RenewData Introduces Backup Tape Liability
PRODUCT FLASH
Vivian Tero
This IDC Flash evaluates RenewData’s recently announced Backup Tape Liability Management Service.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
On October 2, 2007, RenewData, a provider of data extraction, migration, and electronic discovery services, announced the availability of its Backup Tape Liability Management Service. This service offering uses a secure process to identify, analyze, reduce, and consolidate electronically stored data on a corporation’s backup tapes. This offering is intended to enable organizations to reduce the dormant liability and IT storage costs associated with maintaining large inventories of backup tapes. The solution encompasses professional and IT services, which the vendor segments into several distinct phases that corporations can complete to better manage their backup tape inventories:
- Physical media audit. RenewData will visit the customer’s site or work with the client’s offsite physical records and storage provider to discover and identify critical physical information about the media, such as location, types, capacity, condition, and storage environment. This service is intended to enable RenewData’s clients to craft a disciplined response to Rules 26(a)(1) and 26(f) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and determine the most appropriate tapes for sampling.
- Tape sample analysis. This service is intended to enable RenewData’s clients to determine the media’s content as well as implications about the total tape inventory. The information gained from this analysis is instrumental in determining how to proceed with data reductions and, in some cases, can assist a "burdensome" argument if litigation occurs.
- File-level and data content reduction. The intent of these two services is to enable clients to identify data that should be retained to meet their legal and regulatory requirements, as well as allow deduplication and deletion of system and application files. The file-level and data content reduction processes provide a detailed media content database report that clients can use for their required initial disclosures under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 26(a)(1).
- Data consolidation. Once the client has developed its tape reduction plan, RenewData can extract, migrate, and consolidate the associated content into the appropriate platform (typically a disk-based archival system). The extracted data can eventually be hosted within RenewData’s datacenter infrastructure, RenewData’s hosted archiving partners, or the customer’s own datacenter infrastructure. RenewData has existing partnerships with several established content archiving players.
RenewData will certify the process and provide written and oral testimony in the event of legal challenges.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
The requirements of Rules 26(a)(1) and 26(f) of the revised ediscovery rules for civil litigation continue to open up opportunities for content extraction, restoration, and migration service providers. Despite these opportunities, this service market is highly fragmented and increasingly price sensitive. Client demands for process efficiencies and the introduction of disruptive technologies that enable more visibility into the content
of the legacy backup tapes are compelling service providers to come out with service offerings that would provide them with a tactical differentiation.
In May 2007, RenewData launched its Data Migration Service offering, initially targeting the migration of legacy email from backup tapes, content-addressable storage (CAS), and optical platters. IDC research conducted in the summer suggests that the majority of organizations are not automatically ingesting potentially responsive email from nonarchival media back into their archival systems. These companies are becoming more aware of the criticality of making distinctions between their archival and backup operations (for business continuity and disaster recovery [DR] purposes). The research also indicates that many organizations recognize the potential dormant liabilities that reside in their legacy backup tapes. These trends are particularly prevalent among large, highly litigious and regulated industries that have heterogeneous and distributed IT infrastructures. These trends also point to a need among businesses to develop a disciplined and legally defensible approach for evaluating and judiciously migrating or disposing of content in their legacy backup tapes and other media.
RenewData’s Backup Tape Liability Management Service is intended to address this need and differentiate the vendor’s services. This new line of services is a component within RenewData’s Data Migration Service
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Filing Information: October 2007, IDC #209029, Volume: 1, Tab: Vendors offering. RenewData senior management indicated that the Backup Tape Liability Management Service is targeted at organizations from highly regulated and litigious industries that have more than 10,000 backup tapes in storage.
Eliminating backup tapes is a strategic exercise, so within RenewData’s defined target segment, the most likely early adopters of this service offering would be organizations that have ongoing enterprisewide records management and information retention programs. Other likely early adopters include organizations that have expressed intent or ongoing plans to reduce their reliance on third-party physical storage services.
