bank customer with personal bank data, Kornblum admits he'd feel a lot better knowing his bank was melting down the drives it no longer needed. "That's just in case someone who knew what they were doing could reassemble it," he says.

How far is far enough?

Picking one data-destruction method over another usually comes down to how far the organization believes it needs to go to destroy data to comply with applicable legislation or corporate policy. As Kornblum puts it, "It's always a question of how valuable is the information on the drive, and how hard do you think someone would work to get it?"

Unfortunately, most legislation does not offer specific guidance in this area. The majority of today's data-privacy and -protection laws prescribe taking proper data-destruction measures, without indicating the process or technology a company should use, Kahn says. Many laws indicate something to the effect that data should be destroyed so as to render the data unable to be read or accessed successfully.

General guidelines -- such as the broad wording found in such regulations as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act -- prompt organizations to look elsewhere for guidance on the specific processes or technologies they should use to destroy data or sanitize the media on which it's stored.

Not surprisingly, detailed guidelines for media sanitization and disposal can be found in the government sector, including the early U.S. Department of Defense drafts of Standard DoD 5220.22-M. These include a clearing and sanitization matrix and guidelines for destroying every kind of data from classified or top-secret to unclassified.

This standard often is referred to by overwriting-software vendors, a few of whom may claim to be "DoD-certified" or "DoD-compliant." (A 2005 version of the matrix is available from the Web site of the Defense Security Service Office of the Designated Approving Authority.)

Peter Adler, a lawyer and information security expert who heads the Adler InfoSec & Privacy Group, has conducted detailed research on secure media disposal. He cites two leading information security standards with specific guidelines for media disposal and sanitization: ISO 17799 and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-88, titled "Guidelines for Media Sanitization."

Now interim director of privacy and cybersecurity policy at Maryland's Montgomery College, Adler often helps organizations assess security risk and develops specific policies for them to follow. Based on his research, Adler developed a procedural model to help organizations determine whether data or media should be cleared or purged, or physically destroyed.

Like the guidance offered in the NIST publication, much of the model depends on whether the data or media will be reused or will be leaving the organization's control. There's just one caveat: The model assumes an organization first can identify and categorize the data stored on specific media into one of four different classes: nonsensitive information, business-sensitive information, legally protected information and classification not known.

The only challenge to this assumption happens when some media have been lying around for so long it's difficult to know exactly what type of data resides on them. This was the case at the College of Southern Maryland. "Since we didn't really know what was on [the tapes], we treated it all as confidential," Jones says.

Don't mash it, hash it

Another option is to encrypt files or whole volumes of data earlier in their life cycle, before the media on which they are stored need to be retired, or are upgraded or donated.

While experts say that encryption doesn't necessarily absolve companies of their obligation to destroy highly sensitive data or media, encrypting the data may offer something of a legal safe harbor for companies trying to obey many privacy regulations.

The University of Iowa's Hansen is not a great fan of scrubbing or overwriting, which he equates to "locking the barn up after the horse is already out." On the other hand, storing data in encrypted format on a drive partition might let you avoid scrubbing the drive: "When someone tries to recover data, they first have to find the data. If all they see on the drive is noise, that's a pretty effective deterrent. It's definitely a counterforensic technique," he says.

If a corporation could maintain an employee's encryption key for the disk, it could access the data if the employee leaves the company. When the company no longer wants to use the disk, it just "forgets" or destroys the disk, Hansen says.

ESG's Oltsik also sees encryption as possibly the easiest way to, in effect, destroy data. He sees the emerging area of digital rights management as also offering some interesting solutions.
In the age of movable data -- roaming laptops, USB flash drives, PDAs and smart phones -- encryption may well be the answer, Oltsik maintains: "Moving forward, that's how we'll deal with all this data mobility, because you can't take physical possession of every device and just destroy it. There are too many devices, with more coming in the future."

[source: Network World]

Is Fibre Channel dead?

"Today's focus: Is Fibre Channel dead?
By Deni Connor

At Network World's IT Roadmap show in Boston last week, IT
consultant Joel Snyder proclaimed that Fibre Channel is dead.

I asked him why he thought that considering everything I've
heard and everyone I talk to says it's not.

Snyder replied: "Fibre Channel is like Token Ring or H.323.
Those who want to sell it just will refuse to accept [that it's
dead], but the sales of iSCSI by people who 'get it' will
skyrocket, while Fibre Channel will slowly decay away. In two
years, people will say 'Yeah, of course, it was obvious.' For
now, I'm sure people will get all excited about it. The only
reason people will still be buying Fibre Channel is because
there are still a lot of Fibre Channel devices in the pipeline.
The nail in the coffin was 10G-bit Ethernet."

So I asked him: "You are actually saying that 'Fibre Channel is
going to be dead,' when users adopt 10G Ethernet and use iSCSI
to transport their storage. I haven't seen a lot of uptake of
10G Ethernet in the enterprise - yet. But with TCP offload and
Microsoft's Scalable Networking Pack, iSCSI and 10G Ethernet
should be a hit. Right now though 10G Ethernet adapters are
tracking at about $1,000 each, far too expensive for someone who
wants to put in iSCSI because they think it is inexpensive."

Snyder responded. "No, that's not exactly what I meant. What I
mean is that anyone who, today, goes out and buys Fibre Channel
is making a serious mistake, and that the path of growth and
innovation is going to be down the iSCSI route.

"There was a shred of argument that Fibre Channel was faster
than 1G Ethernet, although I honestly don't believe that was
true for most topologies. That argument disappeared for two
reasons: First, vendors discovered that it was dirt cheap to
stick anywhere from 4 to 10 1G interfaces on their boxes,
meaning that you didn't have to have a shared medium, but could
put in a direct link to small clusters and get the same
effective throughput. Secondly, 10G Ethernet is easily available
now, which means that if you truly are not happy with 1G, then
you have the option to jump to 10G.

"In effect, there is no reason to ever buy Fibre Channel again,
starting as of about today - to do so, is to lock yourself into
an expensive and declining technology. Everything about Fibre
Channel is expensive: the patches, the support, the switches and
the adapters. Everything about iSCSI is cheap. Given that the
value in the product is the stuff that sits on top of it, why
would you pay $50,000 for infrastructure to support a
storage-area network [SAN] when you could pay $10,000 and be
just as happy and get just as much performance as you could ever
want.

"Without sounding like an old man, I've seen this evolution five
or 10 times in the past 25 years and you probably have too (I
did see ARCnet, FDDI and Token Ring decline), as initial
technologies had some insane momentum (think FDDI, Token Ring,
H.323), but then absolutely refused to step aside when a cheaper
simpler way of doing things came out (think Fast Ethernet, think
SIP [Session Initiation Protocol]).It is an irrefutable law of
technology that simpler and cheaper win, and this is especially
true when simpler-and-cheaper are going to be indistinguishable
from more-complex-and-more-expensive."

I asked him what he suggests Network World readers should do -
buy Fibre Channel or go with iSCSI?

"Those Network World readers who want to be on the power curve
should be buying iSCSI," says Snyder. "Yes, probably, there are
individual situations where a single 4G Fibre Channel interface
for a particular application is 'better' than iSCSI today. But
for 90% of the people who want to buy SANs, at ALL levels, the
right answer is iSCSI and that's because the value in the SAN is
the same no matter what network interconnect you use." "

[source: Networking World, 15-3-07]