ST Sep-Oct 2021

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

September/October 2021 

Vol 21, Issue 5 

IN OUR DNA: 

Is this the future of data storage? 

BACKUP SOFTWARE: 

Relieving the licensing headache 

STRATEGY: 

'Cloud best', not 'cloud first' 

DATA PROTECTION: 

A matter of trust 

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

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The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

DATA PROTECTION: 

A matter of trust 

September/October 2021 

Vol 21, Issue 5 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 


IN OUR DNA: 

CONTENTS 

Is this the future of data storage? 

BACKUP SOFTWARE: 

Relieving the licensing headache 


'Cloud best', not 'cloud first' 

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS 

COMMENT….....................................................................4 

Nothing new under the sun 

A MATTER OF TRUST..........…..……..................................6 

The hybrid future is all about 'digital trust', argues Edwin Weijdema, Global 

Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam 

06 

OPINION: FLEXIBLE WORKING..................................…8 

The flexible work future is here to stay, argues Herbert Loerch of M-Files - but how 

should organisations respond to the shift? 

TECHNOLOGY: DNA STORAGE..............................................10 

Could DNA offer a solution to the ever-accelerating growth in data? A recent white 

paper suggests it is a distinct possibility 

STRATEGY: DATA PROTECTION….....................................12 

Why is it that the security industry talks about network security, but not data breaches? 

It's clear that something needs to change, and according to Paul German of Certes 

Networks, the change is simple 

10 

CASE STUDY: MEDIAHUB AUSTRALIA...........……......14 

By building a robust storage solution with Scality RING, Australian broadcasters can 

satisfy consumers' voracious appetite for fresh news without a glitch - or egress fees 

MANAGEMENT: DATA SECURITY.....…………............................16 

Cyber-criminals don't take days off, argues Jim Crook, Senior Director of Marketing, 

CTERA, so I.T. professionals can't afford to either 

CASE STUDY: GREATER ANGLIA......................…........18 

Greater Anglia has chosen backup solutions to protect recent infrastructure investments 

and as an initial step in its long-term cloud strategy 

14 

STRATEGY: CLOUD.................................................…...20 

Patrick Smith of Pure Storage explains the three core elements of a successful cloud 

strategy: mobility, consistency and cost control 

ROUNDTABLE: INNOVATION.....................................................22 

When it comes to the data storage industry is there any scope left for real innovation? 

Storage magazine gathered the thoughts of a selection of industry leaders 

ANALYSIS: BACKUP SOFTWARE...............................26 

Jerome M. Wendt of DCIG explains how backup is becoming - slightly - less stressful as 

software providers simplify their licensing options 

18 

CASE STUDY: AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN............…28 

Boston-base media and publishing company America's Test Kitchen has taken its use of 

StorONE's platform way beyond backup 

TECHNOLOGY: DATA FABRIC.....................................30 

Rob Mellor, VP and GM of WhereScape, introduces the four 'pillars' to building a 

successful data fabric for your enterprise 

CASE STUDY: PINEWOOD STUDIOS..........................32 

ATTO delivers key, high-performance Fibre Channel connectivity to one of the world's 

premier studio facilities 

22 

ANALYSIS: TAPE...........................................................33 

LTO tape shipments for 2020 were only slightly down on 2019, despite the broader 

impact of the Covid-19 pandemic 

RESEARCH: REMOTE WORKING................................34 

Remote working has not led to any notable increase in IT downtime, according to new 

research from Databarracks 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Sept/Oct 2021 


MAGAZINE 

03

COMMENT 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

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NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

Our last issue included a piece on the recent developments in the use of 

graphene in the HDD industry, and as if to try and go one better, in this issue 

we look at how DNA itself is being trialled as a data storage medium that 

could be exceptionally well suited to archival. "It's undeniable that data growth is 

outpacing the scalability of today's storage solutions," says Steffen Hellmold, vice 

president, corporate strategic initiatives, Western Digital. "Literally everything we do 

revolves around data - and capturing, storing, processing and mining it only serves to 

create even more data. The density and stability of DNA storage will help the industry 

cost-effectively cope with the expected future growth of archival data for many decades 

to come." 

Also in this issue we have a roundtable piece that asks where the next innovations are 

likely to come from in the sector. Is it really a new product if it's just a slightly 

faster/smaller/higher capacity version of something that a vendor has been selling for 

years? Does attaching a new buzzword to your product mean it is really innovative, or 

just that your marketing team is keeping up to date with what's trending? 

William Toll, head of product marketing at Acronis, says in the article: "There is 

always a continuous string of new innovations in storage, much of it stemming from 

the pace of innovation in the 'nano' technologies that reduce the size of physical 

storage medium. IBM, Microsoft, and others continue to discover and publish research 

in future technologies that are very different from what we have in the market today. 

For example, Microsoft's project silica, the first storage technology for the cloud 

conceived and constructed from scratch. Reliant on ultrafast laser optics to store data 

in quartz glass, this technology is billed to potentially lead to a complete re-think of 

traditional storage system design." 

What about vendors who do not innovate quickly enough? Well, they run the risk of 

becoming irrelevant, and therefore customers will look elsewhere. Lack of innovation 

may also damage vendor brands as these will unlikely be seen as market leaders. The 

result is the company going out of business or getting acquired. "I think that the 

majority of technology is dead after ten years, as are the manufacturers aligned to it 

unless they manage to evolve," warns FalconStor's Steve Ashurst. 

Whatever the next big thing in the storage industry turns out to be, you can be sure 

that we'll be keeping you up to date right here in the pages of Storage magazine - 

some things never change! 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

Sept/Oct 2021 

@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

OPINION: 

OPINION: DATA PROTECTION 

A MATTER OF TRUST 

THE HYBRID FUTURE IS ALL ABOUT 'DIGITAL TRUST', ARGUES EDWIN 

WEIJDEMA, GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIST, PRODUCT STRATEGY, VEEAM 

As hybrid becomes the new norm for 

business, we have to place our trust 

in technology more than ever before. 

When I choose to work from home instead 

of travelling to the office, I am trusting that 

my laptop is fully operational, my Internet 

connection is stable, and that my ability to 

access the cloud-based applications I need 

for my work are available. Subconsciously, 

however, it is natural to worry more about 

your devices and connectivity breaking 

down when working from home than it is 

when you are in the office, with the IT team 

sat in the same building. 

This is because putting our faith in 

technology often requires putting 

confidence in the unknown. Ultimately, this 

is what trust is all about. Am I confident 

enough in someone or something that I can 

overcome the uncertainty of the outcome? If 

you do not trust, you will not take risks or 

take a step into the unknown, which means 

you will never change. So, as organisations 

embrace hybrid working and continue with 

their digital transformation, how can they 

ensure that a lack of trust towards 

technology does not hinder their progress? 

WHO DO YOU TRUST? 

In some ways, the process of trusting a 

piece of technology is similar to trusting 

another human. We have a number of 

mechanisms to draw on. The first is our 

gut instinct. You often know whether or not 

you find someone trustworthy within 30 

seconds of meeting them. This is also true 

of technology. 

Everything from the brand logo to our 

first interaction with the user interface 

adds to our perception of whether or not 

a device, website or communication is 

trustworthy or not. Various studies suggest 

that we are more likely to accept phone 

calls from numbers we recognise. We 

become suspicious about providing 

personal information about ourselves 

when registering for services online, when 

we would have no hesitation giving the 

same details to a bank clerk or mortgage 

advisor. 

While our instincts are indeed powerful 

attributes, they can sometimes let us 

down. In the real world, this might be 

believing one of our friends when the story 

they are telling us is really a joke or 

accidentally driving towards the office on 

a Sunday because our brains are on 

autopilot. In the digital sphere, the 

consequences of us trusting our instincts 

or not thinking properly can be clicking on 

phishing links, compromising personal 

security information, and accepting fake 

news as a truth. 

However, trust is not all about our gut 

reaction. Trust is earned over time, not 

only through our own experiences, but 

also those of others. When you can read 

and learn about others', who you never 

have met, you can reduce your uncertainty 

and posed risk. This way you can take a 

confident step towards the unknown. This 

can be referred to as 'distributed trust'. We 

are more likely to trust a professional 

decorator with a job in our home if he/she 

has a high rating and visible track record 

online where maybe even examples of 

their work are displayed. This is an 

example of distributed trust, and the same 

concept also applies to technology. For 

example, the majority of people are not 

early adopters. These are the fastest 

06 STORAGE Sept/Oct 2021 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

OPINION: 

OPINION: DATA PROTECTION 

"Furthermore, organisations are starting to understand that 

one of the most sure-fire ways for a business to lose trust is 

for their data to be compromised - whether it is stolen or 

simply lost. Veeam research indicates that 41% of business 

leaders think downtime and data loss could negatively 

impact customer confidence. Over half feel that this will 

damage their brand's integrity, showing the inextricable link 

between data protection and trust." 

people to get on board with the latest 

products available or use new technology 

concepts before they become mainstream. 

Technology assists us with reducing the 

uncertainty by giving access to a huge pile 

of information. This information is what 

you can call a trust enabler. 

A LEAP OF FAITH 

The majority of technology users and IT 

teams prefer to wait and see. Whether it's 

buying a new smartphone or migrating 

data to the public cloud, many of us seek 

endorsement from people who have tried 

it first - including our peers, other 

businesses, independent consultants, and 

total strangers on the other side of the 

world. There's a reason the IT industry has 

a saying that no one got fired for hiring 

certain brands. Those brands have built a 

visible track record through being reliable, 

consistent, and delivering a great 

customer experience. People trust that their 

products and services will do what they say 

they will, based on years of success, so 

perceive their risk of investment to be 

lower than working with a brand they are 

less familiar with. 

One of the major trust issues organisations 

have regarding new technology is whether 

or not it is secure. Will their data be safe 

and protected? They also want to know 

what happens when things go wrong. What 

happens if the technology fails? How do we 

get our services back online and quickly 

recover our data? So, with digital 

transformation on the agenda of every 

business boardroom, CIOs and IT teams 

need to feel reassured that the technology 

providers they put their trust in are fit for 

purpose. 

According to the Veeam Data Protection 

Report 2021, 28% of UK business leaders 

see cyber threats as a challenge to their 

digital transformation initiatives in the next 

12 months. This heightened awareness 

towards the impact of cybersecurity 

breaches on their bottom line will weigh 

heavily on the minds of organisations 

when choosing their technology provider. 

Furthermore, organisations are starting to 

understand that one of the most sure-fire 

ways for a business to lose trust is for their 

data to be compromised - whether it is 

stolen or simply lost. Veeam research 

indicates that 41% of business leaders 

think downtime and data loss could 

negatively impact customer confidence. 

Over half feel that this will damage their 

brand's integrity, showing the inextricable 

link between data protection and trust. 

In terms of how successfully 

organisations are currently protecting 

data, backup failures - and incomplete 

backups - are leaving 58% of data 

potentially unprotected. The issues of 

data protection and cybersecurity, 

therefore, pose a threat to both 

businesses' digital transformation but also 

their new hybrid existence. 

