Copan With New Persistent Data Discovery Tool

COPAN Systems announced the availability of its new Persistent Data Discovery Tool to help organizations better understand the vastly underestimated prevalence of persistent data in their storage networks and the massive economic and environmental costs associated with it.

Persistent data — unchanging or static data that makes up the wide majority of data stored by enterprises — is at the heart of the data overload problem that plagues large corporations. But COPAN Systems’ recent Persistent Data survey identified that over 70 percent of respondents are inappropriately storing persistent data on an expensive primary storage system or on a mix of primary and archival systems. This needlessly wastes untold amounts of storage capacity, energy and cooling costs as well as management resources in a typical Fortune 1000 data center.

"The mantra to ‘do more with less’ is always heard in IT, but it naturally gets even louder in tight economic times," said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "COPAN ‘s main point has always been to put persistent data on an appropriate storage system, and its new Discovery Tool helps locate and size that persistent data within an organization’s overall unstructured storage. Users with an unlimited budget and a desire to ‘use more to do more’ probably won’t be interested, everyone else risks nothing to run the free tool, and might just uncover some useful management insights."

To help enterprises obtain a clearer picture of the levels of persistent data, COPAN Systems has developed the Persistent Data Discovery Tool so that businesses become more aware of this often undiagnosed problem and the false perception that most data they store is transactional (or live and active). This analysis can provide organizations with evidence on whether a more detailed study of all their unstructured data is needed or if the implementation of a persistent data strategy would deliver technical and economic benefits.

"Estimates show that the vast majority of transactional data, around 90 percent, turns persistent after only 30 days, yet this data still needs to be stored online, usually for Service Level Agreement or regulatory purposes," said Mick Bradley, Senior VP, Global Solutions & Services, COPAN Systems. "Yet we continue to see persistent data being stored on 100 percent spinning disk with its inherent hunger for power, cooling and greedy footprint. This just doesn’t make economical sense in the business climate that we are in today."

The discovery tool ascertains the total number, type, location and owners of files stored within a data subset of unstructured file data. It then identifies the type of data stored, its creation data, last modification date and last accessed date. This process also uncovers to what level persistent data is being stored on primary storage systems, wasting both economic and environmental resources.

"Our industry survey identified that IT professionals are struggling to cope with the increasing complexity in managing their data," Bradley continued. "Increasing costs and shrinking IT budgets are limiting their ability to optimize their storage strategy, but to get to the ultimate solution, they need to diagnose the problem first, and this is where the Persistent Data Discovery Tool can shed some needed light and a path to cost savings."

The Persistent Data Discovery Tool has been designed to take minutes to run. The report generated by COPAN Systems then advises on a suitable archive policy and indicates cost savings that could be achieved with a different approach to storing persistent data. An effective persistent data strategy would significantly reduce or avoid further tier 1 and 2 disk infrastructure purchases and operational costs.