Big Blue Unites Tape With Disk

Take the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450 solution. This dual tape and disk library is designed and integrated in such a way that it meets the needs of companies that are trying to comply with the federal government's looming regulations to preserve data for certain periods of time. By any measure, IBM is not the only manufacturer to put such a product on the market that makes use of disk for primary backups. For example, in April, EMC announced its EMC Clariion Disk Library, also targeted for regulatory compliance.

But in IBM's case, its executives like to paint the timing of the product's delivery as a plus. Big Blue studied some of the early-to-market disk-based technologies and took lessons on what competitors either did wrong or overlooked. As a result, IBM executives believe they have a stellar product, one that incorporated customers' feedback in regard to the features they needed in such a device.

"We really have a rock-'em, sock-'em box here," says Al Stuart, chief strategist of IBM's Compliance and Data Retention Solutions.

Let's take a look at some of the features IBM is billing as "exclusive." For example, the 450 has a feature called "event based retention management," which is specifically tailored for data that has some kind of time limit on its existence. Stuart points out that some data has an external deadline; for example, government regulations dictate that companies retain e-mail for three years and tax records for seven years.

But what do you do with customer-based data? For example, documents on mortgages are necessary for the length of time it takes a customer to pay off the debt. Then what happens to that data? Do you let it linger in the system forever? That can be costly. With the event-based feature, customers can automatically trigger the system to get rid of data based on a particular event.

Another feature included in the 450 device is the time-honored "hierarchical storage management" capability. That means IT managers can move data from one medium to another as it gets older and becomes less valuable to their businesses. Today, customers really need to evaluate the value of the company's data during its entire life span.

For instance, how long do you keep your customers' statement information on expensive disks? Is it one month or two or three? It's always beneficial to keep statements on disk within the first three months of their creation, mainly because data is retrieved much faster from disk than tape. But then it can be moved to tape as the data becomes older and less valuable to the business (mainly because the chances that a customer will call to check on an item on his or her bill declines as weeks go by).

Finally, a third feature highlighted in this device is tailored for one of those situations that typically is not considered when a technology is in development: Customers asked IBM to design a feature that gives IT managers more control over data that is nearing its automated expiration date from the system. After all, what does a customer do if it gets slapped with a lawsuit just one month before relevant e-mails are set to expire? Stuart says IBM created the "deletion-hold" function just for those situations. This gives the customer more control over a policy-based feature that automatically purges data from the system after a set time period.

"We were told by a couple of customers that they would really like to see this feature," Stuart says. "No one brought this technology forward. This was a gap."