It is clear that humans' relationship with 

technology, whether they are a customer, a 

business decision maker, or an employee, 

is all about trust. So, businesses must turn 

to trusted technology advisors who can 

help them ensure that the digital 

transformation that will power their hybrid 

future is built on the solid foundations of 

modern data protection. 

More info: www.veeam.com 


@STMagAndAwards Sept/Oct 2021 


MAGAZINE 

07

OPINION: 

OPINION: FLEXIBLE WORKING 

PREPARING FOR SEISMIC CHANGE 

THE FLEXIBLE WORK FUTURE IS HERE TO STAY, ARGUES HERBERT LOERCH OF M-FILES - BUT HOW SHOULD 

ORGANISATIONS RESPOND TO THE SHIFT? 

The forced and immediate 

shift to remote working which 

happened almost overnight 

in March 2020 will be without 

doubt, one of the most significant 

and long-lasting impacts of the 

Covid-19 pandemic. 

Any belief that this was to be a 

short-term necessity has over 

time, proven to be illusionary. 

Governments not just in the 

UK but across the world have 

responded to waves of the 

pandemic by opening, closing 

and reopening economies in 

repeated fashion. Even now with 

a large percentage of the UK 

population vaccinated, a large 

proportion of UK employees are 

still expected to work from home 

in what is now being termed 

a 'hybrid model'. 

Some of the 

bestknown 

names in the UK have already 

announced plans for introducing more 

hybrid models of working. These include 

insurance giant Aviva, with 16,000 

employees, and accountancy firms BDA 

and KPMG both reporting a move to 

more flexible, hybrid working methods. 

Investment firm JP Morgan and the 

recruiter Michael Page allowed workers 

back in the office in late March, but none 

have reopened at full capacity. In the 

case of WPP the BBC has reported that it 

has reopened its UK offices at 30% 

capacity, and that figure is expected to 

rise to 50% as the summer progresses. 

As a result of this move to a new way of 

working, demand for office space is also 

declining and businesses are choosing to 

restructure the very way they work by 

focusing on their estates. Capita has 

closed 49 out of 294 of its offices since 

the start of the pandemic while one of the 

Big Four, Deloitte, has closed offices at 

Gatwick, Liverpool, Nottingham and 

Southampton. 

Permanent remote working is now 

being considered by both employers 

and employees who would not have 

even considered this back in 2019. 

The World Economic Forum's 

latest Future of Jobs Report, 

published in October 2020, 

states that 44 per cent of 

workers can conduct their work 

remotely, so this is a very real 

dynamic taking place now. 

Further, here in the UK, in a 

September 2020 poll of 

more than 2,000 office 

workers conducted by the 

British Council for Offices, 




MAGAZINE

OPINION: 

OPINION: FLEXIBLE WORKING 

"If organisations are going to prepare for the new normal of flexible work 

environments, the solution is to develop a well-formed, intelligent information 

management strategy - one that promotes a collaborative and productive working 

environment while adhering to governance, compliance and security protocols." 

found that nearly half of respondents 

said that they intended to work from 

home some of the time going well into 

2021, and this was at a time when 

another national lockdown was viewed 

as a mere fantasy. 

These seismic changes - office space 

reductions combined with new flexible 

ways of working and employee 

expectation that this is the 'new normal' - 

are leading to firms having to reevaluate 

not just where they work, but 

how they work. 

Central to this is a desire to ensure that 

this shift towards flexible working does not 

negatively impact productivity, 

collaboration or company culture. There 

is a body of research that has shown that 

people can be as productive, if not more 

so, when working from home. But for 

employers there is a very real issue. The 

practical and operational advantages of 

an entire workforce working from home 

could be diminished. 

If organisations are going to prepare 

for the new normal of flexible work 

environments, the solution is to develop 

a well-formed, intelligent information 

management strategy - one that 

promotes a collaborative and productive 

working environment while adhering to 

governance, compliance and security 

protocols. 

So, what can companies do now to 

prepare a strategy for the new normal of 

remote work? What should they be putting 

focus on in developing that strategy? 

Below are a few key considerations: 

INFORMATION ACCESS & 

WORKFLOW AUTOMATION 

Most businesses live and breathe 

documents, files, and information; it's the 

lifeblood of a streamlined, productive 

and efficient organisation. Arguably, the 

most important tenet of a flexible work 

strategy is that knowledge workers should 

be able to access and manage 

information from any device and any 

physical location, no matter where that 

information is stored - in a CRM, ERP, 

shared drives, network folders. 

Not only should staff be able to access 

information, but the same processes and 

workflows that govern their work should 

be in place in a flexible work 

environment. 

AVOIDING SHADOW IT 

Shadow IT is where individuals 

incorporate technology solutions on their 

own, away from the 'prying eyes' of the IT 

department. For example, one individual 

may decide they're going to use Dropbox 

for cloud storage, while others decide on 

Google Drive and yet others are using 

Box. This creates two types of sprawl - 

content sprawl and SaaS sprawl - both 

despised by IT departments, not just for 

the inconvenience, but for the risk it poses 

to established governance and security 

protocols. An umbrella strategy should 

account for a unified document 

management system. 

INFORMATION SECURITY 

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and 

rogue endpoint applications can put 

information security at risk. Many 

companies are using an array of 

technology to help allay those risks - 

company-sanctioned hardware, VPN 

connections, and a secure enterprise 

information management platform. 

The result of this shift to flexible working 

is that employers now need to be thinking 

now about how they are going to 

respond to employee expectations of new 

working patterns. 

Government guidance which requires 

people to work remotely will not be 

around forever. As so many employees 

have indicated a preference for remote 

working at least part of the time going 

forward, employers need to consider 

carefully how best to remain an employer 

of choice and stay competitive. 

The solution is an intelligent information 

management platform and the key 

principles that underpin a solid flexible 

work strategy are already there. All you 

have to do to work remotely is grab your 

laptop and go. 

All the information, files and documents 

they need are a couple clicks away, from 

any device. It's this concept of any time, 

anywhere access to company information 

- with a built-in information security 

framework - that truly sets the stage for 

remote working, giving staffers the same 

experience as they would at the office. 

And by doing that, companies can ensure 

continuity, productivity, and efficiency of 

their remote workforce. 

More info: www.m-files.com 




MAGAZINE 

09

TECHNOLOGY: DNA STORAGE 

A NEW TWIST ON A LONG-STANDING ISSUE 

COULD DNA OFFER A SOLUTION TO THE EVER-ACCELERATING GROWTH IN DATA? A RECENT 

WHITE PAPER SUGGESTS IT IS A DISTINCT POSSIBILITY 

The DNA Data Storage Alliance, an 

organisation of more than 25 leading 

companies formed by Twist 

Bioscience Corporation, Illumina, Inc. and 

Western Digital together with Microsoft 

Research, has released its first white paper 

titled 'Preserving our Digital Legacy: An 

Introduction to DNA Data Storage'. 

The white paper presents DNA data 

storage fundamentals in an accessible way 

for both technically curious readers and for 

IT business, computer science or electrical 

engineering readers interested in the 

benefits, a technical overview, and the cost 

of ownership of this potential new storage 

medium. It discusses why DNA data 

storage is needed and expected to address 

the exponential growth of digital data. 

A recent Gartner report estimates that in 

2020, humans likely generated in excess of 

400 ZB of digital 'stuff' - equivalent to 400 

million petabytes or 400 billion terabytes 

(or 40 "shoeboxes" of DNA data storage). 

Further, Gartner "considers a 35% per-year 

growth scenario - closely reflecting the 

actual growth we saw beginning in 2010, 

a year that might be considered the birth of 

the cloud storage area - to be most likely." 

According to the report, "new breeds of 

storage technologies must be created in 

response to the emerging need for 

immense available capacity at minimal 

cost in enterprise data centres." 

The density of DNA data storage is 

unprecedented. If the space inside an LTO 

cassette (approximately 235,000 mm3) 

were filled with DNA-based bits, the 

cassette could hold about 2,000,000 TB, 

or about 115,000 times the number of bits 

on an LTO-9 tape. In addition, 

encapsulated DNA has been shown to 

remain stable for 1000's of years, even in 

harsh conditions. 

"It's undeniable that data growth is 

outpacing the scalability of today's storage 

solutions," comments Steffen Hellmold, 

vice president, corporate strategic 

initiatives, Western Digital. "Literally 

everything we do revolves around data - 

and capturing, storing, processing and 

mining it only serves to create even more 

data. The density and stability of DNA 

storage will help the industry costeffectively 

cope with the expected future 

growth of archival data for many decades 

to come." 

Another key aspect of DNA as a storage 

medium is the immutability of its format. 

With existing storage technologies, the 

physical structure and format of the media 

and the methods used to read and write to 

it are fundamentally coupled. In contrast, 

DNA's structure means that any generation 

of DNA readers and writers will be able to 

read and write DNA as long as the bit 

encoding formats are saved. 

"In addition to density, stability and 

eternal relevance, DNA data storage 

provides a far more sustainable option, 

requiring negligible space and energy 

when compared to current data centres 

that use an ever-growing amount of 

power and land," said Emily M. Leproust, 

Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist 

Bioscience. "Taken together, DNA's 

storage density, durability and minimal 

maintenance costs radically reduce the 

cost of maintaining digital data in DNA 

over time, making it a viable option for 

long-term archival data retention." 

"The intersection of the trend toward 

massive digital data storage needs with 

our ability to manipulate synthetic DNA 

offers a vision of data archival ability that 

could radically change the scale of what 

we store and how long we store it," 

comments Karin Strauss, senior principal 

research manager at Microsoft Research. 

"Preserving our digital legacy in turn opens 

possibilities to extract, and even create or 

discover, new knowledge." 

More info: www.dnastoragealliance.org 




MAGAZINE

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STRATEGY: DATA PROTECTION 

THREE REASONS WHY THE SECURITY 

INDUSTRY IS PROTECTING THE WRONG THING 

WHY IS IT THAT THE SECURITY INDUSTRY TALKS ABOUT NETWORK SECURITY, BUT NOT DATA 

BREACHES? IT'S CLEAR THAT SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE, AND ACCORDING TO PAUL 

GERMAN, CEO, CERTES NETWORKS, THE CHANGE IS SIMPLE 

For too long now, organisations have 

been focusing on protecting their 

network when in fact they should 

have been protecting their data. This 

article outlines three reasons why the 

security industry has been protecting the 

wrong thing and what they can do to 

secure their data in future. 

REASON ONE: THEY'RE CALLED 

DATA BREACHES, NOT NETWORK 

BREACHES, FOR A REASON 

Looking back on some of the biggest data 

breaches the world has ever seen, it's 

clear that cyber hackers always seem to 

be one step ahead of organisations that 

seemingly have sufficient protection and 

technology in place. From the Adobe data 

breach way back in 2013 that resulted in 

153 million user records stolen, to the 

Equifax data breach in 2017 that exposed 

the data of 147.9 million consumers, the 

lengthy Marriott International data breach 

that compromised the data from 500 

million customers over four years, to the 

recent SolarWinds data breach at the end 

of 2020, over time it's looked like no 

organisation is exempt from the 

devastating consequences of a cyber 

hack. 

