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CAS (Content Addressed Storage) isn't new - EMC introduced the Centera in 2002. The current iteration supports cloud storage as well.
https://www.emc.com/data-prote...

Neither Pure or EMC market these for read only. The VNX2 we just installed uses it for FAST VP. Write's are cached on a handful of SLC based drives (2-4 disks usually), when possible, called "FAST Cache" to increase write performance. Then FAST VP moves the most used blocks to the MLC drives from the slower tiers (SAS, NL-SAS, SATA).

Neither Pure or EMC market these for read only. The VNX2 we just installed uses it for FAST VP. Write's are cached on a handful of SLC based drives (2-4 disks usually), when possible, called "FAST Cache" to increase write performance. Then FAST VP moves the most used blocks to the MLC drives from the slower tiers (SAS, NL-SAS, SATA).

They don't?

Yes, technically there is a way to execute phone specific code with specially crafted text messages. This is not doing that. It's not executing a program.

Generally, if a carefully-crafted input can cause your application to crash, a similarly-crafted data may be able to exploit the same bug and cause an execution of malicious code. If — as is usually the case — the crash is due to buffer overflow and I can stomp over your app's memory, I may be able to place my code in the right place and it will be executed as part of the app...

There are ways to mitigate that — such as by declaring data-parts of memory non-executable — but the earlier successful exploits of buffer overflow in the image-parsing code suggest, Apple is not using this.

But this is not what I expect from Apple. This is just bad. Lack of sanity testing?

Security — as any good work in general — is hard. Disproportionally harder than the merely Ok work. The real measure is not the number of bugs, really, but the speed of the fixes, once the problems are discovered. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be slow at that too...

Yes, EMC.

Oddly enough, the correct answer was down modded to 0. Good to see that the NSA is actively working to keep the details of their operations in the dark.

For those of you who want to get in on the publicly sanitized version of the technology, have a look at..

http://www.emc.com/campaign/gl...

You aren't getting it. Sharepoint is a cheap document management library like Documentum: http://www.emc.com/domains/doc... not an expensive fileshare.

As for the Office integration being terrible, that's just not true. Failing silently is not alright but that shouldn't be happening there is something going wrong with your config.

As for metadata... actually the Project Managers, Systems Analysts, Business analysts.... should be doing it not the engineers. Library maintenance is supposed to be part of someone's job. Seriously your company just isn't using the product right.

White trash, eh? I know a few high-tech companies that would disagree with you.

You know, small companies that you've probably never heard of, like:
Google ( the Lenoir NC data center is featured: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/ )
Apple (Their Maiden, NC, data center is a model for green data centers: https://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/ )
EMC (Not only do they have a huge datacenter/Center of Excellence in Durham, which earned LEED Gold status ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130314-01.htm ) but they also manufacture storage arrays in their Apex plant ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2006/08082006-4543.htm ) and have a significant R&D presence in RTP)
Facebook ( The Forest City Data Center: https://www.facebook.com/ForestCityDataCenter ) Oh, and Rutherford County is very rural.

Further, North Carolina has one of the world's premier research and education networks, NCREN ( http://ncren.net/ ), which just underwent significant expansion over the last two years.

And the list of high-tech and higher education excellence goes on and on.

North Carolinians even know about Slashdot. :-)

Having read the actual article, and not the biased summary, it seems a reasonable decision for the director to make. There is a place for that type of documentary; and it would certainly be a good thing to show in the right venue. And I'm sure the director had a difficult time with the decision.

But, then again, just exactly what does Slashdot commentary have to do with the scientific process anyway? (Yes, I do understand real science, and I also don't have any need to prove that to anyone).

White trash, eh? I know a few high-tech companies that would disagree with you.

You know, small companies that you've probably never heard of, like:
Google ( the Lenoir NC data center is featured: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/ )
Apple (Their Maiden, NC, data center is a model for green data centers: https://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/ )
EMC (Not only do they have a huge datacenter/Center of Excellence in Durham, which earned LEED Gold status ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130314-01.htm ) but they also manufacture storage arrays in their Apex plant ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2006/08082006-4543.htm ) and have a significant R&D presence in RTP)
Facebook ( The Forest City Data Center: https://www.facebook.com/ForestCityDataCenter ) Oh, and Rutherford County is very rural.

