Will your data outlive your vendor?

Can you trust archiving your data using software from a relatively small company? The perception sometimes is that it is “safer” to go with a large company, and that since one should take a long-term view for archive it is better to work with a long-term company. Even at five years old OM is still considered quite young.

I had this very conversation with a large UK broadcaster two weeks ago. They, quite rightly, voiced concerns around company history, size and sustainability.

I’d like to point out a few arguments:

It’s Your Data! (and we’ve always known that)

Because at OM we’ve always been 100% aware of this concern, since the birth of the company, before ever a line of code was forged, we set out to underpin our solution with open standards.

Therefore, from day one we’ve always allowed, should the worst come to the worst, for users to remove our software and still be able to access their data; and to be able to access their data on standard file systems, using standard tools, and using standard interfaces.

In contrast, products from large companies often go down a “closed box route” – promoting and utilising proprietary platforms. Some large companies have big egos to match!

If a company uses proprietary file formats in their storage solution, and that company or product line goes under, then the data that resides within that product is in very real danger of becoming unavailable, unsupported, unusable.

What do you do with an EMC Centera, a HP RISS, or an Isilon system if you decide that you don’t want to use their software anymore, or if they discontinue that product line? You’ll end up moving data off the system whilst ending up with rather a lot of junk metal.

And that could be an awfully expensive turn of events.

How safe is any company / product line?

If Lehman brothers can go in the blink of an eye, anyone can go.

In our area of the market there are very pessimistic rumblings around Overland, Pillar and Qantum. These guys have installs all over the place, what happens to the customer and its data when one of these ‘pillars’ of the storage community goes south?

Wouldn’t you prefer your data to be on a system you control / if necessary can take control of?

Specialisation   

Because OM dwells in the Creatives marketplace, we care deeply that our product works well, is integrated well, and is priced appropriately for those companies.

That means that if a new version of Final Cut Server comes out with funky new archiving options, we’ll be there supporting them and working with them to give you the best possible, most re-usable archive of data that we can. It’s important to us because the Creatives marketplace is where we live.

The View from OM
We reduce the risk for customers based on technology:

• MatrixStore runs on off the shelf hardware.
• The software runs the Mac OS (Leopard) or Linux
• The data is stored on standard filesystems using standard file formats.
• If you decide MatrixStore is not for you then your data will still be accessible, it will not have been de-duped or stripped across 7 devices.
• You can deploy old servers into or out of the archive, you can even test the archive on your existing kit, and reuse that kit for other purposes afterwards,

If I were the CTO of a large enterprise considering which vendor to trust with my assets I would surely look to solutions that have one eye on the future as well as the here and now.