When these breaches hit the headlines, 

they're called 'data breaches', yet the 

default approach to data security for all 




MAGAZINE


STRATEGY: DATA PROTECTION 

these organisations has been focused on 

protecting the network - to little effect. In 

many cases, these data breaches have 

seen malicious actors infiltrate the 

organisation's network, sometimes for 

long periods of time, and then have their 

pick of the data that's left unprotected 

right in front of them. 

So what's the rationale behind 

maintaining this flawed approach to data 

protection? The fact is that current 

approaches mean it is simply not possible 

to implement the level of security that 

sensitive data demands while it is in 

transit without compromising network 

performance. Facing an either/or 

decision, companies have blindly followed 

the same old path of attempting to secure 

the network perimeter, and hoping that 

they won't suffer the same fate as so many 

before them. 

However, consider separating data 

security from the network through an 

encryption-based information assurance 

overlay. By doing so organisations can 

seamlessly ensure that even when 

malicious actors enter the network, the 

data will still be unattainable and 

unreadable, keeping the integrity, 

authentication and confidentiality of the 

data intact without impacting overall 

performance of the underlying 

infrastructure. 

REASON TWO: REGULATIONS AND 

COMPLIANCE REVOLVE AROUND 

DATA 

Back in 2018, GDPR caused many 

headaches for businesses across the 

world. There are numerous data 

regulations businesses must adhere to, 

but GDPR in particular highlighted how 

important it is for organisations to protect 

their sensitive data. In the case of GDPR, 

organisations are not fined based on a 

network breach; in fact, if a cyber hacker 

were to enter an organisation's network 

but not compromise any data, the 

organisation wouldn't actually be in breach 

of the regulation at all. 

GDPR, alongside many other regulations 

such as HIPAA, CCPA, CJIS or PCI-DSS, is 

concerned with protecting data, whether it's 

financial data, healthcare data or law 

enforcement data. The point is: it all 

revolves around data, but the way in which 

data needs to be protected will depend on 

business intent. With new regulations 

constantly coming into play and 

compliance another huge concern for 

organisations as we continue into 2021, 

protecting data has never been more 

important, but by developing an intentbased 

policy, organisations can ensure 

their data is being treated and secured in a 

way that will meet business goals and 

deliver provable and measurable 

outcomes, rather than with a one-size-fitsall 

approach. 

REASON THREE: NETWORK 

BREACHES ARE INEVITABLE, BUT 

DATA BREACHES ARE NOT 

Data has become extremely valuable 

across all business sectors and the increase 

in digitisation means that there is now more 

data available to waiting malicious actors. 

From credit card information to highly 

sensitive data held about law enforcement 

cases and crime scenes, to data such as 

passport numbers and social ID numbers in 

the US, organisations are responsible for 

keeping this data safe for their customers, 

but many are falling short of this duty. 

With the high price tag that data now has, 

doing everything possible to keep data 

secure seems like an obvious task for every 

CISO and IT Manager to prioritise, yet the 

constant stream of data breaches shows 

this isn't the case. 

But what can organisations do to keep 

this data safe? To start with, a change in 

mindset is needed to truly put data at the 

forefront of all cybersecurity decisions and 

investments. Essential questions a CISO 

must ask include: Will this solution protect 

my data as it travels throughout the 

network? Will this technology enable data 

to be kept safe, even if hackers are able to 

infiltrate the network? Will this strategy 

ensure the business is compliant with 

regulations regarding data security, and 

that if a network breach does occur, the 

business won't risk facing any fines? The 

answer to these questions must be yes in 

order for any CISO to trust that their data is 

safe and that their IT security policy is 

effective. 

Furthermore, with such a vast volume of 

data to protect, real-time monitoring of the 

organisation's information assurance 

posture is essential in order to react to an 

issue, and remediate it, at lightning speed. 

With real-time, contextual meta-data, any 

non-compliant traffic flows or policy 

changes can be quickly detected on a 

continuous basis to ensure the security 

posture is not affected, so that even if an 

inevitable network breach occurs, a data 

breach does not follow in its wake. 

TRUSTING INFORMATION 

ASSURANCE 

An information assurance approach that 

removes the misdirected focus on 

protecting an organisation's network and 

instead looks at protecting data, is the only 

way that the security industry can move 

away from the damaging data breaches of 

the past. There really is no reason for these 

data breaches to continue hitting the media 

headlines; the technology needed to keep 

data secure is ready and waiting for the 

industry to take advantage of. 

In the same way noone would leave their 

finest jewellery on display in the kitchen 

window, or leave their passport out for the 

postman to see, organisations must 

safeguard their most valuable asset and 

protect themselves and their reputation 

from suffering the same fate as all those 

other organisations that have not. 

More info: www.certesnetworks.com 



Sept/Oct 2021 


MAGAZINE 

13

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: MEDIAHUB AUSTRALIA 

THE GOOD NEWS 

BY BUILDING A ROBUST STORAGE SOLUTION WITH SCALITY 

RING, AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTERS CAN SATISFY 

CONSUMERS' VORACIOUS APPETITE FOR FRESH NEWS 

WITHOUT A SINGLE GLITCH - OR EGRESS FEES 

Today's television viewers expect content 

to be global, streaming, and available 

on demand. Broadcasters need to be 

first with breaking news and to deliver this 

quickly and efficiently, they need access to 

their rapidly expanding archives at a moment's 

notice. MediaHub Australia has found a costeffective 

solution that is helping Australian 

broadcasters deliver seamless digital content 

into viewers' homes without a single glitch. 

CREATING CONTENT FOR DIGITAL 

CONSUMERS 

Twenty years ago, most news outlets were 

analogue, with a handful of national 

broadcasters. Today, content is global, 

streaming, and available 24x7. Footage can 

be shot and edited from an iPhone. 

Consumers have a constant appetite for 

fresh news. 

For news broadcasters, the pressure to 

retain viewers is relentless. Their challenge is 

to create and distribute compelling news 

content and to do so quickly and efficiently 

ahead of the competition. There is a need 

for broadcasters to re-purpose their 

extensive archives. 

MediaHub Australia is one of the largest 

service providers to accelerate transformation 

in the Australian market. The business, 

founded in 2009, is responsible for the live 

broadcast of more than 400 TV channels and 

90 radio stations. It works with the country's 

biggest broadcasters, including Sky and ABC. 

"Our job is to take our broadcasters' content 

and deliver it to viewers' homes 24 hours a 

day, without a single error," says Alan 

Sweeney, CEO of MediaHub. 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: MEDIAHUB AUSTRALIA 

"Data is everything. There is little value in data if you can't access it. ArkHub enables 

customers to access their archives whenever they need, at no extra cost, and to use 

this content to their advantage." 

SECURE STORAGE & INSTANT 

RETRIEVAL 

One of the practical challenges of the new 

digital landscape for broadcasters is how to 

store and access large volumes of digital 

content. Broadcasters not only need to store 

content securely and efficiently, but they also 

may need to access it at a moment's notice. 

"Clients may store certain data and only 

require access to it three months from now, 

or they may want access to it within minutes," 

Sweeney explains. For instance, this could be 

re-purposing news footage to create an 

obituary or supporting live footage as part of 

a national broadcast. 

"One of the great things about TV is that the 

experience for the viewer appears seamless," 

Sweeney adds, "But behind the scenes there's 

a great deal of work to make that happen." 

MediaHub wanted to create a service to 

allow broadcasters to store content but 

enable instant access without additional fees. 

"Cloud providers do a great job of selling 

storage but there can be high fees for 

egress," Sweeney states. "We wanted to 

create a new model." 

MEETING EXACTING NEEDS 

ArkHub is MediaHub's response, a new 

storage-as-a-service offering aimed at the 

Australian broadcast market. It is built on the 

high storage density of the HPE Apollo 4510 

system, along with Scality RING scalable 

object storage, Cray ClusterStor E1000 

Storage Systems, and Mellanox SX6036 

InfiniBand Switch. 

"Scality enabled us to stretch across our 

own data centres and two co-locations," 

explains Scott Jolly, MediaHub's head of 

operations. "This, plus the density of HPE 

Apollo, allowed us to address fourteen-nines 

durability and data retrieval times, offering 

one hundred percent availability." 

MediaHub is a long-time user of HPE 

servers and storage. This history, Sweeney 

says, plus trusted support and HPE's 

collaboration with Scality, a recognised 

leader in scalable object storage, made the 

decision to use HPE and Scality to develop 

ArkHub an easy one. HPE's collaboration 

with its partner CustomTec was also 

imperative in helping MediaHub on its 

journey. 

"It was clear we had two great professional 

businesses working together to deliver a very 

robust, technologically advanced solution. 

This would allow us to develop a storage 

solution that would meet all the data storage 

requirements of the industry and our clients," 

says Sweeney. 

CONTENT STORAGE WITHOUT 

COMPLEXITY 

The result is a data storage service that 

enables broadcasters to store content with 

instant no-fee retrieval. With huge historical 

archives now accessible, broadcasters can 

create richer content. As-live footage can be 

stored and added to live broadcasts. Content 

can be created, stored, retrieved, and 

broadcast automatically to an agreed 

schedule. It takes much of the complexity out 

of storage tasks. 

For MediaHub, it creates a competitive 

advantage in a crowded field of broadcast 

service providers. "Data is everything," says 

Mark Strachan, head of product at 

MediaHub. "There is little value in data if you 

can't access it. ArkHub enables customers to 

access their archives whenever they need, at 

no extra cost, and to use this content to their 

advantage. We see ArkHub as a major 

contributor to the continued growth of 

MediaHub." 

In addition, ArkHub makes it easier to 

duplicate footage, strengthening business 

continuity. Broadcasters can convert their 

entire libraries of tape files to digital, store in 

ArkHub, and access when needed. Data is 

also kept within Australia, respecting national 

data privacy laws. 

The next opportunity, Strachan adds, is to 

showcase ArkHub as a Dropbox-style facility 

with secure encryption to transfer files within 

and between organisations around the 

world: "After that, data management is the 

next challenge we can solve for clients." 

The launch also opens up opportunities in 

new industries. MediaHub is actively 

pursuing other data-heavy industries, 

including healthcare, education, and 

finance, where secure access to historical 

data is critical. The HPE solution is easily 

expandable, meaning MediaHub can add 

capacity as required. And having premium 

HPE support allows for peace of mind and 

smooth operations. 

"In global terms, Australia is a vibrant but 

small broadcast market," says Sweeney. 

"ArkHub enables us to expand into new 

markets. HPE and Scality create a very real 

gateway into the digital storage market and 

that presents an enormous growth 

opportunity for us." 

More info: www.scality.com 




MAGAZINE 

15

MANAGEMENT: DATA SECURITY 

EVERY DAY IS A DATA PROTECTION DAY 

CYBER-CRIMINALS DON'T TAKE DAYS OFF, ARGUES JIM CROOK, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, CTERA, 

SO I.T. PROFESSIONALS CAN'T AFFORD TO EITHER 

cannot be read even if it is temporarily 

locked due to an assault. 

