Vendors Flock to New Data Management Initiatives

Archive Management.org and the Green Data Project Receive Warm Response

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The recently announced web community Archive Management.org (AMO) and its first initiative, The Green Data Project, which was announced at Storage Decisions in NYC last week, have received a warm response from the technology industry. Six vendors have contracted to be Partner Sponsors of AMO and the Green Data Project: instead of merely advertising on the web sites, they will be actively participating in the community effort.

Rockville, MD-based FileTek, and its affiliated companies, Clearview Content Management and Trusted Edge, have made a generous endowment to AMO, Green Data Project and to the Data Management Institute, another data management-focused organization and springboard for Archive Management.org.

According to William Loomis, FileTek CEO, "We believe that a significant contribution can be made by grassroots organizations comprising business and technology planners to improving the practice and the products in the enterprise content management space. We look forward to participating in what is sure to be an important global dialog between the industry and end users of archive and data management products."

FileTek President and Clearview CEO Phil Pascarelli adds that one of the greatest challenges confronting companies today is organizing the massive amount of data they have accumulated and notes, "Intelligent data management is the key challenge companies confront as they deal with the requirements of compliance regulations, legal requirements for data retention, deletion and protection and e-discovery. Good management of data is also required if you are going to do anything about data center power efficiency, considering the pivotal role that storage technology plays in electricity demands in the data center today."

On that point, Pascarelli is joined by Michael Koclanes, Sr. Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Plasmon, a company specialized in building archival storage solutions. "Our research at Plasmon has validated most of the arguments that the Archive Management.org group is making in its latest Green Data Project initiative. Clearly, if we can migrate data that has a low probability of re-reference onto highly resilient and low power UDO archival platforms, we could shave substantial energy costs from storage and reduce the carbon footprint of IT significantly."

Jim Wheeler, Director of Marketing and Business Development for QStar Technologies in Mary Esther, FL, notes that his company was among the original backers of the Archive Management.org undertaking. It was at a Partner Conference this Summer in Sorrento, Italy, that QStar and many of its reseller/integrators first communicated the need for an effort like AMO. "We were excited by the idea of a group that would advance the goal of intelligent data management and archive. Jon Toigo, chairman of the Data Management Institute, came over and gave a passionate speech about the business value case for data archiving and the need for the archive industry to begin an earnest dialog with business and IT consumers. Our message, he said, was being drowned out by other voices in the industry bent on simply selling more disk arrays. We asked Toigo to build a community where we could all come together and we are delighted with these promising results."

"QStar has long been an advocate of greener archive solutions," states Riccardo Finotti, President of QStar Technologies. "By providing archival solutions that incorporate technologies like Blu-ray, UDO and tape, IT managers are offered the ability to meet both electronic discovery and retention needs. They meet green requirements by migrating data that needs to be retained, but is accessed less frequently, to more cost-effective platforms that meet retrieval demands while requiring less space, cooling, and power."

Austin, Texas-based Caringo CEO Mark Goros wasn't in Sorrento, but says that data management and archiving has been "a largely undiscovered frontier" to date. "Today, we are witnessing the creation of greater amounts of unstructured data than ever before with no end in sight. This has led to parallel growth in data storage and management of large and complex repositories. While large storage technology vendors seem to be promoting complicated, multi-tiered storage environments for data management, we have focused on providing customers with a simple, cost effective approach to storing unstructured data or content. An organization's most irreplaceable business asset is information in digital form and it needs to be protected and preserved over years and decades. Increasingly, data is at terrible risk of loss or accidental disclosure. Our software products focus on addressing content so it can be easily stored, retrieved and migrated to newer media as technology evolves over time. A community like Archive Management.org is exactly what is needed to raise awareness about what is needed for effectively managing, protecting and preserving data well into the future."

Goros gets agreement from CTO Kamel Shaath of Ottowa, Canada-based archive appliance vendor, KOM Networks. Shaath says that archiving sells itself, "if you get the chance to talk to a customer." He notes, "Data archiving isn't rocket science and it pays off with great dividends for companies that put principles into practice. Unfortunately, companies are too often encouraged to throw more storage at every problem instead of archiving older data whose probability of re-reference is very low. The result of this practice is decreasing productivity because files are difficult to locate and increased CAPEX and OPEX costs because of all the gear that companies are deploying and really don't need. If you could just get the word out that there are alternatives to buying yet another disk array based on managing data better, you could dramatically reduce costs, improve profitability and alleviate the risk of data loss or compliance hassles. AMO and the Green Data Project are initiatives whose time has come."

Sol Squire, Managing Director for archive service provider Data Islandia in Reykjavik, Iceland, says that business is booming. "In Europe, and to an increasing level in the States, green initiatives are combining with compliance initiatives to underscore the importance of intelligent archiving strategy. We are uniquely blessed with the lowest carbon footprint for IT operations in the world, which is why so many companies are building data centers here. AMO and the Green Data Project are wonderful vehicles for explaining the business value of archiving and for articulating the role that service providers can play in helping companies build an archive strategy. We are delighted to be playing a part in such a worthwhile endeavor."

For C2C, the Green Data Project is an opportunity to properly educate the market about the business benefits of effective email archiving driven by the legal and business imperatives of regulatory compliance, e-discovery and capacity management and how those policies can mitigate the costs and environmental impacts of unrelenting storage growth. According to C2C CEO Dave Hunt, policy-based email archiving and green IT go hand-in-hand. "A study has shown that 40 percent of disk-based corporate data is never accessed, so archiving those files will have an immediate impact in slowing the need for new disk purchasing," said Hunt. "The green effect of reducing storage capacity with effective data archiving is magnified when you factor in the not just electrical demands to power the storage arrays, but the associated costs and power requirements to maintain the proper environmental conditions within the data center."

From Mike Linett's perspective as CEO of Newark, Delaware-based Zerowait, an engineering company specializing in high availability network storage, Archive Management.org plays into sensible architecture. "Vendors have been selling folks a lot more storage than they actually need and telling them to keep it all on-line all the time. This is nonsense, especially given the likelihood that most of the data will ever be touched again. We like Toigo and AMO because he shares our commonsense views about real storage requirements and our dislike of vendor marketecture. For years, all we have been hearing is the storage industry's equivalent of the old Doritos ad: 'Keep crunching, we'll make more.' The time has come for an organization to present the notion that it's the data, not the storage technology, that matters most. Whether you are trying to keep the auditors at bay or cut power costs, managing data should be your first move."

Archive Management.org can be reached on the web at www.archivemgt.org. Green Data Project is at www.greendataproject.org. Both sites are completely free and registration is required to participate in dialogs about storage and data management issues.

For more information about Archive Management.org or the Green Data Project, contact Jon W. Toigo at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Contact:
Toigo Partners International
Jon Toigo, 727-736-5367
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
or
JPR Communications
Judy Smith, 818-386-0403
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it