Keeping Data Forever

David Ferris had an interesting post the other day hinting of keeping all data forever. (Here) At Procedo, this is something that we're seeing with our customers as well. Over the course of the past few years we have seen our average customer increase from 2-3 TB to well over 10TB.

Over the past two months we've also had two requests for quotes from customers that have over 1PB of archived content each. We also have many customers that ask if we can increase retention during a migration applying a new retention period to all legacy archived data.

What this trend is confirming for us is that customers are keeping more data, longer. Customers who 6 years ago applied a 3 year retention period to their data still have it and don't know if or when they may turn on expiry to purge the data.

Storage growth is going to continue to compound as the rate at which we are creating new data is increasing multi-fold and we're not purging the legacy data. At our current rate, we could start to see the 100TB archive as being normal for the good majority of our customers. Needless to say, our storage partners are starting to realize the archive market is going to be a major growth area for them in the next few years.

The Recession Is Over!

Yeah yeah, I know this is still being debated. I waited for awhile to post after reading this as just like everyone, has their doubts regarding if this is true or not, did the cash for clunkers create an artificial high, did the expired, soon to be expanded $8000 homebuyer credit contribute, etc.

At Procedo we have weathered through this past 12 months just like everyone. Being impacted in at least one way or another during that time. However, we are seeing the activity levels or real deals starting to increase. What is interesting is that during the time we never really saw a dip in our activity, but what we are seeing now is an increase of deals starting to close. The shear volume of deals increasing, but more importantly, real deals that have been on the radar for some time with our clients preparing for them are starting to close as well.

We're seeing more of the "want to get done" deals happening vs. just the "need to get done."

What we're also seeing, is the continued need and drive towards archive improvements. As many of our partners have indicated over the years, archiving is continuing to be an integral part of the organization and is no longer just a want. Companies are realizing the vast benefits of archiving. What we are starting to see a major trend with is not just archiving, but companies demanding more from their archives and therefore an increase in migrations from one archiving platform to another.

We're excited to be partnered with so many leading providers in the archiving space and working with them bring new customers to their platform through competitive archive migrations.

Users, do they really matter?

I've been working in the world of providing IT solutions for over 15 years now in various capacities. However, the one thing that has never changed from any role I've been involved with is that there are "users" we all need to deal with. From my consulting days, "user" was just another four letter word. Anyone who has ever consulted dreaded hearing that "a user called and is having a problem." Especially if it was right after an upgrade or a major system change.

In the world of archiving, the user seems to be forgotten when we speak to a lot of our potential clients, until the user calls...

So what about the user in archiving, do they really matter? Is the users input really important in selecting an archive? Does it really matter how easy it is for the user to get access to their archived content?

Obviously, the simple answer is yes, they do. The more complex answer is, "yes they matter and even more important, their experiences should be positive and as non-impacting to the way they use their email/archive."

Shortcutting objects in the archive in Exchange became the standard, because it provided users with virtually the same way to access their data as if it was in Exchange. So what happens when the company migrates their archived content from one application to another? So what happens when the shortcuts are now different and they don't function like they are supposed to, or they look different than new shortcuts, or you can't click on them the same way you can new shortcuts? Does it really matter? Does it really matter that the user experience is now negative with the new multi-million dollar archive system you just deployed?

Do users really matter? maybe, maybe not. Go ahead, disrupt their environment, you'll find out soon enough. When migrating, make sure you provide them a positive experience. If not, they will blame the new archive - not the old one you just migrated from.

Is Different Better?

One of the constant challenges that our customers struggle with is, " Is Different Better?" Our customers approach us when they are ready to make a change for a significant portion of their archive environment. This might be the storage, the application or both. Regardless, making a change is a significant stress activity for our customers. They ask the usual questions "If I change, can I search better?", "If I change, will I ever have to manage the archive again?

Something that we always tell our customers is to make sure that the decision they are making to change will bring them a better balance of what they need from their archive. Not every archive is perfect, even though some vendors claims theirs to be, but why change unless there is improvement? Even if the improvement is perception to the end users. Selecting a solution that provides them a better balance will make them more satisfied with their decision and therefore reduces the stress of the change.