3. Consider who is viewing your files remotely 

a. Remote access to an organisation's files 

brings a significant number of benefits. 

However, if the wrong people are 

authorised to view specific files, this could 

lead to security issues. To mitigate this, 

ensure that your remote access system, 

whether VDIs, global file systems or other, 

meets corporate security policies and 

provides consistent access control from any 

personnel user device or location. 

Ransomware attacks have skyrocketed 

during the pandemic, by nearly 500%. 

The REvil gang took advantage of the 

USA's 4th July holiday weekend to stage the 

US$70 million Kaseya ransomware attack, 

while the SolarWinds breach took place just 

before Christmas. 

It's clear that cyber-criminals do not take a 

day off. Year-round protection of your data is 

vital to safeguard it so that if an attack does 

occur, your company can continue to operate 

as usual. 

Below are four essential tips for 

safeguarding your organisation's most 

valuable asset: its data. 

1. There is no excuse not to back up your data 

a. It goes without saying that data backups 

are crucial. An external hard drive to store 

backup copies is simply not enough. 

b. An effective data protection strategy 

involves storing at least one previous 

version for a specific retention period (a 

minimum of 30 days) in a read-only 

repository which is in a different location to 

the original. This is the absolute minimum. 

2. End-to-end data security is key 

a. End-to-end security is, of course, a must for 

protecting files against ransomware and 

other cyber-threats. Having data security 

end-to-end implies encrypting data at the 

edge (where it is created), in transit (over 

the network), and in the cloud (where it is 

stored) in cloud-driven distributed setups. 

b. Global file system technology can 

safeguard your data before it leaves your 

devices, workplaces, and servers by 

leveraging source-based encryption at rest 

and in transit. Furthermore, your data 

4. Make sure that passwords are updated 

regularly (and are secure) 

a. Employees relying on weak passwords are 

more likely to be susceptible to successful 

cyber-attacks. When resetting a password, 

make sure it is a combination of letters, 

numbers, and symbols. 

b. Keeping passwords safe on a multi-factor 

authentication password manager and 

updating them regularly is a simple and 

effective way to prevent passwords, and 

your data, getting into the wrong hands. 

You can never have too much security when 

it comes to your business lifeblood, data. An 

effective and regularly updated strategy can 

support a number of aspects, from business 

continuity to innovation, giving your 

organisation a possible edge over the 

competition. 

Cyber-attacks and threats can come from a 

myriad of sources and take hundreds of 

different shapes and forms. A data security 

strategy that can be easily implemented 

organisation-wide will help your business 

prevent its data from being inaccessible or 

worse, falling into the wrong hands. 

More info: www.ctera.com 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: GREATER STUDY: 

ANGLIA 

ON THE RIGHT TRACK 

GREATER ANGLIA HAS CHOSEN ILAND SECURE CLOUD BACKUP FOR VEEAM CLOUD CONNECT AND 

ILAND SECURE CLOUD BACKUP FOR MICROSOFT 365 TO PROTECT ITS RECENT INFRASTRUCTURE 

INVESTMENTS AND AS AN INITIAL STEP IN ITS LONG-TERM CLOUD STRATEGY 

Greater Anglia is a major train 

operating company (TOC) in the 

UK, offering commuter and 

intercity services at 133 stations across 

the region. Greater Anglia's rail network 

ranges from its Central London terminus, 

Liverpool Street station, to Essex, Suffolk, 

Norfolk, parts of Hertfordshire and 

Cambridgeshire and throughout the East 

of England. In 2021, the company was 

named 'Train Operator of the Year' at the 

Rail Business Awards for the second 

consecutive time due, in part, 

to record levels of 

improvement in 

train 

punctuality, a new fleet that greatly 

benefited the customer experience, station 

upgrades and ticketing initiatives. It has 

also been awarded a Gold Accreditation 

through the IdeasUK Innovation 

Assessment. 

Greater Anglia's cloud journey, 

according to Himesh Patel, head of IT 

service delivery, began with two massive 

investments. First, the company decided 

to replace its entire fleet. The new, stateof-the-art 

trains are due for completion at 

the end of 2021 - an unprecedented feat 

in terms of scale. Second, it decided to 

upgrade its wide area network, which was 

low-bandwidth and couldn't allow for 

cross file sharing. Both were vast 

undertakings, which required a lot of IT 

strategy and preparation. During that 

process of evaluation and innovation, 

Himesh saw an opportunity to transition 

to the cloud and seized it. 

"Our new trains are deploying more 

modern technology and infrastructure, 

which meant we had a lot of legacy 

applications that were defunct when the 

new applications came in. From 

there, we began looking to 

push a lot of 

applications either 

to the cloud or 

to 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: STUDY: 

GREATER ANGLIA 

"iland Secure Cloud Backup is an elegant solution, particularly because of its 

integration with Veeam. The overall solutions architecture is what we were 

looking for - something we can certainly build on in the future. All the 

conversations we've had with the iland team have been very transparent, very up 

front. There's been nothing hidden in the whole process." 

suppliers in their own cloud environments," 

said Himesh. 

STARTING THE JOURNEY 

The company's first steps to the cloud 

began with a mandate to secure its 

investment in Microsoft 365, including 

OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint - an 

upgrade that coincided with the new 

network. Himesh and his team knew full 

well that Microsoft offered little in terms of 

backup protection and to make matters 

worse, malicious attacks, like malware, 

ransomware and phishing, were on the rise. 

Himesh selected iland Secure Cloud 

Backup for Microsoft 365 and iland 

Secure Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud 

Connect to address those concerns. With 

iland and Veeam, an industry leader in 

backup solutions, Greater Anglia could 

protect its critical data from internal and 

external cybersecurity threats and reduce 

the total cost of data protection and 

retention, while also moving its overall 

backup strategy toward the cloud and 

away from outdated technologies like 

physical tape. 

"iland Secure Cloud Backup is an elegant 

solution, particularly because of its 

integration with Veeam. The overall 

solutions architecture is what we were 

looking for - something we can certainly 

build on in the future," said Himesh. "All 

the conversations we've had with the iland 

team have been very transparent, very up 

front. There's been nothing hidden in the 

whole process. Our requirements were 

listened to and were factored in. The most 

important thing for us is building a 

partnership with a reliable provider. We're 

not in it for the short term, it's a long-term 

partnership." 

"At iland, we strive to form long-lasting 

customer partnerships with the goal of 

crafting cloud strategies that address their 

immediate needs, while also planning for 

the future," said Johnny Carpenter, vice 

president sales for EMEA. "We're proud to 

consider Great Anglia such a partner as 

well as one of the more innovative and 

forward-thinking companies we've had the 

pleasure of working with. With iland 

Secure Cloud Backup for Veeam and 

Secure Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365, 

Greater Anglia has been able to 

seamlessly transition away from legacy 

hardware, ensure the protection of its 

network investments and implement the 

resources and proven technology 

necessary to succeed on its transition to 

the cloud." 

Before partnering with iland, Greater 

Anglia had been backing up its missioncritical 

applications on premises via 

backup-to-tape, a technology that would 

not provide the flexibility and scalability 

the company needed as its business grew. 

Between the time, energy and resources 

spent on non-innovative maintenance, like 

replacing and storing old tapes, Himesh 

and his lean, 10-person IT team also had 

less time to further business objectives. 

With the move to the iland's cloud 

backup, however, valuable IT resources 

could be freed up to help the business 

complete more profitable business 

objectives, like rolling out the new trains, 

IT infrastructure and associated 

applications, wide area network, and new 

customer information screens at each 

station. 

MOVING UP AND OUT 

"From a strategy point of view, I think 

cloud backup is excellent," said Himesh. "It 

just moves everything up and out, 

removing our responsibility onsite. It will 

allow us to remove a lot of legacy 

hardware eventually." 

According to Himesh, the company's 

latest innovations, especially its move to 

the cloud with iland Secure Cloud Backup, 

are just the beginning. Though they started 

off small, he said they've already started 

internal discussions about migrating 

everything to the cloud with Infrastructure 

as a Service (IaaS) on iland Secure Cloud. 

He's looking forward to being able to 

utilise modern platforms to leverage 

economies of scale and drive cost 

efficiencies. 

"We're committed to going through that 

cloud journey," concluded Himesh. "Right 

now, we're trying to tick the right boxes in 

terms of the sort of people we want to do 

business with and have long term business 

relationships with: iland fits that bill." 

More info: www.iland.com 




MAGAZINE 

19

STRATEGY: CLOUD CLOUD 

'CLOUD BEST', NOT 'CLOUD FIRST' 

PATRICK SMITH, CTO EMEA AT PURE STORAGE, EXPLAINS THE THREE CORE ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL 

CLOUD STRATEGY: MOBILITY, CONSISTENCY AND COST CONTROL 

It's no secret that cloud now plays a pivotal 

role in the success of modern organisations. 

For those looking to thrive, it should be a 

given. When implemented correctly, cloud 

should enable smooth business agility, with its 

scalability and flexible capacity ultimately 

providing technology services on tap. 

Of course, the label 'cloud' has now come to 

mean a whole variety of things, making the 

term itself rather nebulous. Indeed, clouds now 

come in many forms, and with a mindboggling 

variety of providers and services, it 

can make the prospect of implementing a 

cloud strategy, and getting it right, both 

daunting and confusing. 

Most organisations already have a cloud 

strategy which is likely to range from simply 

running productivity tools in the cloud through 

having a single public cloud provider, 

combining public and on-premises cloud and 

potentially consuming services from multiple 

cloud providers. Are these environments 

interoperable? How should an organisation 

plan on scaling and incorporating different 

workloads? Do they provide the capabilities to 

meet business objectives? 

These are significant issues to 

take into consideration when 

developing and iterating a cloud strategy and 

the management of data is worth special 

consideration; they're called 'data centres,' 

although disguised as AZ's and Regions in the 

public cloud. 

Given the importance of an organisation's 

data in an increasingly competitive data-driven 

business climate it is critical that data is 

accessible, protected and mobile whatever its 

mass; managing data easily, consistently and 

cost effectively in the cloud, as on-premises, is 

essential. 

MOBILITY: DON'T LET YOUR DATA GET 

TIED DOWN 

Increasingly, organisations that are adopting 

modern applications are more reliant on the 

individual clouds that house their workloads 

and data. Using multiple providers in this way 

can cause 

issues 

in 

relocating data, or subsets of data, from one 

environment to another. Adopting cloud 

should facilitate application movement 

whereby the underlying data simply moves with 

the application; across Clouds, from Cloud to 

Co-Lo(cation) or Cloud to on-premises. 

Fortunately, mobility is not a myth, and 

organisations can ensure that they don't end 

up with siloed data by opting for providers that 

have multiple integrations and partnerships. In 

particular, organisations should ensure they 

opt for services that integrate seamlessly with 

the large public cloud providers, such as 

Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. 

