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Truth in IT, Inc. Announces New Director of Business Development

Storage industry publisher names Dave Littman as new Director of Business Development.

SAN DIEGO, August 22, 2011 – Truth in IT, Inc., a storage industry publisher, recently named Dave Littman as its new Director of Business Development. Truth in IT is pleased to welcome Littman to this key position on its growing team. Littman was previously with Simco Electronics, Inc., and within the storage space, Dedham Consulting, Asigra, Inc., Sepaton, and Neartek and has a long track record in sales, marketing and business development with broad experience creating and managing all phases of the sales cycle.

Littman will take the lead in strengthening Truth in IT’s current customer base and building new business relationships. In addition, Littman will play a key role in developing new lines of business to build Truth in IT’s offerings to its customers.

With the knowledge and experience held by Littman, Truth in IT enhances its capabilities to build and grow its core business goals of arming today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.

"Dave is a great addition to our team at Truth in IT,” explains W. Curtis Preston, CEO, "his experience in and understanding of the storage industry, and his ability to create truly collaborative relationships will help us bring our ideas at Truth in IT to fruition.”

Backup Central Live! survey yielded interesting results

Written by W. Curtis Preston Wednesday, 02 March 2011 01:17

Tape is still hot, cloud is getting hotter, but companies are still stagnated when it comes to capital purchases, according to a recent survey of 156 IT professionals during the Backup Central Live! seminar series.

I purchased an audience response system from Option Technologies for our Backup Central Live! seminar series.  (We will be in 20 North American cities and several cities abroad this year.) Each attendee is given a keypad that allows them to answer questions displayed on the screen during our seminars.  The system displays what everyone's answers are and stores them in a database for later retrieval.  This increases audience participation, provides some interesting live verification to the audience of what the speaker is saying, and can provide some interesting marketing information when you compile everything together.

While not every attendee pushed the buttons on their keypads, we got a much larger percentage of response than you would get from any email-type survey. Such surveys yield single-digit percentages at best.  In contrast, the vast majority of our attendees responded to the live survey, giving us a total of 156 respondents.  (3 of them walked off with the keypad!  We know who you are...)

The biggest surprises were the number of people that are still doing things exactly the opposite of what we've been telling people to do for years.  (This brings up another advantages of these systems.  The perceived anonymity allows people to be much more candid in their responses.)

Given that I've been preaching for years that the one thing that people needed to stop doing was backing up directly to tape across the network, it was surprising for me to learn that 49.1% of them are still doing exactly that -- backing up directly to tape with no disk buffer.  By the way, I don't have a problem using tape at all.  I just believe you should stage backups to disk prior to sending them to tape.  The mismatch between the speed of the backups and the speed of tape devices is the number one cause of backup system failure today.  Every backup system specialist I know has been saying this for nearly a decade, so it's surprising that half of the respondents are still backing up directly to tape.  A related statistic showed that even though many people have moved to disk staging or deduplicated targets, 88% still use tape as their final destination for backups.  Only 13% of the respondents have gone tapeless.  (61% of the respondents said they are not using dedupe at all.)

Another big surprise came when we talked about long term retention (greater than 1 year) and how it is being accomplished.  The only reason to store backups for multiple years is e-discovery and space reclamation.  Backup is lousy at both of them, so backup software shouldn't be used to meet this requirement.  This is why it was a surprise to learn that 60% of the respondents were still using backup software that had no e-discovery capabilities to meet their e-discovery requirements!  Couple that with the fact that 24% of the respondents also said their retention on their backups was infinite, or that 79% of the respondents said they retain backups for longer than a year, and you have a "disaster" waiting to happen.  All it will take is one e-discovery request to cost each of these companies far more money than a full archiving system would have cost.  Then they'll wish they had done something different.

42% of the audience felt they do not have a good understanding of the amount of data they are managing. This is a very common problem as well, leading to difficulty in planning for the capacity of the primary and backup systems.  Storage management software can help, but very few people use it.

My final surprise came when we talked about the cloud.  For those who think that the cloud is all hype and no purchases, consider this.  For something that's only a few years old, I think it's impressive that over 10% of the respondents said they were storing reference data in the public cloud, 10% said they were storing primary data in the public cloud, and 10.6% said they were storing backups in the cloud.  78.9% of the respondents are not using the public cloud at all, so there's certainly room for growth.  One reason for the popularity of the cloud could be that 41% of the respondents said that their company is not making any capital purchases right now. This was cited as the number one barrier to deploying new technology.  Since cloud is all about a monthly bill and not a large capital purchase, it is very compatible with the way many IT departments are now being forced to conduct themselves.

Like I said, tape is still hot, cloud is getting hotter, and many people are not making capital purchases.  Very interesting stuff, if you ask me.