New, “Data Erasure” Service From Sun

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems today (November 25) launched a new data protection service called “Data Erasure”, which helps data center personnel to remove and destroy from their storage, data that is no longer useful or relevant, yet may be sensitive enough to pose fraud and / or security risks.

Guidelines for protection and security of data are given by the Department of Defense (DoD) document, 5220.22-M, “National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM)”, whose latest updated version was released in February 2006. Data center personnel often have to relocate data from location to another, or redeploy information across different media, or send the storage equipment back to the vendor for any maintenance / repair, or decommission the storage hardware after its life is over, or upgrade to the latest models that come in the market. The new “Data Erasure” service provides the facility to remove data from the original storage on the site itself, and at the platter-level. The service also helps the organization become compliant with regulatory requirements, especially if it is supplying products and / or services to government agencies, where disclosure of classified information only to authorized persons is a top-priority issue.

Read more about the new service from Sun here.

New Storage Virtualization Platform From HP

A new storage virtualization platform that can simplify the management of heterogeneous midrange storage arrays has been announced by Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

Named HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP), the product pools capacity across storage hardwares and brings a centralized command to the fingertips of the administrator. The SVSP makes it possible to distribute application data as per the demands of users; say for example data being consigned to archives can be shifted to lower-cost storage in real-time, without disrupting operations. Thanks to SVSP, customers can plan to purchase less-capacity storage hardware on a staggered, need-to-use basis and keep on adding capacity as business grows.

Further, SVSP allows seamless data replication techniques to be deployed, which means that cloning, snapshots, synchronous local mirroring and asynchronous remote mirroring make it possible to back up data remotely and assist in recovery in situations of disaster.

Virtualization as an efficient and cost-effective concept has grown across all technologies in the domain by 26% over the period from 2006 to 2008; and within the domain, storage virtualization technology has grown by 36%. SVSP seeks to capitalize on this interest in the technology, as network based virtualization reduces TCO considerably.

Read more about SVSP here.