Adopting Kubernetes allows for enhanced 

data flexibility by being application centric, 

allowing an organisation to move the whole 

app or workload as many times as needed. 

Making sure that the environment is built for 

this portability 

from 




MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: STRATEGY: CLOUD 

"Organisations will also want to ensure that they achieve a 

consistent, simple experience. So you should therefore opt 

for a single cloud provider, right? Not necessarily. A single 

provider may have the ability to offer hundreds of different 

services, but that doesn't mean all of them are right for 

every organisation. Going down this route may mean you 

find yourself 'locked in' without the flexibility you are used 

to and with your data constrained rather than truly 

enabling your business." 

day-one provides future-proofing. 

Organisations therefore need to make sure 

that they have a platform in place that has a 

data-plane fully integrated into Kubernetes. 

CONSISTENCY, THROUGH HYBRID 

Organisations will also want to ensure that 

they achieve a consistent, simple experience. 

So you should therefore opt for a single 

cloud provider, right? Not necessarily. A 

single provider may have the ability to offer 

hundreds of different services, but that 

doesn't mean all of them are right for every 

organisation. Going down this route may 

mean you find yourself 'locked in' without 

the flexibility you are used to and with your 

data constrained rather than truly enabling 

your business. 

Organisations shouldn't assume that the 

public cloud is always the best option for every 

workload. Ultimately, a 'cloud best' rather than 

a 'cloud first' strategy should be adopted: pick 

and choose the use cases where cloud makes 

the most sense, but where this isn't the case 

consider keeping applications under your own 

control, through a hybrid set up. Yet by having 

a portion of their infrastructure on prem, 

organisations don't need to worry about losing 

the flexibility that they've come to love with 

cloud. Increasingly characteristics of the 

cloud are available in a hybrid or onpremises 

environment such as elastic capacity 

and as-a-service consumption-based 

commercial models. 

MAINTAIN COST CONTROL & AVOID 

TECHNICAL DEBT 

Cloud with its inherent scalability is fantastic 

for business agility and offers the potential for 

significant savings for the right workloads. 

However, this scalability can be a doubleedged 

sword. Whilst capacity is available 

instantly with the 'swipe of a credit card', it can 

be easy to get carried away, leading to rising 

monthly bills that are increasingly hard to 

track. Factor in a multitude of consumers and 

services across multiple cloud providers, and 

it's easy to see how cloud spending can get 

out of control. 

This again is where having a 'cloud best' 

strategy comes into play, and where choosing 

a hybrid cloud model can allow for the best 

cost efficiencies. Flexible consumption models 

should be considered as they allow 

organisations to pay for use, rather than 

engaging in the tricky practice of predicting 

capacity requirements in 18 months time. This 

will position organisations to address 

changing business demands whilst avoiding 

excess capacity or unnecessary commitments 

on spend. 

CLOUD AS A VEHICLE FOR GROWTH 

Ultimately, for organisations to get the most 

out of the cloud, they need to be proactive 

rather than reactive in how they use it. This 

means having a fully developed strategy, 

making sure you are equipped for multi-cloud 

up front and not locking yourself out of any 

potential infrastructure upgrades once a cloud 

architecture is established. With flexibility built 

into the architecture ensuring both optionality 

and portability, organisations can ensure they 

are geared for growth and ready for the 

unpredictability that businesses globally have 

had to accept. 

Wherever it is used or stored, an 

organisation's data holds immense value. 

With the right cloud strategy in place, and 

having portability as the lynch-pin, each 

organisation can squeeze every last drop of 

value from its data and use it to gain a 

competitive edge. 

More info: www.purestorage.com 




MAGAZINE 

21

ROUNDTABLE: INNOVATION INNOVATION 

THE NEXT BRIGHT IDEA 

WHEN IT COMES TO THE DATA STORAGE INDUSTRY IS THERE ANY 

SCOPE LEFT FOR REAL INNOVATION? STORAGE MAGAZINE 

GATHERED THE THOUGHTS OF A SELECTION OF INDUSTRY 

LEADERS 

Over the past nine decades, the 

storage industry has brought to 

market numerous groundbreaking 

technologies and architectures - 

many of which are still in use today, years 

after they first appeared on the market. 

Every day, vendors announce new products 

that seemingly offer something different 

from the myriad of competing solutions 

already available; but are these simple 

updates to existing technologies, with a 

few tweaks and additions? Or are they 

truly original? At a time when so much has 

already been developed, can data storage 

vendors still be innovative? 

To find out, let's go back to the very start 

of the storage industry as we know it today. 

It was nearly a century ago, in 1928, that 

Austrian scientist Fritz Pfleumer patented 

the first magnetic tape. Since then, tape 

has played a significant role in the storage 

of data. NAKIVO's director of product 

management, Veniamin Simonov, 

comments: "There have been numerous 

breakthroughs in the data storage industry 

since the times of magnetic tape which, 

over the years, has helped to revolutionise 

how data is stored. Since then, we've seen 

the move to disk storage, which has 

included floppy disks, hard disk drives, 




MAGAZINE

ROUNDTABLE: ROUNDTABLE: INNOVATION 

optical disk drives, and so on." 

But how has storage technology evolved 

over time? Since the inception of data 

storage, the industry has developed different 

media, from tape to disk to SSDs and flash, 

strived to increase areal densities, 

introduced architectures that aim to 

maximise data location and retrieval speeds. 

CONTINUOUS EVOLUTION 

A lot more is on the horizon, according to 

Andrew Buss, research director, European 

enterprise, infrastructure and European 

edge strategies at IDC: "We've seen the 

move from tape to disk, and now the 

migration to flash is underway. We're in the 

early stages of new approaches such as 

Intel Optane persistent memory, which 

allows high performance and highly 

durable storage media, as well as to add 

another level of caching for memory when 

added to the memory bus as DIMMs. In 

addition, new materials and lining 

technologies like graphene may well bring 

the humble spinning disk back to prime 

relevance once again for situations where 

real-time performance is not so critical. In 

the future there are likely to be many 

advances such as holographic storage or 

even DNA-based storage." 

Innovation begets innovation, explains 

Antonio Barbalace, senior lecturer at the 

School of Informatics, University of 

Edinburgh: "With the introduction of flashbased 

storage devices, new hardware 

interfaces have been introduced, including 

the bespoke NVMe. NVMe is under 

continuous evolution, and several diverse 

variations to the interface/protocol have 

been introduced, such as OpenChannel, 

Zoned Namespaces and computational 

storage." 

Curtis Anderson, software architect at 

Panasas, takes this idea and develops it 

further: "If you describe tape, disk, flash, 

NVDIMMs, etc. as 'base technologies', 

then as each new type of base technology 

is added to the mix, the combination 

allows for a much wider range of 

possibilities. Where innovation truly 

happens, however, is in how the various 

base technologies are assembled into 

functional systems." 

MAKING THE LEAP 

Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer at 

Lightbits Labs agrees with this view: "We 

will continue on an iterative path until we 

make a leap - like from paper tape to 

magnetic tape, to disk drives, to solid state 

media and the next jump will be to some 

kind of technology like phase change or 

memristor - and finally to quantum 

storage. In between, there will be lots of 

iterative improvements in speed, density 

and lower cost." 

Has it therefore become harder and 

harder for vendors to come up with truly 

innovative products? Yes and no, 

according to Randy Kerns, senior strategist 

at Evaluator Group: "On the surface, it 

seems that way, but new innovations aren't 

necessarily just a new technology but really 

the application of new technologies." 

David Trachy, senior director of emerging 

markets at Spectra Logic, believes that the 

current battle against attacks on data will 

have an impact on where vendors will 

focus their R&D efforts: "We are likely to 

see the greatest innovations in software, 

specifically around data protection, 

because of the increase in security attacks, 

such as ransomware." 

Billions of dollars are still spent on R&D, 

justifying the thought that something brand 

new is around the corner. William Toll, 

head of product marketing at Acronis, 

says: "There is always a continuous string 

of new innovations in storage, much of it 

stemming from the pace of innovation in 

the 'nano' technologies that reduce the size 

of physical storage medium. IBM, 

Microsoft, and others continue to discover 

and publish research in future technologies 

that are very different from what we have 

in the market today. For example, 

Microsoft's project silica, the first storage 

technology for the cloud conceived and 

constructed from scratch. Reliant on 

ultrafast laser optics to store data in quartz 

glass, this technology is billed to 

potentially lead to a complete re-think of 

traditional storage system design." 

USERS DRIVE CHANGE 

"There have been some real and significant 

storage product innovations in recent 

years," according to Paul Speciale, chief 

product officer at Scality: "Some examples 

are new solutions for data backup with 

deduplication to eliminate backing up the 

same data redundantly many times. New 

hyperconverged solutions have simplified 

deployment and efficiency, and object 

storage has enabled massive scalability for 

billions of files. All of these were driven by 

changing customer needs, such as 

increased data growth rates, access by 

more users via the cloud, and the need to 

be more efficient." 

End user requirements are indeed a 

significant driver behind data storage 

innovation. Industry veteran Alex 

McDonald, chair of a number of technical 

groups at SNIA EMEA and USA, agrees: 

"Necessity is the mother of invention. Users 

are very needy, and the storage industry 

has been hugely inventive. Since everyone 

wants to store their stuff faster, cheaper, 

and bigger, I think the industry has 

delivered on those criteria. External 

demands have driven innovation over the 

years, finding applications for Pfleumer's 

tapes to spinning disks of iron oxide all the 

way to persistent memories made of glass." 

Software-defined storage (SDS), where 

hardware and software are uncoupled, is 

one stand-out innovation that has helped 

the industry enormously, for example by 

allowing greater administrator productivity 

thanks to its ability to leverage automation 

to adapt to changing requirements, and by 




MAGAZINE 

23

ROUNDTABLE: INNOVATION INNOVATION 

"There have been some real and significant 

storage product innovations in recent years… 

New hyperconverged solutions have simplified 

deployment and efficiency, and object storage 

has enabled massive scalability for billions of 

files. All of these were driven by changing 

customer needs, such as increased data growth 

rates, access by more users via the cloud, and 

the need to be more efficient."- Paul Speciale, Scality 

giving end users the flexibility to select 

controller software and hardware from 

different vendors. Adoption rates of cloud 

storage enabled the industry overall to 

grow by bringing costly technologies within 

reach of budget-conscious organisations. 

Interestingly, ESG's senior analyst Scott 

Sinclair disagrees with the notion that 

traditional features of technology were 

recently revolutionised: "You don't see a 

tonne of innovation in traditional features, 

such as snapshots, for example. But 

storage vendors are providing plenty of 

innovation in other areas such as 

combining artificial intelligence (whether 

integrated into the array or part of an 

external management platform) that 

collects telemetry data from the storage 

array to provide actionable insights or 

even automation to administrators. For 

example, leveraging this data and 

integrated intelligence the system can 

more efficiently scale workloads, to 

recommend actions to diagnose or 

remediate issues, or automatically optimise 

the storage resources when application 

requirements change. 