Further, North Carolina has one of the world's premier research and education networks, NCREN ( http://ncren.net/ ), which just underwent significant expansion over the last two years.

And the list of high-tech and higher education excellence goes on and on.

North Carolinians even know about Slashdot. :-)

Having read the actual article, and not the biased summary, it seems a reasonable decision for the director to make. There is a place for that type of documentary; and it would certainly be a good thing to show in the right venue. And I'm sure the director had a difficult time with the decision.

But, then again, just exactly what does Slashdot commentary have to do with the scientific process anyway? (Yes, I do understand real science, and I also don't have any need to prove that to anyone).

You can find information about the requirement on the FFIEC site at http://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/authentication_guidance.pdf.

I don't think it explicitly requires RSA keys, but it does speak of multi-factor authentictation. RSA is often a reference to a specific company. The government guidelines would be rightly questionable if they endorsed a specific company as the potential solution. However, RSA the company does do a job of (possibly) providing multi-factor authentication.

Generally it works like this: The user is prompted for a username which is then used to check credential information and displays a particular image to the user (previously selected by the user) before the password is entered. That ensures that the user is prompted to enter information, and then is given a chance to recognize or back out of a transaction based on their recognition of their custom image before a password is entered. This provides positive verification in addition to the password requirement. The second factor is based on the device in use by the user where a cookie has been stored if the user has displayed the ability to add additional layers of known information, generally the answers to questions the user has selected and answered previously.

This layered authentication process, username, positive verification, device validation, conditional challenges, is generally considered consistent with the requirement for multiple factors of authentication. I'm not sure that it meets the goals of the guidlines published by the FFIEC, but it does provide layers of authentication which is generally all a financial instutition can implement without running afoul of patents (a whole separate painful issue) which is generally acceptable in a competitive market. Instutitions which require a second channel of authentication, such as a phone number communication, key fob, remote key or other device generally are seen as unnecessarily annoying by customers. Essentially the problem boils down to a compromise between convenience demanded by end users vs security demanded by legislative guidelines. As always, the real problem is the users who don't actually want the hassle of a more secure system.

This says nothing about the security compromises in financial instutitions where a maximum number of password characters defies sanity coupled with a limitation of potential characters. That's just stupid. Also common.

there is no problem in storage that your wallet couldnt solve... http://emc.com/products/family/emc-centera-family.htm

'The Commonwealth Bank has cancelled some 8000 credit cards after it detected a data breach at a merchant .. The bank did not release the name of the affected merchant and its acquiring bank, or when the breach occurred.

“[CommBank] continuously monitors all credit card transactions to protect our customers from fraud and during this process we became aware of a potential credit card compromise through an Australian merchant acquired by another bank,”

So, it took CommBank to noticed the fraudulent transactions and inform the client before they even noticed anything wrong. Which begs the question as to what technology they were running their system on.

"Banking sources would not identify the merchant or bank involved, however St George Bank emerged as the only institution that would not flatly deny it was the bank in question."

' St.George Bank Cuts Server Deployment and Management Costs with Virtualized Infrastructure'

Kit. Equipment. Stuff. From here: "Today, Apex manufactures and ships EMC's market-leading EMC® CLARiiON® CX series of networked storage systems, EMC Celerra® network attached storage systems and EMC Centera(TM) content addressed storage systems."
I'm assuming that the equipment and software stolen was from those product lines.

Intel insiders have seen this coming. Dadi won. Three strikes and you're out for Pat.
1. Itanium
2. Pentium 4
3. Larrabee

Fortunately for the guys in Hillsboro, Nehalem is a glowing success.

If you have commercial information that you absolutely cannot allow to fall into the wrong hands (or accidentally deleted, corrupted, not backed up, whatever), is storing that data in a data center ever really acceptable? I would think not, but I'd like to hear someone else's opinion. Has anyone here done things DIY for this very reason?

Although it appears they got bought by EMC.. hrm.

Deduplication can help you reduce the size requirements on the backup server.

If buying new capacity, you should probably think about buying a backup server that can be expanded to have more capacity than your existing server, depending on current server usage.

Plan for a few years down the road, when it becomes necessary to expand capacity of the main server, backup more servers... or more likely: store multiple old versions of files that changed over time.

Normally.. if you have a 500 mb video file, and someone made some edits to it and re-saved. There are now going to be two 'files' in the backup repository for a time: the old version and the new version with the edits (twice the space usage)

So storage requirements on the backup server can actually be much more than storage requirements on the server being backed up.

