By Belinda Runkle, Fios, Inc.

Remember storage systems back in the 90’s, when storage vendors were promising how SAN, NAS and other monolithic storage devices where going to cure the IT world of all their storage and data management ills? Hard drives were just so darn expensive and data was proliferating at an alarming rate. What was an IT administrator to do, keep adding file servers every week? The storage industry sprinted to provide bigger, better, faster solutions all geared towards getting all of our files into one glorious place, where it would be forever hosted by redundant disks, controllers, nics, power supplies, you name it. Every possible point of hardware failure was made redundant, a pledge to forever protect our data from the swath of destruction caused by static, bad users, bad hardware and other catastrophes.

Those of us in IT rolled up our sleeves, planned our server migrations, and inconvenienced our users by pushing their data from user shares and hard drives to the central storage system. The more Draconian IT shops implemented Windows group policies and other programmatic enforcement to keep users from saving data to unsupported locations. Once the IT migration was complete and all the data was “safe,” there was no time to celebrate. As soon as we had moved all the data to one glorious place, we created a new problem for ourselves — some of us had so much data in one place that backup and recovery using our standard tape methods no longer served us. So, off we went to shop for faster tape devices, nearline storage devices, redundant SAN/NAS devices, remote archiving vendors, and more-more-more tools, and expenses, to help us manage our data, which was ironically exploding with greater velocity than prior to our storage leap.

Millions of dollars were thrown at the storage solutions, as well as the add-on solutions to support the storage solutions. It was a fairly disheartening trend. Many IT admins simply scrubbed any mention of storage, backups and DR experience from their resumes. The problem was never really solved, and most IT shops are still cycling through that same data management trend. Today, we have other pressures that make IT admins nervous, including hard requirements for legal and regulatory compliance with major changes initiated by various governing bodies, including HIPAA and SOX, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

(Here’s where I tick folks off.) Today’s marketing for document management, records management, preservation, and DIY evidence processing reek of these early storage system promises. Most of the silver-bullets seek to leverage existing IT assets (that’s “the hook”) in order to build capabilities and confidence in providing services most IT folks don’t fully understand. While many of these tools are certainly far better than what the IT organization has today, quite often the IT admins, as well as the systems, stumble on providing a clean path for the data to leave the system. After all, the point to preservation isn’t preservation - it’s the ability to get the data that you want to preserve out! While most systems can provide a fairly simplistic export tool to pull out files and basic metadata, many are terrible at letting you transition your data across various tools and platforms in a smooth fashion. This is unfortunate. The end for most data is destruction, as it should be. Some systems allow data to live virtually forever, but this has legal implications that are not usually good for the business.

For the data that needs to live, travel, see the world and visit other systems, such as e-discovery review platforms, analysis tools and case management applications, the monolithic solution is often like a dungeon or, better yet, a dam. The nature of data is that it contains communication and the Buddha-nature of communication is that it must flow. Yes, that’s right. Flow. Not get locked up on your storage system, your SharePoint, your Mc-archiver-deluxe or your backup tapes.

The IT shops that can review their systems and see where data ebbs, stops and flows can observe how the best tools will make moving the data in and out of the system easy. Good solutions will be like a swift-running river, pulling data out its tributaries and pushing it towards the timeless ocean in a continuous cycle. As we learned in kindergarten, water doesn’t stop at the ocean but instead evaporates (flows up), travels a tad more, and then returns to us again as drizzle, snow and grapefruit-sized hail.  So it is with data.

Some folks are seeing the big picture and pushing for slicker import/export offerings, integration, service-oriented architectures, XML standards and so on. Very often these tools have one or two systems in mind and a handful of platforms that they excel at handling. Most of them ignore the basic principal here - any critical piece of data can be required to flow anywhere at any time, to be produced in any format negotiated by two adversarial parties, and to be sent to the furthest reaches of the earth with a mere wave of a court order. Tracking files flowing through various systems and humans is oftentimes like tracking molecules of H2O across major bodies of water. Ask your provider how they track a specific e-mail chain amongst your integrated (or non-integrated) systems. You might not like the answer.

Like a ship in a bottle tossed into the sea, data has a way of returning to you in the most unlikely places.

About the Author:
Belinda Runkle is the Director of Development at Fios, Inc., the only services provider that focuses exclusively on the complex and rapidly evolving realm of e-discovery. Runkle leads the development of Fios’ technology infrastructure to support the defensible collection, processing, review and production of electronically stored information (ESI) in response to litigation and governmental investigation.