"Vendors are also providing innovations 

to help their storage systems better support 

the needs of cloud-native or containerbased 

workloads. Another area of 

innovation is offering a consumptionbased 

model to procure storage resources, 

rather than just a CAPEX-based model. 

These are just some examples. The key 

takeaway is that there is a tonne of 

innovation going on, but not all of it might 

show up on a traditional data sheet." 

HEALTHY COMPETITION 

We are likely to see R&D around both new 

and current technologies in the future: "I 

think we'll see both the development of 

existing technologies and ground-breaking 

innovations," adds Steve Ashurst, European 

managing director at FalconStor. 

The degree of innovation varies 

depending on where within the storage 

industry we look. When it comes to storage 

features for example, we have witnessed 

developments ranging from enhanced 

support of cloud-native or container-based 

application environments, to streamlining 

hybrid or multi-cloud storage 

management, incorporating intelligence 

into the storage system to simplify, or even 

automate IT operations. 

Competition is another driver behind 

innovation. The storage market is full of 

different solutions to end users' storage 

issues, with vendors competing to market 

the same cure to their storage woes. But, 

as with every industry, competition is 

healthy, and can lead vendors to push 

harder with product development to make 

it as marketable and user-friendly as it can 

be. FalconStor's Ashurst explains: "We see 

existing vendors competing with emerging 

players to create something completely 

new or make improvements in order to 

capitalise on the new underlying trend." 

New trends and challenges are another 

clear driver behind data storage 

innovation. Scality's Speciale explains: 

"New problems require new, innovative 

solutions. We see this happening now as 

the technology landscape is changing 

again during this shift to cloud-native. This 

will once again spark a broad range of 

innovations. We see this happening again 




MAGAZINE

ROUNDTABLE: ROUNDTABLE: INNOVATION 

"Data centres are generally more conservative 

in nature than early adopters in new storage 

technology and connectivity. As reliability is core 

to their mission, there certainly is a tendency to 

stick with the known technology and keep 

updating it to incrementally improve."- Tim Klein, ATTO 

now as the technology landscape is 

changing again during this shift to cloudnative. 

This will once again spark a broad 

range of innovations." 

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW 

Despite an array of products launched on 

the market on a regular basis, most end 

users tend to be cautious when it comes to 

the adoption of new technologies and 

solutions, as Tim Klein, president and CEO 

of ATTO, points out: "Data centres are 

generally more conservative in nature than 

early adopters in new storage technology 

and connectivity. As reliability is core to 

their mission, there certainly is a tendency 

to stick with the known technology and 

keep updating it to incrementally improve." 

The lifecycle of IT products is also a factor 

in the adoption curve, as Speciale explains: 

"Most customers are not diligent about 

discovering what data is stored and on 

what system, and therefore tend to be lax 

and concerned about deleting data to 

reclaim space. This leads to bounded 3-5 

year life spans for most solutions, 

especially on the hardware platform side. 

This, in turn, means that you will find a 

prevalence of solutions newer than 5 years 

within the data centre." 

To truly succeed, a new technology or 

architecture must also be cost-effective, as 

adding a new technology to hundreds or 

thousands of servers can be a costly 

exercise. "Fundamentally - especially at 

scale - it is not affordable to only use the 

latest and greatest technology," tells us 

Lightbits Labs' Eshghi. "Most of the capacity 

in data centres and the cloud is still based 

on spinning disk drives. Spend is different 

though - because (for example) flash drives 

are far more expensive than spinning 

drives, there is more spent on flash drives 

than spinning even though the capacity of 

flash sold is less than spinning drives." 

LESSONS FROM HISTORY 

What about vendors who do not innovate 

quickly enough? Well, they run the risk of 

becoming irrelevant, and therefore 

customers will look elsewhere. Lack of 

innovation may also damage vendor 

brands as these will unlikely be seen as 

market leaders. The result is the company 

going out of business or getting acquired. 

"I think that the majority of technology is 

dead after ten years, as are the 

manufacturers aligned to it unless they 

manage to evolve," warns FalconStor's 

Ashurst. 

Innovation is a necessity for most vendors 

looking to maintain a strong position in the 

market, but the degree to which any 

vendor can innovate is crucial. Being able 

to disrupt the market with a new product or 

service allows a company to cut through 

the noise and become an industry leader, 

instead of following the same technology 

lines as everyone else. 

Data storage may have been around for 

many years, but there still is room for 

vendors to innovate and surprise end users 

with ground-breaking products. This may 

be because they leveraged existing 

technologies or architectures, or possibly 

because they developed a brand-new 

solution. Either way, it seems that there will 

always be something new and shiny on the 

data storage horizon for the industry to 

explore. ST 




MAGAZINE 

25

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: BACKUP SOFTWARE 

BACKUP SOFTWARE LICENSING: FROM A 

POUNDING HEADACHE TO A DULL THROB 

JEROME M. WENDT OF DCIG EXPLAINS HOW BACKUP IS BECOMING - SLIGHTLY - LESS STRESSFUL AS 

SOFTWARE PROVIDERS SIMPLIFY THEIR LICENSING OPTIONS 

If your head starts to hurt any time you 

think about backup software licensing, 

join the crowd. Backup software 

licensing must rank as one of the most 

unpleasant topics to discuss in all of IT. 

Any time any conversation turns to 

backup software licensing, one can 

almost see people's heads start to hurt. 

Unfortunately, avoiding the topic solves 

nothing as one cannot escape the need 

to license backup software. Thankfully, 

backup software providers have made 

significant strides in recent years to 

simplify their licensing. Not only have 

they made it easier to license their 

software, organisations have five simpler 

licensing options from which to choose. 

IT HAS GOT EASIER 

One reason organisations hate discussing 

backup software licensing stems from its 

legacy of complexity. Before they could 

even buy the software, organisations may 

have had to determine one or more of 

the following: 

The number of servers under 

management 

The number and types of applications 

they needed to protect 

The number and types of operating 

systems they needed to protect 

The number and type of backup 

targets used (disk, tape, cloud) 

The amount of data to protect 

The number of storage networking 

ports 

Ascertaining these and other factors 

made protecting organisational data 

more of accounting than a technical 

exercise. Organisations first had to 

inventory their entire IT environment 

before they could buy any software. Then, 

once in place, they had to do so annually 

to renew their software licensing and 

support. 

While all the complexity associated with 

backup software licensing has not gone 

away, it has certainly got easier. This 

simplicity comes out of the new types of 

backup software licensing that providers 

use. Backup software licenses are now 

largely all-inclusive in that they include 

most or all their software features for one 

flat fee. However, each provider 

calculates its total licensing cost using a 

different methodology. 

Here are the five most common backup 

software licensing models available from 

providers today. 

1 - Capacity-based - Backend Terabytes 

(BETB) 

This model bases its software licensing 

cost upon the total amount of data stored 

and managed in its vault. Providers 

offering this option usually license their 

software in 1TB increments with a one TB 

minimum purchase. Any time an 

organisation crosses a 1TB threshold, it 

must obtain another 1TB capacity license 

from the provider. These TB licenses may 

be calculated annually or even monthly. 

Assuming the backup software offers 

compression and deduplication, some 

organisations may find this licensing 

approach attractive. Organisations can 

potentially protect a lot of data for a 

nominal cost. 




MAGAZINE

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: BACKUP SOFTWARE 

"While all the complexity associated with backup software licensing has not gone 

away, it has certainly got easier. This simplicity comes out of the new types of 

backup software licensing that providers use. Backup software licenses are now 

largely all-inclusive in that they include most or all their software features for one 

flat fee. However, each provider calculates its total licensing cost using a different 

methodology." 

2 - Capacity-based - Frontend Terabytes 

(FETB) 

This model bases its cost upon the total 

amount of data residing on servers that 

organisations must back up. Providers 

offering this option usually license their 

software in 1TB increments with a one TB 

minimum purchase. Any time an 

organisation crosses a 1TB threshold, it 

must obtain another 1TB capacity license 

from the provider. These 1TB licenses may 

again be calculated annually or monthly. 

This licensing option generally appeals to 

organisations in one of two situations: 

either they have a lot of data that does not 

deduplicate or compress well, or their 

applications experience high data change 

rates, but not much growth. In these two 

scenarios, the amount of data being 

protected stays roughly the same making 

this licensing option attractive. 

3 - Per CPU Core 

This model determines cost by counting the 

total number of CPU cores in the server 

and licensing the software accordingly. As 

the number of server CPUs changes, the 

software licensing also changes. These per 

CPU core license calculations may be done 

annually or even monthly. 

The trick here is to establish which server 

CPUs the backup software counts. Some 

software licenses count the number of 

CPUs in the physical machine that hosts 

the backup software. Others count the 

number of CPUs in the virtual or physical 

machines they protect. 

This licensing option often appeals to 

heavily virtualised organisations that use 

powerful physical machines to host their 

virtual machines (VMs). In this way, they 

can protect many VMs at a potentially 

lower licensing cost. 

4 - Per Protected VM 

This model emerged in the era of server 

virtualisation. It determines cost by 

counting the total number of VMs in the 

environments and licensing its software 

accordingly. As the number of VMs 

changes, the software licensing changes to 

match. These per VM license calculations 

may be done annually or monthly. 

This licensing option often appeals to 

heavily virtualised organisations that only 

have a few VMs and expect minimal VM 

growth. In this way, they can protect their 

VMs at a potentially lower licensing cost. 

5 - Per Physical Backup Server 

This approach most closely resembles the 

legacy model of licensing backup 

software. An organisation buys a single 

backup software license that it installs on 

one physical backup server. The main 

difference from past licensing models is 

that this software license includes most or 

all the software's features. Features 

organisations should prepare to license 

separately are integration with 

deduplication appliances or storage arrays 

and replication. 

This licensing option often makes sense 

for environments that want the simplest of 

the licensing options. They do not need to 

count or monitor the number of CPUs, 

VMs, or total capacity to calculate backup 

software licensing. 

NOT CURED, BUT GETTING BETTER 

Organisations have no shortage of data 

centre topics to discuss that cause them 

ample stress and pounding headaches. 

While one cannot and should not consider 

backup software licensing as solved, 

recent changes have certainly simplified it. 

Backup software providers now primarily 

license their backup software in one of 

these five methods. Further, many give 

organisations at least two options to 

license their software. One even analyses 

each client bill monthly and bills the client 

based upon the licensing model most 

favourable to the client. 

These types of improvements in backup 

software licensing have helped to make it 

less complex than it used to be. While 

potentially still a hassle, it now more 

closely resembles a dull throb than the 

pounding headache it used to be. 

More info: www.dcig.com 




MAGAZINE 

27


CASE STUDY: AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN 

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS 

BOSTON-BASED MEDIA AND PUBLISHING COMPANY AMERICA'S 

TEST KITCHEN HAS TAKEN ITS USE OF STORONE'S PLATFORM 

WAY BEYOND BACKUP 

StorONE's built-in NAS capability allowing 

users direct access to archive their old 

projects. StorONE provides them with 

better insight into what exactly is in their 

archive and has eliminated the need for a 

tape library. 