"How about testing them on web services like digg, or on company mail servers instead of fake throughput and "feel" tests?"

I've been waiting for the same thing, unfortunately SLC flashed-based drives (the more expensive NAND flash with the higher lifespan) is still exceptionally expensive. But, the good news is major SAN vendors are already offering SSD options. Everyone from EMC to Sun Microsystems is starting to include SSD drives in their storage products. While it would be very unusual for us to get a peek into the storage systems of companies like digg, etc, hopefully they'll filter down far enough that we can get some realistic reviews soon. I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Nowadays, any content management system worth anything has a built-in wiki and most allow direct linking and searching between the local wiki and wikipedia.

For example Documentum and Sharepoint both have federated search providers for Wikipedia.

Plus, because the OP works for a "large company" they probably already have DCTM or MOSS installed somewhere.
Why reinvent the wheel when you've already bought a better one? (job security?)

Telecom Class A data centers have a few characteristics to prevent - YES PREVENT - this type of issue.

a) lightning rods at every corner of the building and the highest points that are PROPERLY GROUNDED. Sometimes you need to drip water to get a good ground.
b) Power supplied from two or more *different* power substations
c) Local UPSes - different for each power feed. We're talking $150K each.
d) On site generation (diesel or gas turbine usually)
e) Heavy construction to survive tornadoes and hurricanes
f) Strong physical security procedures (the computer, inside the cage, inside the room, inside the room, in the center of the building).
g) data center floors may be located on huge springs to reduce earthquake impacts.
h) Not located an area prone to flooding, not even 100 year floods.
i) EMC DMX systems have built in batteries and capacitors with enough juice that if power is pulled, all data in cache will still be written to disk. http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/specification-sheet/c1166-dmx4-ss.pdf

And they usually get something else that the rest of us can't - extremely high prioritization for refueling. A trauma hospital may be higher priority, but other normal hospitals are lower priority that a telecom data center.

Did you ever wonder why your phone bill was so high? REDUNDANCY is a way of life. Chances are your telecom has automatic fail over to a redundant system 500+ miles away too. Keeping those systems and their data synchronized isn't cheap either. Fortunately, the huge data pipes are considered internal costs.

EMC IRM (Formerly Authentica (yes, there is a typo in the summary))

Oracle IRM (Formerly SealedMedia)

Liquid Machines

Adobe LifeCycle Rights Management

If it's anything like these systems, they still use spinning platter disk drives.

I'm talking about when you start seeing a significant percentage of datacenters choosing to go with flash storage for at least some of their systems.

Signficant percentage would be 5-10%, with more extensive installs giving more weight to 'significant'. Only OSes and programs would count less than terabytes of database, for example.

right here:

http://www.emc.com/products/family/email-xtender-family.htm

Exchange isn't something you can take out of the box, install while you are having a few beers, and expect great results. A large Exchange deployment requires planning. Everything from the server and network architecture to the storage subsystems needs to be thought out. This includes backups and archiving.

There are lots of companies that make tons of products to do this. CA, Symantec, and EMC, just to name a few.

This upgrade looks like a convenient cover for something more sinister.

-ted

Looks like the big boys are getting into the game also: EMC in Major Storage Performance Breakthrough; First with Enterprise-Ready Solid State Flash Drive Technology Market-leading Symmetrix DMX Systems to Feature Newest Flash-based Technology for Unprecedented Performance and Energy Efficiency http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2008/011408-1.htm They're claiming a 10X performance improvement, but at 30X the cost/MB. Given that a high-end DMX holds around 3000 drives, that a lot of flash memory! John

EMC != Electro-Magnetic Compatibility in this context. EMC DMX as in http://www.emc.com/products/systems/DMX_series.jsp

It's any company that needs a major amount of storage (tera/peta/exa bytes) either at their main site or even remote sister sites would utilize these products. Companies like EMC and EqualLogic make device frames that house hundreds of regular hard drives and are presented to servers as a local drive despite not being local. Because the storage is in a frame and the frames are intelligent, the frames can do data replication to DR sites without a server ever needing to know about it. I know EMC makes both fibre channel-based and IP-based hardware and, based on the headline of the linked article, EqualLogic makes IP-based (iSCSI) SAN equipment. iSCSI allows a corporation to utilize an existing ethernet/IP network without investing hundreds of thousands in a separate storage area network (i.e. fibre channel, see Brocade Comm. Systems).

