Data Storage

The top court in Germany yesterday issued an order for the deletion of telephone and internet records, collected over a period of months, after the biggest class-action suit ever seen in Germany won a huge victory. Over 34,000 plaintiffs petitioned the federal constitutional court in relation to legislation that requires telecommunications companies to retain a record of all emails, texts, phone calls, faxes and websites used.

Under the legislation, authorities aren’t permitted to actually read the emails or listen to the calls – the only thing the authorities can do is find out who phoned who or who visited which website. However, the federal constitutional court in Germany ruled that this legislation is unconstitutional and creates a ‘Big Brother’ culture – which Germans especially, are wary about. While telecoms data storage is still legal in Germany, the law makers are going to have to develop some stricter guidelines if they want to avoid further litigation.

Cisco’s partners – what’s left of them anyway – have stated that despite the seeming naivety of Cisco removing HP from its partner programme, the move was actually well considered as Cisco is finding lucrative niches in the world of data centres.

Since jumping into the data centre and server market last year, Cisco certainly does seem to be making headway with a number of innovative new products and services. Let’s wait and see what happens!

IBM has come up with a solution to the storage problems medium to large sized businesses face. Known in short as Sonas, the Scale Out Network Attached Storage allows businesses 1-30 pods. Each pod contains a storage controller, a storage node, and either 7,200 or 15,000 drives that can be scaled up to 14.4 petabytes – a massive amount of storage! The Sonas storage solution also comes complete with a Tivoli Storage Manager backup and archive solution. Everything businesses need to quickly, easily and safely store their data!

Dell is developing a range of CloudEdge servers to cater for large but not hyper scale data centre’s that work round fail-in-place hardware. The new CloudEdge servers will be a no-frills version of Dell’s hyper scale data centre servers and they should save a lot of space and energy consumption. Dell currently provides servers for hyper scale data centre’s such as Microsoft and Facebook. Certainly these smaller and less expensive servers should prove popular.

Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and International Business Machines Corp. have been granted $20 million (around £12.5 million) to fund projects that are energy-efficient. The money comes from the United States government fund that aims to promote companies to develop eco-friendly ways to do business. The ‘American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’ as it is known has funding for 14 projects in the telecoms and data storage industries. According to recearch, the telecoms and IT industry uses around 3% of all electricity in the USA so funding eco-friendly projects – such as Yahoo’s efficient data-centre – will really benefit the country.

After using telepresence and unified communications to help other companies reduce their carbon footprint, Cisco is now doing the same – but by using Virtual Facility by Future Facilities. Cisco saved about $120,000 (around £ 73, 295.8) in energy costs per year since implementing a Virtual Facility data centre due to reduced energy and cooling costs using the VF technology. As data centres have become some of the most expensive, energy draining pieces of equipment in the IT age, Cisco is undoubtedly onto a winner with VF. The environment too!

The highest court in Germany is to hold a hearing next Tuesday (22/12/09) to decide whether or not authorities should be allowed to require telecoms companies to store internet and phone data. Currently, the law allows this data storage and telecoms companies have to store the data for six months if there is a chance of it helping with police investigations. 34,000 citizens including the current Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger disagree with this law and have filed a lawsuit to that effect. On one side of the argument, citizens believe that the law violates a basic human right – that of privacy. On the other side, the authorities argue that lives could be saved and crimes prevented as was the case with the Sauerland terror group. Both valid points.

Many companies in many industries have to engage in data storage for compliance reasons nowadays. Even if companies don’t have to store data for compliance reasons, it’s good practice to do so anyway. In the event of a disaster or a legal disagreement or for myriad reasons, data storage is the practical way to keep your company’s records straight. In the current climate however, cost concerns are of primary importance.

One of the most efficient ways to store data and cut costs is to use deduplication. Deduplication ensures that when data is stored, the same files aren’t stored over and over again. Not only does this save storage space and money, it also means that staff can take less time to find the data they really need, without having to trawl through multiple copies of the same data.

The German government has been criticised for an ‘unconstitutional’ new scheme for data storage. Under the scheme, known simply as ‘Elena’ sensitive employee data on personal behaviour such as absenteeism or reprimands will be stored indefinitely. This will apply to up to 40 million German workers who are registered for a pension. Data protection campaigners have reacted furiously to the plan, which should be put into action in January. The storage of such information can only lead to trouble, is the predominant view. 1984 anyone?

Dell are introducing the 10GbE for the Dell EqualLogic storage appliances, improved software for management and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The new offerings are an attempt by Dell to infiltrate the data centre infrastructure market. With new networking, storage and management services, Dell should have no problem making waves in the market. The new FCoE allows IP and storage networks to be built using a singular fabric rather than LAN and SAN which will save companies a lot of money in data storage.