"Our journey with StorONE continues to 

evolve," Brandt explains, "as we build our 

layers of archival storage and begin using 

it in a primary storage capacity." 

America's Test Kitchen (ATK) is 'where 

curious cooks become confident 

cooks'. A media and publishing 

company based in Boston, ATK produces 

unique and original content for television, 

video, websites and podcasts, and printed 

magazines and books. Their awardwinning 

and respected family of brands 

includes: America's Test Kitchen and 

Cook's Country television shows, Cook's 

Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines, 

ATK Books, ATK Kids, ATK Online 

Cooking School, ATK websites, and the 

Mystery Recipe, Proof and The Walk-In 

podcasts. When ATK needed help 

archiving and protecting their extensive 

library of media assets, they turned to 

StorONE's S1:Enterprise Storage Platform. 

"When evaluating our content 

requirements and how best to protect and 

archive our most critical assets, I didn't 

want to get locked into a storage solution 

that could only store backups, or that 

could only be used as an archive," said 

Dustin Brandt, Director of IT at ATK. 

"StorONE enables us to archive and 

consolidate 20+ years of digital assets, 

use it as an automated backup target, 

serve up storage for virtualisation 

development, and provision on-demand 

storage shares for project development. 

We're doing this at a price that is 

dramatically less than competing, singleuse 

systems, and for the types of files and 

content that we deal with, we've even 

found storing our backups on StorONE to 

be less expensive and more accessible 

than putting them in the cloud." 

ELIMINATING TAPE ARCHIVES 

ATK has been using StorONE for over two 

years and continues to leverage its 

flexibility to support multiple use cases. 

ATK initially used StorONE to migrate 

away from tape library archives and 

provide a better overall administrative 

experience for dealing with long-term, 

cooler storage. Shortly after 

implementation, ATK began leveraging 

Within the first year, ATK began using 

the same StorONE system as an NFS 

archive for its Rubrik backup appliance. In 

this scenario, ATK uses StorONE as the 

target for its automated backups and 

lifecycle policies of production 

virtualisation and NAS systems. 

As Brandt explains: "The flexibility of the 

system and ease of use of StorONE allows 

us to stay responsive to the company's 

needs and quickly devise and provision 

new solutions." Using their StorONE in 

this way, ATK is able to balance its archive 

strategy and reduce the company's 

dependency on any single public cloud 

provider and their associated costs. In 

2020, ATK began using StorONE as a 

storage host for development 

virtualisation workloads, and in 2021, 

they are beginning to move some of their 

production NetApp NAS workloads to 

StorONE as well. 

AUTOMATIC TIERING 

"StorONE rewrote and collapsed the 

legacy storage IO stack to deliver a 

unique storage solution that has the 

flexibility to meet a wide variety of storage 

use cases from a single storage platform," 

said StorONE CEO, Gal Naor. "ATK is an 

excellent example of our typical customer 

journey. They start with backup or archive, 

and then as other workloads emerge or 

old systems reach the end of life, they 

move them to the StorONE platform." 

At ATK, StorONE runs on a highly 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN 

"When evaluating our content requirements and how best to protect and archive 

our most critical assets, I didn't want to get locked into a storage solution that 

could only store backups, or that could only be used as an archive. StorONE 

enables us to archive and consolidate 20+ years of digital assets, use it as an 

automated backup target, serve up storage for virtualisation development, and 

provision on-demand storage shares for project development." 

available storage controller with internal 

flash drives, which provide rapid data 

ingest. Connected to the HA storage 

controller are 2PBs of hard disk storage 

for long-term storage. StorONE 

automatically tiers data as it ages to the 

HDD tier for faster recall performance. 

StorONE's volume isolation technology 

enables ATK to fine-tune how each 

workload will use the flash tier. Some VMs 

are dedicated to flash-only, while the 

archive and backup workloads mostly use 

hard disk capacity. ATK uses StorONE 

snapshots to increase data retention and 

protect against accidental user deletion or 

ransomware. 

Brandt summarised his StorONE 

experience by saying, "Storage has always 

been a challenge for us - the volume and 

types of media files we work with make it 

imperative for us to respond quickly to the 

business' needs. I just need it to work, and 

StorONE makes storage simple. I continue 

to be amazed that this one solution can 

support many use cases without switching 

storage hardware." 

StorONE's Enterprise Storage Platform 

enables customers to solve very tactical 

challenges like backup, archive, or tape 

replacement and then add productionclass 

use cases to the platform at their 

pace. The initial tactical project turns into 

a long-term storage consolidation strategy. 

More info: www.storONE.com 




MAGAZINE 

29

TECHNOLOGY: DATA FABRIC DATA FABRIC 

THE REALITY OF DATA FABRIC 

ROB MELLOR, VP AND GM OF WHERESCAPE, INTRODUCES THE FOUR 'PILLARS' TO BUILDING A 

SUCCESSFUL DATA FABRIC FOR YOUR ENTERPRISE 

In today's world, enterprises must be agile. 

As the pandemic has demonstrated, they 

need to be able to change their objectives 

and goals to support operating processes 

and decision-making capabilities as quickly 

as possible. 

Businesses need to be able to find and use 

the analytical data and assets that support the 

strategic and tactical decisions they have to 

make daily. But how do they achieve the 

nirvana of complete and unrestricted access 

to analytical data? The answer is through a 

data fabric. 

WHAT IS A DATA FABRIC? 

The term 'data fabric' was first coined by 

Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna in a 2016 

report. It has been widely adopted by vendors 

and other analyst firms in the interim. But while 

the name might be new, the objective behind it 

isn't: an architecture that includes all forms of 

analytical data for any type of analysis that 

can be accessed and shared 

seamlessly across the entire 

enterprise. 

A data fabric provides a better 

way to handle enterprise data, 

giving controlled access to data 

and separating it from the 

applications that create it. This is 

designed to give data owners 

greater control and make it 

easier to share data with 

collaborators. 

According to Gartner, there are 

four key pillars in a data fabric 

architecture: 

1. The data fabric must collect 

and analyse all forms of 

metadata. 

2. It must 

convert passive 

metadata to 

active 

metadata. 

3. It must 

create and 

curate 

knowledge 

graphs. 

4. It must have a robust data integration 

backbone that supports all types of data 

users. 

WHAT CAN A DATA FABRIC DELIVER? 

The goal of data fabric is for users to be able 

to quickly and easily access the data they need 

and analyse it. To achieve this, they need a 

data catalogue function. The data catalogue 

provides a repository for all technical 

metadata, a business glossary, data dictionary 

and governance attributes. 

It acts as an easy-to-use entry point that 

employs non-technical language to let users 

view quickly what data is available and what 

analytical assets exist (for example, reports, 

visualisations, advanced predictive and other 

models). 

If the catalogue tells them the data they require 

is not available, they can submit a request to 

technical personnel to allow that data into the 

environment. Once they have permission to 

access the information, they should be able to 

use it to make decisions, either by creating 

their analytical asset with the data or through 

an existing asset that they can tweak to fit their 

needs as required. 

Once the analysis is complete, users should 

be able to continue to examine data and 

assets in their area or find other information by 

returning to the catalogue. 

HOW IS THIS ACHIEVED? 

Making data access and analysis easier for 

users frequently makes the infrastructure 

behind it more complicated. From a technical 

perspective, this means the people who build 

and maintain the data fabric need to focus on 

a number of issues. For example, they can 

avoid the duplication of data and analytical 

assets by ensuring they know what already 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: DATA TECHNOLOGY: DATA FABRIC 

"Making data access and analysis easier for users frequently makes the 

infrastructure behind it more complicated. From a technical perspective, this 

means the people who build and maintain the data fabric need to focus on a 

number of issues. For example, they can avoid the duplication of data and 

analytical assets by ensuring they know what already exists in the environment." 

exists in the environment. 

They need to be able to use the data 

catalogue information to rapidly ascertain if 

the data being requested exists or not. If it is 

available, they may only need to update the 

catalogue and notify the user it is there. The 

data catalogue needs to be updated with 

any additions, edits, or changes made to the 

data fabric, its data or analytical assets. 

Data lineage and usage must be 

continuously monitored. 

Data modelling supplies much of the 

information found in the data catalogue, 

including changes to database design, the 

existence of data and its location, definitions 

and other glossary items. It is vital data 

models are connected to the Business 

Glossary to ensure a well-managed data 

catalogue. 

The data fabric relies on three different 

analytical components: the Enterprise Data 

Warehouse (EDW), the Investigative 

computing platform (ICP) and the real-time 

analysis (RT) engine. Data integration, 

extracting data from sources and 

transforming it into a single version that is 

loaded into the EDW, is a key component in 

the creation of analytical data for the EDW. 

This ETL (extract/transform/load) or ELT 

(extract/load/transform) process creates the 

trusted data used in producing reports and 

analytics. 

The advantage of ELT is that data is extracted 

and loaded into the warehouse directly and 

transformation logic is applied to the 

warehouse. Modern warehouses are far more 

powerful than ETL engines so they can 

complete the transformation work far more 

quickly. In addition, ELT is designed to handle 

all types of data, including unstructured data 

in data lakes. 

For the ICP (or 'data lake'), raw data is 

extracted from sources and reformatted, 

integrated and loaded into the repository for 

exploration or experimentation. This repository 

is used for data exploration, data mining, 

modelling, cause and effect analyses and 

general, unplanned investigations of data. 

Data virtualisation is another technology that 

underpins the data fabric because it removes 

the requirement to move data physically 

around the architecture by providing it 

virtually. The ability to provide access to all 

data, regardless of its location, is a major step 

toward what is sometimes referred to as "data 

democratisation". 

Usage statistics found in the data catalogue 

are often created by monitoring technologies 

in the EDW and ICP. Monitoring who is using 

data and what data is being used provides an 

insight into the overall performance of 

analytical repositories. For example, data that 

is rarely used can be stored in archive media. 

Spikes in utilisation can be planned for and 

data frequently used together can be cached 

or brought together virtually for better 

performance. 

Finally, databases cannot be overlooked as 

important components of the data fabric 

environment. Previously, the data warehouse 

and the investigative area were separated 

because they used incompatible technologies. 

It is now possible, with data storage being 

separated from computing, for the data 

warehouse and ICP to be deployed on the 

same storage technology. 

DATA FABRIC IS A REALITY 

If data fabric is to succeed, the organisation 

needs to maintain the integrity of the 

architectural standards and components it is 

built on. If silos are created temporarily as 

workarounds, they need to be decommissioned 

when they are no longer needed. 

The value of the data fabric depends on the 

strength of the information gathered in the 

data catalogue. Out-of-date, stale, or 

inaccurate metadata mustn't be allowed to 

leak into the catalogue. 

Legacy analytic components should be 

reviewed and redesigned because while 

deploying them in the data fabric may be 

convenient, it could cause problems when 

integrating them into the whole fabric. 