SANs enable proper separation of servers and data and come with their own tools. Servers can be setup in a cluster with each node being configured to utilize storage allocated on the SAN but only an active node has the storage mounted. Upon failover the passive node can take over and users don't notice any downtime. The data is independent of the server hosting it. It can get expensive though. EMC sells its DMX Symmetrix frames for about $1.4 million (last time I saw a value) depending on capacity ($1.4M probably gets you about a petabyte but don't quote me on the price; it's been too long to remember accurately).

Retrospect is alive and well, too. We have some exciting strategic plans and we're hiring senior engineers with system software experience.

Retrospect is well suited to the poster's issue. It has "proactive" backup for intermittently connected laptops, SQL backup, strong encryption and many other features that -- whoops, </sales-pitch>.

++Strong Bias
// I work at Avamar, I helped found it in 1999, Avamar was bought by EMC back in November 15, 2006.
see "EMC | Avamar"
Avamar's solution has very low overhead on a Laptop and after the first backup, subsequent backups usually take less than a minute. It also deals nicely with opened files. If you don't want to buy a multi Terabyte server to run it, it is available as a service from a number of vendors in a rebranded form. For example from AT&T it's called "AT&T Online Vault"
--Strong Bias
There are of course other services/products out there, just look.

I preface this by saying I know I will get flamed for not recommending Open Source but SOX is a Federal mandate (Federal equals PMITA)

EMC's Centera is my personal favorite, it isn't cheap but it does exactly what you need and is auditable and recognized by all the third party audit compmaies as well as the Federal government.

I have worked in IT for 15 years and 5 of those have been for a LARGE financial institution. When it comes to audit and SOX go with something standard, tested and commercial, unless you want to spend the next 6 months explaining to your auditors how your homegrown solution works and then the next 6 months building something new that your auditors do understand (or worse, like losing your job).

Are you proposing that a single SAN storage net span multiple (remote) physical locations?

> Unfortunately, if such a thing exists, it hasn't really become mainstream yet.

EMC centera http://www.emc.com/products/systems/centera.jsp

I've been using Legato (now EMC) Networker at a number of different sites for over ten years now. It's easy, reliable, and supports a wide range of hardware. It scales well, but can get quite expensive when you start adding large autoloaders into the mix.

Their site should get you started. They'll set you up with a media kit and 45 day demo licenses if you request one.

here you go

http://software.emc.com/products/product_family/em ailxtender_family.htm/

If storage is becoming more net-centric, what really matters is having the most ways possible to access your data. People don't really need the desktop software features. I'd gladly give away 90% of them if it was just easier to collaborate and be able to find our stuff when we need it.

To hell with expensive collaboration tools that require my own server. First there was eroom, then the much cheaper 37 signals, and now the free google. Long live google.

Low-end EMC SAN boxes use SATA: http://www.emc.com/products/platforms.jsp

Looks like they've been busy :)

EMC DMX3 with an ED-48000B FC Director. Actual setup - works flawlesly - you can start low and scale up to 1Pb/array & 64 2gb FC connections/array without any downtime.

EMC DMX3 with an ED-48000B FC Director. Actual setup - works flawlesly - you can start low and scale up to 1Pb/array & 64 2gb FC connections/array without any downtime.

I'm mentioning this only because I've not seen anyone else do so. On my current project we are putting word docs into eRoom (http://software.emc.com/microsites/eRoom/index.js p). It has pretty good version tracking and is web-based (so "universally" accessable). We were going to be ISO certified, so I assume it supports that. The only drawback we've run into so far is that there is a limit to the number of objects you can have in an eRoom. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by a "medium-size" project, so I'm not certain if this limit will matter. We got around the limit by creating several eRooms based on different topics. Oh, and it's sometimes kind of slow but that may be our local network.
I do not work for the eRoom people, or walk their dogs. I've just been using their product and I think it's decent.
I'm also curious about LaTeX, anyone care to comment about the usefulness of separating formatting from content? I'm guessing that the TeX users think it's the best thing on the planet, but I regularly use formatting in psuedocode to show where "if..then" statements align (begin and end). In other words, the formatting also conveys meaning. I'm not clear on how squishing this through a LaTeX engine (compiler? doo-hickey?) would be able to maintain this meaningful formatting. thx.

