A terribly confusing survey was recently published in eWeek, but the survey at least touches upon an important topic. The main idea is that companies are not deleting data as securely or often as they should. The survey tries to emphasize that “data retirement” is not the same as data deletion, data erasure, or data destroying. To me, it sounds like words all describing the same thing.

What typically gets talked about in industry circles is how to securely store data for long periods of time. Where do we put it, how can we keep it safe. But companies are also struggling to get rid of data. If data is never going to be accessed again, it should be deleted. There’s no reason to hold onto it. Some industry regulations mandate that data be “retired” or deleted after a set period of time, to protect sensitive information. Companies need to figure out how to dispose of this data securely and effectively.  Manually going through TB’s of data to determine what should go is a poor option.

StorFirst EAS has built-in, automated measures that help companies retire data from an archive when companies determine that data is no longer needed. Within our software, there’s two options related to data retirement that we’d like to clarify: lifespan policies and retention policies.

*Keep in mind: As data passes through the StorFirst file system, the software will send a copy of each file to EACH tier in the archive infrastructure (like disk, tape, and cloud).*

Lifespan policies are assigned for each individual tier. This means that when the StorFirst EAS Auto-Purge job moves throughout the tiers of storage, looking for data to purge, data that has exceeded the assigned lifespan policy for that volume will be purged. When we say “purge,” we mean that the data still exists on other storage tiers and within our file system. Data has only been removed from a specific tier. Lifespan has more to do with data reduction, in that it allows companies to remove data from more expensive, high-speed storage once the value of this data decreases over time.

Retention policies, on the other hand, cover the entire file system and are designed to protect against manual deletion. By setting the retention policy to Permanent, users will never be able to manually delete data; data can only be deleted through the Auto-Purge job. “Deletion” means that the data has been removed from all available tiers and the file system.

This feature is great for compliance-driven environments (healthcare, government, legal, etc.) that require data to be held, as it prohibits manual deletion of information until the set retention period has expired. The retention settings span from 0 days (meaning data can always be manually deleted) to Permanent (meaning that data can never be manually deleted).

Over the course of Seven10’s history, we’ve largely been an OEM company. Back in the day, Fidler OEM’d StorFirst EAS to provide archive gateway support to optical storage. Shortly thereafter, Metavante used StorFirst EAS as the archive layer in their check imaging application, writing to compliant storage like Centera and tape. For the past 5 years, AGFA has OEM’d StorFirst EAS, embedding it within their mission-critical cardiology application. When doctors use the AGFA application to recall cardiology images from storage systems located in local and remote data centers, they (unknowingly) use StorFirst EAS to do so.

As the company and the StorFirst EAS product has matured, we realized that we needed to establish an identity for the technology. It possessed enterprise-level features, had been tested and used in the market for nearly 10 years under OEM’s, and was ready for something more. A company-wide decision was made to test the waters of a more channel-oriented structure.

In the past 2 years, we dipped our toes in the channel waters. We signed up Avnet, Arrow ECS, and Dell. We’ve done international work with Fujitsu, Bull, TIM, and Adiva. While we experienced success with these partners and continue to work with them, we knew there was more opportunity out there among the reseller channel. At the time, we were working primarily with distributors.

So here we are, November 2010. We’ve officially opened the doors to a worldwide partner program and are actively recruiting new partners to carry the StorFirst EAS brand. The new channel partner program will offer various features and benefits, including joint marketing and selling with Seven10, technical pre-sales support, access to sales and marketing collateral, ongoing Web-based sales and technical training, and periodic product and technology roadmap updates.

In the next few days, we’ll post and answer the question: Who should partner with us and why?

Please view the following demonstration to get a complete picture of StorFirst EAS.

The bells and whistles that come with archiving products nowadays can sometimes be useful to the customer, but more often than not, these extra fluff features can add unnecessary complexity.

In this post, instead of focusing on file virtualization, tiered archiving, retention policies, and other storage buzz words, I’m going to liken our product to something that every Windows user on the planet is familiar with. Heck, college kids that only use computers for Facebook and the occasional college assignment will understand StorFirst EAS when I’m down here.

StorFirst EAS, an enterprise product capable of writing billions of files and hundreds of terabytes, is quite simply a drive letter. You know your C:\ drive on your computer? The place where anything you install goes? One of the most convenient places to save documents, pictures, etc.?  That’s a drive letter. It’s your C:\ drive.

Now, IT people, think of this drive letter on a server. Assign it any letter you want. StorFirst EAS, the enterprise archiving software, is really just a drive letter on a server. Your job as an admin is to simply copy any files that you want archived, or even just point your application to us (a drive letter) and we handle everything else.

What exactly do we do? We’ll write to disk, Centera, NAS, tape, VTL, the cloud – anything, really. We’ll apply those retention policies, put a lock on each file for compliance. But Seven10 is just a target.

In age where installs and configurations require professional services, you can install us in 15 minutes, you’ll see us (a drive letter), and you can begin archiving.