Network Engines (NEI)

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Fixed content storage grabs users' attention
By Deni Connor
Network World, 05/26/03

Users need to start evaluating their options regarding storage of fixed content data now that analysts have predicted it will consume more than half of a corporation's storage resources by 2005.

Fixed content storage consists of data such as digital images, e-mail messages, presentations, video content, medical images and check images that don't change over time. Unlike transaction-based data, whose usefulness is short, fixed content data must be kept for long periods of time, often to comply with retention periods and provisions that government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have specified.

Analyst firms such as The Yankee Group say that the market for fixed content data will grow from 308,000 terabytes this year to 1,251,900 terabytes in 2006. Enterprise Storage Group says that fixed content reference information will represent 54% of all data by 2005 and will grow faster than that of traditional transaction-based and file-oriented storage.

While fixed content storage consists of a variety of data that must be referenced and addressed, it's a huge market nonetheless, which requires some unique capabilities to store it and differentiate it from short-lived transaction-based data.

A number of issues are driving the growth of fixed content, analysts say.

"The biggest one is compliance," says Jamie Gruener, a senior analyst for The Yankee Group. "Compliance is multidimensional - not only do you need to save the information in an indexed way, you also need to be able to access the information at a fairly rapid rate. And in some cases, it has to be preserved in an unaltered, unrewritable state."

Other issues include the type of media used for storing fixed content data and its cost............

Object-oriented storage

Enter Centera, an object-oriented storage system that EMC introduced last year.

Traditionally, storage is viewed as either blocks or files of data that are subject to being retrieved from a specific location and media type. Block-oriented data resides on Fibre Channel storage-area networks and direct-attached storage; file-oriented data on network-attached storage.

In object-oriented storage, each piece of data is represented as an object and automatically is assigned a unique digital identifier or fingerprint. The fingerprint is used to retrieve the object, irrespective of its location and placement, whether on tape, spinning disk or ATA media. As data moves from disk to tape during its life cycle, its fingerprint, sometimes called metadata, tracks its location, so that it can be retrieved quickly and so that related data objects, such as X-rays and test results for a patient, can be correlated coherently.

The same digital fingerprint identifies not only the location of the data but its character. For instance, an X-ray that is stored on optical media could be associated with a keyword in a document management system and from there to the patient's chart and prescription information.

Robert Terdeman, senior vice president and CTO for Rogers Medical Intelligence Solutions in New York City, chose Centera to store the volumes of clinical information Rogers sells to pharmaceutical, biotechnology firms and healthcare professionals. He combines it with Documentum's enterprise content management platform, which organizes the data before handing it off to Centera for storage.

"A lot of our collateral comes in on paper," Terdeman says. "We take it and extract key words and store the collateral on the EMC Centera. We are constantly asked to go back and look for this piece of information or that document, and we can never throw it away.

"Data could be relevant 10 or 12 years down the road," he says. "For instance, with our Retrospective Data Analysis, you can search back 12 years on urinary tract infections. We have the largest repository of unpublished medical information in the world."

Before using Centera, Rogers had cabinets of paper records that took hours to dig through to extract information. They weren't easily accessible to people who needed information.

A year ago, Terdeman started to redesign the information network for the company, which had a 100 people and was unprofitable.

With Centera, Terdeman went from negative profitability to "roughly $2 million profitability. We reduced the head count from 100 to 71 solely based on the implementation of scanning and the Centera technology. The five terabytes of the Centera was less than the fully loaded support cost of one technician," he says. "By that itself, it was justified." n

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