Give me a moment, and I'm sure I'll think of one.

If it's cheap, then Netapp might not qualify... :)

What about technologies - NAS? Host-attached? Gateway/NAS? Grids?

Other companies/products to consider:

EMC (The Celerra is a nice product)

Onstor Bobcat

HP

IBM

Hitachi

Panasas

Exanet

Yotta Yotta

StoreAge

If you want basic raid devices look at Infortrend/Transtec. Their S-ATA offerings now support RAID-6 and are dirt cheap.

Get A Centera.

I'm biased but this is a high level Linux based storage system done right. It's not easy to create a coherent storage system out of lots of separate machines, the software that runs on this cluster does a lot of work. This thing fully redundant with no single point of failure, dynamically expandable without even taking it offline, it scales to 100's of terabytes and manages all that content continuously (scanning for corruption and fixing it, garbage collecting, etc..). The cluster has redundant backend networks and parallel paths everywhere, it even uses reiserfs to store the data. There's a lot of good engineering in this unit and they sell it at a decent price compared to NAS boxes.

Check it out:
http://www.emc.com/products/systems/centera.jsp
I do work for EMC (like I said.. I'm biased) but I don't speak for them, my opinions are my own.

Storage clustering is simply hard to do while still presenting a low level filesystem interface. Tossing that out and creating file storage as a high level service with a richer interface seems like the right approach to me. Show me a storage clustering solution that doesn't do that and I'll show you something full of bugs, expandability issues, limitations, and pain points.

Good article from all the way back in 2004 regarding where this is actually pointed. http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=510 00391&flatPage=true

Would Sun rather see Linux go away? Sure, but they also believe in it enough to sell it. http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z/index.jsp

These are quotes directly from they guy heading up EDS's strategic alliances. Not from members of the strategic alliance - has anyone asked Ellison if he thinks Linux is insecure, prone to unfriendly forking? Guess not. http://www.oracle.com/events/unbreakablelinux/inde x.html. Guess not.

Cisco? Well lets see they have linux running on some of their hardware, and apparently its good enough for their engineers to run http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0216cislinux.htm l

So lets round out the list...

EMC - http://www.emc.com/products/systems/linux/index.js p
Dell - http://linux.dell.com/
Microsoft - http://www.mslinux.org/ Err, umm - ok maybe not.

This is how 800TB can be digitaly locked forever http://www.emc.com/products/systems/centera.jsp/ and still be online.

Ha! I mock your attempt at trying to look like one of the techno-cognoscenti by wearing a thumb drive around your neck. I wear an EMC Symmetrix around my neck so I can store several terabytes of data. Admittedly this has made certain things (eating, going to the bathroom, leaving the data center) difficult but when my friends come over they're all impressed at how 133t I am!

If you want to spend the extra money and have a warranty and fancier case, look at Nexsan , or EMC's AX100. Scary that EMC is selling something cheaper than the competition, but they are. Sorta disturbs the natural order of the universe. Still, either will set you back several thousand. The AX100 looks pretty impressive on paper. Options for dual controllers, and up to 3 TB in a 2U space. Haven't tried one myself yet.

Disclaimer: I work for a storage integrator, both are brands we sell.

Go figure, inexpensive storage from EMC... Clariion AX100 . 3 TB that'll fit in a 2U space for $9536 at sanspot

...and as we all know, a server host can write about 150MB/sec...

Verizon had to roll this out in "nowhere" Keller TX because of regulation laws. They wanted their first roll out to be out of their landline footprint so they wouldn't get tangled up with the FCC too much. However, Hopkinton MA (eastern MA - home of EMC) is one of the top 10 towns on the list (also, in VZ Footprint), and so is most of So Cal. Expect it in the 150 biggest markets in 8~12 months, or so says the buzz.

Don't blame the RAID, blame the DELL. Those PowerVault enclosures are steaming piles of garbage. We just had to replace about 12TB worth of PowerVaults due to repeated failures, averaging several a week for while there. We're now on EMC Symmetrix DMX hardware, and it's been much more reliable.

Our small Proliant (HP/Compaq) servers with internal arrays are also WAY more reliable than those PowerVaults. With 22 proliant servers, 8 drives in each, I think we've had one failure in three years.