Last week at HP Discover in Vienna we announced the HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup System.  I have a podcast I did with Jay Livens that I also turned into a video. You can watch that in this blog post as well as a new video showing the B6200 in the booth at HP Discover.  I also talk about our CEO Meg Whitman stopping by the booth to check out the B6200.  Here's a picture of that:

Go to the blog article to watch the videos and get the details.

Today, I talk to Jay Livens, an expert on the topic of backup and data protection, about the latest news around HP StoreOnce deduplication software.  As always, there's more content on the blog post so I recommend you click on the title of this article or the "read more..." link below.  Here are the two power podcasts with Jay.

Today I conclude my two part video talking about HP StoreOnce.  This is particularly interesting because some of the innovative technology from HP Labs is discussed.  Here's the video but I suggest you click on the blog article to read the other details I have in the article.

After a week in rainy southern California, I have a video from our HP Labs team in Bristol, England talking about HP StoreOnce deduplication software. 

I sat down with two of our execs to talk about the state of storage technology and what HP is doing to address the storage market. There are three videos here to watch.

By Lee Johns

Do you love Sushi?  I certainly have come to.  Great taste, healthy - what could be better?  It seems everywhere I turn today there are new Sushi restaurants springing up.  Sushi is it!  It is one of the old adages of marketing that if Sushi had been marketed as "Cold Dead Fish", it would not have been as successful. 

Now to the topic of this blog post.  The new HP StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 Network Storage Systems - our unified storage products announced this week feature a capability called single instancing.  These products provide an easy way to deploy unified file and block services to new and existing SAN environments and the single instancing feature eliminates copies of files on the system and can reduce the space consumed by up to 35%.  Now I am not an expert but that seems to me to be deduplication.  I understand that there are different types of deduplication.  There are different types of sushi too.  Apparently someone at Microsoft decided to use single instancing as the term for file deduplication. Whoever it was, they likely are not a fan of Sushi.

The new X1000 and X3000 HP StorageWorks are unified storage systems that combine file and application storage and feature file deduplication that can save up to 35% of space.  There - I've said it.  .  .

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Hi Folks,

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail at home that started off:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to let you know that computer tapes containing some of your personal information were lost while being transported to an off-site storage facility by our archive services vendor. While we have no reason to believe that this information has been accessed or used inappropriately, we deeply regret that this incident occurred....

So the first question I have is how does an archive vendor lose tapes? How hard can it be to take the tapes from your customer put them in a secure truck and drive them to the storage facility? Isn't that your whole business model - you will pick up, transport and store these tapes safely and securely 100% of the time?

Now I understand that any activity with humans involved cannot be guaranteed to work 100% of the time. So what really happened? A bit more of an explanation would have been helpful, such as the truck was in an inadvertent accident and the contents of the truck were spilled into a river or all over the highway and could not all be recovered. Without more details I'm left wondering did someone make off with the tapes by accident or on purpose? Or was this just sloppy work by the company?

Anyway, I hope this is a call to action for this company to do at least two things to prevent such an incident in the future.

1. Look into tape encryption such as the LTO-4 offers. I would have been more much pleased if that second sentence read "While the tapes were physically lost, the data they contained cannot be accessed or read by anyone because the data on the tapes is securely encrypted with sophisticated technology requiring encryption keys to make the data readable. Our security policy ensures that these keys are always stored in or transported to physically separate locations from the computer tapes."

2. Consider the use of replication and electronic vaulting for moving data off-site for archiving. With new technologies such as deduplication and low-bandwidth replication, this company would perhaps be able to reduce the amount of data that is stored on tapes and physically transported to archive storage. Again, I don't know the specifics here, but as an example let's say this company had four sites that they were backing up to data to tape and transporting those tapes to off-site archives. With replication and electronic vaulting, they could replicate data from three of their sites to just one site for backup to tapes and then only have to move tapes from the one site to archive storage thereby reducing their risk exposure by 75%.

If you're worried about how a similar incident could impact your company and what risks are involved HP is here to help. We can work with you to significantly reduce your data security exposure from the desktop to your data center. On the storage side, we offer a FREE storage security risk assessment. For more details on HP's other data security options beyond storage please check HP's Security web page.