These are all issues that can be addressed 

and overcome. The technologies already exist 

to build the data fabric and there are a 

number of suppliers that can provide many of 

the components that stitch it together. It may 

only be five years since data fabric came into 

existence as a term but it is already very much 

a concrete reality. 

More info: www.wherescape.com 




MAGAZINE 

31

CASE STUDY: PINEWOOD STUDY: 

STUDIOS 

"THEY ALWAYS JUST WORK STRAIGHT OUT 

OF THE BOX…" 

ATTO DELIVERS KEY, HIGH-PERFORMANCE FIBRE CHANNEL CONNECTIVITY TO ONE OF THE 

WORLD'S PREMIER STUDIO FACILITIES 

Pinewood Studios is one of the world's 

premier studios, renowned for its 

versatility and unique complement of 

exceptional facilities, services and expertise. 

Home to the legendary 007 Stage, a further 

23 stages, 3 TV studios, a permanently-filled 

Underwater Stage, acres of backlot and 

thousands of square feet of production office 

and workshop space, Pinewood has enabled 

the creation of the most enduring productions 

over its 80-year history. Films from franchises 

including Jurassic World, Star Wars, and 

Harry Potter rely on Pinewood's technological 

capabilities as much as the physical space. 

Just as technology has simplified many 

aspects of film and broadcast production, it 

also has created new challenges for studios. 

Directors and other production artists are 

generating more files than ever and each 

year, as technology advances, so do the sizes 

of those files. 

Pinewood Digital (Pinewood Studios' Dailies 

facility) previously ran an IP-based storage 

solution, which delivered data over a 10Gb 

Ethernet network. However, with the 

introduction of new large format cameras 

such as the Arri ALEXA 65 and 'scan once' 

35mm workflows they, like the rest of the 

industry, had seen significant growth in file 

sizes. Their existing infrastructure simply 

could not cope with the increased volume of 

data, which forced Pinewood to seek a 

solution that could handle the data demands 

of today and tomorrow. 

Pinewood Digital is responsible for 

processing data acquired from digital 

cameras on shoots and from traditional 

film scanning workflows. The data is 

ingested into servers from which the media 

is colour corrected, processed for editing 

and online review. 

There is a collaborative component where 

teams can be working on projects in-house 

and remotely, often at the same time, 

requiring files to be available to all for editing 

and review. In addition, Pinewood is 

responsible for facilitating long and short-term 

archival of the data to both linear and diskbased 

mediums. Ethernet, even at the very 

latest speeds, might not reliably solve the 

storage networking issues Pinewood had run 

up against. 

ATTO Technology is well known in the media 

and entertainment space as experts in solving 

storage network and connectivity challenges. 

No other company specialises in this type of 

infrastructure optimisation and their solutions 

are found not only in studios across the globe 

but in nearly any environment where highperformance 

data movement is critical. 

The solution for Pinewood was to upgrade 

their infrastructure from IP-based to a Fibre 

Channel Storage Area Network. While speed 

was a fundamental factor, Fibre Channel, and 

more specifically ATTO Fibre Channel with 

their proprietary technologies, provided 

additional benefits such as load-balancing 

and failover. Additionally, Pinewood clients are 

Apple macOS users, where many of those 

platforms require a Thunderbolt adapter to 

connect to external Fibre Channel storage. 

In all, ATTO ThunderLink Thunderbolt to 

16Gb Fibre Channel adapters provided key 

Fibre Channel connectivity, by connecting the 

Macs to Fibre Channel switches with a Rohde 

and Schwarz SpycerBox and ATTO Celerity 

Fibre Channel HBAs on the other side. 

At the time, Pinewood Digital had over 15 

servers with 40 clients attached across various 

sites. By upgrading to a Fibre Channel SAN 

they received huge increases in speed and 

significantly enhanced project sharing and 

collaboration. 

ATTO designed ThunderLink Thunderbolt to 

Fibre Channel adapters specifically to support 

the work of media professionals who need to 

create high-quality deliverables within tight 

schedules. Their unique design characteristics, 

tested compatibility, performance and support 

make ThunderLinks faster, more powerful and 

reliable than any other Thunderbolt adapter. 

ATTO ThunderLinks arecurrently the only 

Thunderbolt to Fibre channel adapters on the 

market. 

Former head of Pinewood Digital, Thom 

Berryman, chose to use ATTO products for 

Pinewood's connectivity peripherals including 

ATTO ExpressSAS HBAs as a quick and 

reliable solution for LTO archiving. "They just 

always work straight out of the box," Berryman 

said of ATTO's portfolio. ATTO also achieved 

Berryman's goal of being able to support a 

variety of operating systems including Mac, 

Windows and Linux. 

More info: www.atto.com 




MAGAZINE

ANALYSIS: ANALYSIS: TAPE 

TAPE KEEPS PACE WITH THE MARKET 

LTO TAPE SHIPMENTS FOR 2020 WERE ONLY SLIGHTLY DOWN ON 2019, DESPITE THE BROADER IMPACT 

OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC 

rule, which involves at least three copies or 

versions of data stored on two different 

storage mediums, one of which is off-site 

and one that is offline - or an 'air gap'. 

Demonstrating its strong ability to protect 

data, LTO tape technology offers an 

inherent air-gap, say vendors, which is 

essential to thwarting increasingly 

sophisticated ransomware and malware 

threats that may corrupt live, backup, and 

archive data simultaneously. 

The LTO Program Technology Provider 

Companies, Hewlett Packard 

Enterprise, IBM Corporation and 

Quantum have released their annual tape 

media shipment report for 2020, detailing 

year-over-year shipments. The report 

showed 105,198 petabytes of total tape 

capacity (compressed) shipped in 2020, 

slightly short of 2019 (itself a record year). 

For context, real GDP fell to a -5% growth 

rate during the same time period. 

"Despite the unexpected headwinds for 

many segments of the technology industry 

produced by the pandemic, overall LTO 

tape capacity shipped in 2020 was strong in 

context," said Eric Bassier, Senior Director, 

Quantum. "Coming off record capacity 

shipped in 2019, we were optimistic for 

2020 - but global shutdowns and other 

factors outside of our collective control led 

to a reduced performance. We're optimistic 

that there will be a return to the prior 

capacity growth trend in 2021 as 

companies return to making storage 

purchases, account for new trends requiring 

stronger security measures, and we continue 

to see shifts in purchases from older to 

newer generations of LTO tape." 

Emerging trends during the pandemic 

include increased ransomware attacks and 

other cybersecurity threats that increased in 

severity as remote work became the norm 

for millions of workers. These new 

vulnerabilities for corporate enterprises led 

to a surge to record levels of ransomware 

attacks in 2020, exacerbated by a 

distributed workforce, stretched-thin IT 

teams and 'bad cyber hygiene' by remote 

workers. The trend reinforced the need for 

organisations to adopt the "3-2-1-1" backup 

"LTO tape continues to keep pace with the 

IT market as current and emerging users 

discover new ways to incorporate it into their 

data protection practices," commented Phil 

Goodwin, Research Director, IDC. "The 

prevalence of ransomware exploded during 

the pandemic as the shift to remote work 

created more opportunities for threats to 

corporate networks. With the native ability to 

provide air gap and fast restore, LTO tape 

will continue to be a core component of 

data management best practices." 

LTO-8 technology already available offers 

up to 30TB of compressed capacity, with 

transfer speeds of up to 360 MB/sec native, 

750 MB/sec compressed. When you 

compare native data rates LTO-8 tape is 

faster than the latest generations of hard 

disk drives with transfer rates of 210 MB/s. 

LTO tape's features make it a critical 

component of any modern-day data storage 

infrastructure. LTO tape offers secure and 

reliable long-term archival storage for data 

after it is no longer accessed frequently at a 

cost substantially lower than flash disk or 

cloud when considering factors such as 

power, cooling and retrieval. 

More info: www.lto.org. 




MAGAZINE 

33

RESEARCH: 

RESEARCH: REMOTE WORKING 

PROTECTING THE HOME FRONT 

REMOTE WORKING HAS NOT LED TO ANY NOTABLE INCREASE IN IT DOWNTIME, ACCORDING TO 

NEW RESEARCH FROM DATABARRACKS 

New research by Databarracks has 

revealed 27% of organisations 

experienced no unplanned IT 

downtime in the last 12 months, showing 

no increase on 2019. This is despite 

widespread remote working and a heavy 

reliance on connectivity and cloud 

services. 

The findings are from Databarracks' 

2021 Data Health Check. Running since 

2008, the annual report surveys over 400 

IT decision-makers in the UK on remote 

working, cybersecurity, cloud and IT 

resilience. 

Peter Groucutt, Managing Director of 

Databarracks, said: "Remote working has 

proven equally reliable as the office since 

the start of last year, despite its perceived 

risks. Remote working changes your risks, 

but not necessarily for the worse. Home 

broadband is far less reliable than 

resilient business connections, but the risk 

is spread across your staff. An outage of 

internet at the office will affect all staff 

whereas home internet issues will only 

affect one or some staff." 

Other key figures from the research 

include: 

Cybersecurity issues were the biggest 

cause of downtime for 13% of 

businesses, but showed no uplift on 

the previous year 

Connectivity problems accounted for 

16% of downtime and cloud outages 

6%, again showing no significant 

change on the previous year 

49% of devices used by staff are 

owned by the company, up from 45% 

in 2020 - steps are being taken to 

further increase security 

"This decentralised risk also changes the 

way that we need to think about 

resilience," Groucutt goes on. "Users' 

connectivity and devices are now more 

critical. It's a similar picture for cloud 

outages, which also haven't caused more 

downtime than previous years. Most 

organisations now operate a hybrid-cloud 

with a combination of on-premises IT and 

cloud. This decentralisation of IT is again 

good news for resilience because it 

reduces the risk of a complete outage. 

Incidents for services like Teams or Slack 

are widely reported because they affect so 

many organisations but our research 

shows that cloud outages aren't causing 

more downtime. The remote working 

experiment has had a positive impact on 

the wellbeing of many employees, but this 

data shows it's also worked well from an 

IT resilience standpoint." 

THE RISK OF BYOD 

Discussing changes to BYOD policies, 

Groucutt added: "Since last year, we've seen 

more companies issue all employees with 

devices. There was no change in the number 

of organisations who have an entirely BYOD 

policy, but the companies that had a mix of 

employee and company-owned devices 

dropped. This is good news from a security 

perspective. BYOD isn't necessarily less 

secure, but company-owned devices are the 

simplest to manage." 

"Overall, there's much to be optimistic 

about for the future of remote working," 

concludes Groucutt. "It worked so very well 

last year when we had no alternative and it 

will continue to play a big role even when 

the world can return to the office. The key 

now is to sustain this momentum. This means 

preparing for other potential vulnerabilities 

as hybrid working practices become the 

norm. This includes having comprehensive 

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery 

plans in place in the event of a large-scale 

cyberattack or cloud outage." 

Readers can download the full 2021 Data 

Health Check report at the URL below. 

More info: 

www.databarracks.com/resources/datahealth-check-2021 




MAGAZINE

ST Sep-Oct 2021

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