Make room for data

When one thinks about the visualization solutions that SGI Federal Inc. specializes in, data storage management may not immediately come to mind. Yet the wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, Calif., finds its government projects often come with immense storage needs.Take, for instance, the company's work for the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, one of the world's leading weather prediction centers. The center makes elaborate regional forecasts for the Defense Department, the National Weather Service and private companies. It processes more than 6 million observations a day and channels the results into 500,000 oceanographic and atmospheric charts, analyses and forecasts.In September 1999, the center hired SGI Federal to improve the resolution and accuracy of its forecasts. As part of the work, SGI built a hefty data storage component, called Numerical, which was capable of supporting throughput of one terabyte every 12 hours and of keeping 80 terabytes of data accessible. "Given our roots as a graphics company, people don't often think of SGI as offering storage solutions," said Tony Celeste, national director of defense business at SGI Federal. Actually, complex data management plays an important role in the company's high-performance computing and visualization government work, he said.Although most government departments don't have the data requirements of the Navy's weather service, storage needs are rising as agencies tackle enterprisewide projects. "Many of our government customers are using the 'P' word: petabyte," said Roy Sanford, vice president of marketing and alliances for content addressed storage for EMC Corp., Hopkinton, Mass. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. According to Steve Alfieris, vice president of EMC's federal business, a lot of the drive for increased storage comes from agencywide projects, such as server consolidation, in which mail servers or other services are consolidated into one central location to save money and simplify management. E-government projects and post-Sept. 11 disaster recovery projects have also accounted for recent sales in large-scale solutions.As a result, customers are looking for solutions that "mask the complexity" that such large solutions entail, Alfieris said."The situation today is not like it was five years ago, when IT departments just bought equipment and didn't know what to do with it. Now there's a push for some centralized storage products," said Nigel Turner, senior vice president of storage solutions for Computer Associates International Inc., Islandia, N.Y."There is a fundamental shift in the way people are looking at their storage," said Jeff Lundberg, a product marketing manager for Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif. "The real focus is to reduce management and hardware expenditures within [enterprise] environments."To this end, companies are releasing new tools to help better manage large sets of data.In March, EMC released a number of upgrades to its storage management software suite, Navisphere, that simplify management tasks. One product, called MirrorView, enables organizations to make a complete copy of the data on up to four storage systems and place it in a remote location, facilitating easy-to-deploy disaster recovery systems. Another product, SnapView, enables nearly instantaneous replication of transactional data in multiple locations. Navisphere itself was upgraded to allow administrators to monitor performance of multiple EMC storage systems via a Web browser. An administrator can spot bottlenecks and easily move workloads between different systems.In October 2001, EMC signed a strategic agreement with Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas, to offer co-branded, enterprise-level storage solutions. This partnership has played out particularly well in the government sector, where more than 35 percent of the partnership's sales have taken place, according to Bob McFarland, vice president and general manager of Dell's government sales. Customers include the Air Force Air Mobility Command, which is consolidating its application, print and file servers on 12 U.S. bases. The Port of Seattle is using the co-branded offerings for e-mail and database functions, as is Montgomery County, Md., for its e-mail system.In April, Computer Associates released its BrightStor Portal, which addresses the problem large organizations may have with managing multiple third-party storage solutions. Since each storage solution has its own management interface, organizations with multiple systems must also maintain multiple computers to manage them. Computer Associates' software centralizes the management functions of these heterogeneous systems into a single interface."The complexity of our customers' enterprise storage environments will continue to increase," said Russell Artzt, Computer Associates executive vice president. This solution, he said, "will enable them to more easily assimilate these new technologies." In March, Network Appliance Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., also introduced new tools and upgrades aimed at simplifying the storage manager's workload. One tool, SnapMirror, continually backs up content in remote locations and uses less bandwidth than other solutions by only backing up that which is new or has been changed since the last backup. Network Appliance is marketing its solutions to agencies seeking to centralize backup routines across several offices, said Suresh Vasudevan, director of software product marketing. Many organizations still send out backup tapes to branch offices by mail, and have administrators copy the data and mail the results to a central location. "The problem with this approach is that after a couple of backups, these duties are often neglected," and as a result agencies can't guarantee the data at each remote location is safe, Vasudevan said. "SnapVault allows a simple, cost-efficient way of guaranteeing that data gets backed up," Vasudevan said.In March, Veritas released a storage management solution called NetBackup Storage Migrator that automatically moves infrequently accessed files to more cost-effective storage media, such as tape drives. This solution can free up 30 percent to 50 percent of immediate storage space, Veritas' Lundberg said."The software allows you to manage large amounts of storage more efficiently, so you get the most out of the resources you have," he said.Another innovative approach to meeting large-scale storage needs is EMC's Centera, a new solution designed to work as a repository for "fixed content," such as X-ray images, video files and other large-scale records that do not need to be modified after they are created. Centera answers the demand the company had been seeing for large-scale, easy-to-manage archiving solutions, EMC's Sanford said. In this system, each file is given a globally unique 128-bit fingerprint that can be accessed through an application server, which acts as a time-stamp and authentication of the file's integrity. Centera clusters can scale from five terabytes to more than a petabyte, and a single full-time person can oversee more than 160 terabytes of data, Sanford said.