Change can be good, change can be bad, change that creates a better balance is key. Make sure when you decide which path you are going down, that you will create a better balanced environment.

Archive Storage Decisions - Cloud or On-Premise?

When selecting an archive there are a few major decisions that impact the rest of the design. The first one that will guide the other decisions comes down to, Hosted vs. On-Premise. This is not an easy decision and we don't expect that to change anytime soon. This decision used to be black & white, however this is changing, the decision was either outsource everything or keep everything on-premise. If choosing on-premise, the next decision was to select the archive storage platform, NetApp SnapLock, EMC Centera, HDS HCAP and recently Data Domain plus others.

There is somewhere north of 30,000 on-premise enterprise deployments of archiving solutions today. As the data growth of these archives continues to sky-rocket, many of these customers are debating on shifting their archive to the cloud. While many companies are doing just this and migrating to cloud archive vendors like LiveOffice, there are many others that are hesitant to throw away their investment in their on-premise archive solution.

Imagine if these customers would have the ability to keep their most accessed data (newest) stored in the on-premise archive storage solution (NetApp, Centera, HCAP, DDUP, etc) while being able to migrate all of the least accessed (oldest) data in the cloud in an automated fashion.

The ability to scale the archive would be endless and the capital expenses would be minimized while having a virtual unlimited storage pool in the cloud to work with. All while ensuring that the end users access their data in the same way they do today. Such as, searching working the same way, shortcuts still working and the users have no idea their data is in the cloud.

Imagine...

Archiving, No Longer a Want

In the current economy many people are scaling back on all forms of spending. Our world's spending habits have changed from wants and desires to focusing only on needs. This is clear across not only personal spending habits but corporate purchases as well. Large "non-essential" purchases have been delayed if not cancelled all together.

Keeping this in mind, we're seeing a really interesting trend in archive deployments and archive spending. Our first quarter of 2009 saw an increase of opportunities of over 300% over the same quarter a year ago and 250% over the 4th quarter of 2009. Already only 15 days into Q2 we've already seen more inquiries this quarter than we did in the same quarter of 2008, which puts us on pace to a 200% increase over Q1 2009.

These statistics and trends that we are seeing along with what our partners are seeing, is that archiving has moved beyond a want in corporate data centers. Clearly the benefits of archiving and storage efficiencies that come with it are being defined as a need across all verticals.

Another trend that shows that migrations are a large part of this is we had many application vendors reach out to us in the first quarter of this year to add support for their applications to PAMM. Look for some of these announcements throughout the rest of this quarter as our solutions become integrated.

Archiving is now critical to almost every organization, ensure you perform proper due diligence in selecting your new archive for the solution that best fits your needs and look to PAMM to help you get there.

Which archive solution is best for me?

One question that our technical and sales teams get asked all the time is "Which application/solution should we pick?" One thing that is guaranteed is that we'll never provide an answer to this. Being in the unique position as the industry leader in the archive migration market, we enable all of our partners sell their products. We make the commitment to our partners that we will support them, but will not recommend them.

This doesn't stop our customers from asking, so what we do is position this back to our customers. "What is important for your archive solution?" While all archiving applications perform the same basic tasks, the key for each customer is in the finer details. What are their goals of the archive app. Some companies may want to ensure it is totally hands off to them, so for these customers, we're migrating from an on-premise to a Cloud provider. Others may have a specific need in e-discovery that only one on-premise solution provides. Here we'll perform an on-premise to on-premise migration.

Why are there so many options for archiving today? There is no company that does everything perfectly yet today. Each partner performs certain tasks better than any other one out there, but isn't the end all be all for everyone. If there was, the competition wouldn't be as fierce as it is today.

Which archive solution is best for me? The answer is simple, which ever one fulfills your greatest needs. For each company, this will be an absolute unique list based upon their user's requirements. The good news is, there is a solution out there for you.