Our esteemed colleague and zeitgeist-chaser extraordinaire, Alex Howard of WhatIs.com, has put together a nice post, including podcast, about that most time-honored and mysterious of storage industry questions: What is ILM? Opening a can of worms, to be sure, but Alex does a commendable job creating a definitive resource.  

Even if you already know what ILM is, download the podcast anyway, have it at the ready, and simply press “play” for those less expert in the nuances of storage technology (like, say, when upper management wants to know what “ILM devices” you have in place). It could save you loads of time.

Over the past month, I’ve been working on putting together podcast tips with some of our experts. Pierre Dorion, certified business continuity professional for Mainland Information Systems Inc., recently contributed a podcast called “Outsourcing backup: Get the right service level agreement”.

In this tip, Pierre discusses the questions that can help you ensure that a service level agreement (SLA) meets your requirements when outsourcing backup, such as:

• What are your data recovery needs?

• How fast can your data be restored?

• What are the contractual obligations of the SLA?

• Does your service provider have a solid disaster recovery plan in place?

Pierre also offers practical advice on making sure these questions get addressed. Check it out below.

Elsewhere on the Web, check out www.sla-zone.co.uk. It’s got a bunch of useful SLA information, broken down into topics such as services, performance, problem management, customer requirements, termination, and so on. Also, www.itil-itsm-world.com has a series of documents that are used to help build a framework for service management, including information on service level agreements and IT outsourcing.

We all know that deleting a file doesn’t actually “delete” anything. Deletion only marks the file’s clusters as free for re-use — data actually remains tucked away within the sectors of each cluster until they are overwritten by new data. To really destroy data, it must be overwritten multiple times. This ensures that the magnetic traces of previous recordings cannot be read with advanced laboratory equipment (even when new data is on the media).

But how many times do you really have to overwrite that deleted data before it’s actually considered secure? Once? Twice? Ten times? Experts say that multiple overwrites are worthwhile — even required — noting that anywhere from 7 to 11 writing passes may be needed to fully overwrite the old data.

And there’s no shortage of tools that promise to kill your old data. Professional products like FDRERASE/OPEN from Innovation Data Processing can securely erase the magnetic disk using three to eight passes. Even end-user products like File Shredder from HandyBits.com promise to overwrite file data with random information up to 15 times, claiming that “it is practically impossible to recover the original data”.

Now there are circumstances when it pays to be extra thorough, but personally I think it’s overkill — a practice based on old MFM/RLL drive technologies. US DoD specification 5220.22 calls for three overwrites, while NIST standard SP 800-88 was revised in 2006 to call for only one overwriting pass on modern (post 2001) hard disks.

But I want to hear what you think. What tools are you using? How do you ensure that your old files are securely deleted? Does it even matter to you?

In the mean time, listen to this FAQ on Storage Security where Kevin Beaver offers practical answers to the most common storage security questions he hears from storage pros today.

Hitachi Data Systems announced a major upgrade to its Content Archive Platform, which SearchStorage.com News Director Jo Maitland reported on today. If you’re considering adopting an archiving product, you might want to check out the second chapter of the Data Retrieval Research Guide, which we published this week. It highlights the key issues involved with retrieving data from archives, with lots of information on CAS and deduplication.

We also recorded a podcast on email archiving a while back, which offers information about archiving with CAS and dealing with unstructured data. Check that out below.

Elsewhere, you might be interested in reading what Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO of HDS, has to say about HDS’s Content Archive Platform in a recent blog post entitled “When is CAS not CAS?”.

Unstructured data is… well, it’s unstructured. Unruly, even. Unbearable? Well, maybe that’s a bit too much, but it’s definitely hard to deal with. Word documents, email, images and MP3s, among other types of files, are crowding storage systems at an exponental rate and classifying this data can be very difficult. Analysts note that 85% of data in a typical enterprise is considered unstructured, and managing all of this data is a growing concern for many enterprises.

In this podcast, Pierre Dorion offers practical answers to the most common questions about unstructured data management he hears from storage pros today.

Download the Unstructured data management FAQ podcast.

These days, its tough to ignore the ever-present coverage of security breaches and identity theft in the news. In this podcast, storage security expert Kevin Beaver offers practical answers to the most common security questions he hears from storage pros today.

Download the Storage Security FAQ podcast.

Kevin is a frequent contributor to SearchStorage.com, check out some of his recent storage security tips below.

Why and how your storage environment will be attacked
Storage security and the firewall DMZ problem
Five must-have storage security testing tools
Hack your storage to test your security

Elsewhere on the internerd, you might want to check out this recent webcast on storage security by Jon Toigo.

Then, go lock the doors and windows.