Copan Systems is receiving $25M in venture funding today because someone believe that have the first truly viable replacement for tape in their Revolution 200T product. EMC, IBM, NetApp, and other have been pushing disk-based backups for the last few years. The problem with the strategy employed to date is that disk is still more expensive than tape at the raw resource level, even though it may only be pennies per megabyte. These pennies add up over 100TB as illustrated by a blurb on the Copan Systems web site, “Current disk technology is still 3-5 times more expensive than tape. For a 100TB archive, that means spending either $300,000 for tape of $1,000,000 on disk.” I believe Copan Systems is worth a closer look.

posted: 6:48:24 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I’ve spent the past couple of days getting to know the DataFort product from Decru. The DataFort performs inline encryption of data, or better known as encrypting data at rest. This is an area I’ve wanted to get into for a few years. I last took at a look at encrypting data at rest in 2002 when I was working for AT&T Wireless. Encrypting data at rest is good for securing hard drive against misplacement and then being read by wayward sysadmins. The Decru DataFort is extremely easy to use. To put it into production all one has to do is assign a management IP and map zones containing its WWNs. This may be different in a NAS environment as we were taking a look at it in a SAN environment.

posted: 6:46:31 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()