Hello Joe, Darleen, Neil (are you 'toasters'?), Tom, Stan
May I introduce myself. My name is Duncan Wright, and I am the Managing Director of Enigma Data Systems. Thank you for enquiries about our HSM solution - I hope to answer a few questions in this e-mail, but please do contact me if you have further questions.
Our principal market is the upstream Oil and Gas sector where many terabytes of data are collected and processed several times to determine hydrocarbon prospects worldwide. Our customers include all the big ones like ExxonMobil, Shell, bp, Anadarko etc. Some customers are also Network Appliance clients aswell - for instance, Anadarko ordered 17TB of Filers last week, and our software will be responsible for managing the datasets - including project archiving and HSM.
I don't want to bore you with all the details, so will be brief!!. Our software is designed to handle large volumes of data and high speed robotic libraries . One of our biggest benefits is that our software is project based. The oil industry works in projects - like a block/lease of sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico, or an interpretation project which is smaller, and where a drilling opportunity may exist. A project can include Oracle with pointers to files spread over several filesystems, and indeed systems. A project can include several people and dozens of applications and a variety of file types. Outside the oil industry, a project could be the flaps on a Boeing 737, or an engine at Ford. In the end we all work in projects, even in Microsoft Office. A project could be a filesystem, or a person!.
We have a number of products, but the ones of interest to you will be (I think!), IDS (Intelligent Data Store) - the I/O layer that allows any application to interface to tape libraries, without modification to the application, PARS (Project Archiving and Retrieval System) and in particular, PARS Migrator.
Let me concentrate on PARS Migrator.
PARS Migrator is project based HSM. We embed Veritas's HSM engine to handle the 'movement' of files from the disk to tape. One of the issues with standard HSM is that it works 'in a panic'!!. It is reactive and doesn't allow predictions, or scheduling or 'what if' scenario's.. It causes network overload and I/O overload by generating simultaneous reads and writes and concentrates precious CPU cycles on swapping out data instead of executing users applications. These always happen in peak time!!. PARS Migrator has a management layer that allows previews, scheduling, and most important - projects to move on and off disk. We have a whole presentation on this as I am sure you can imagine, and an e-mail does not do justice. But suffice to say that the HSM interface to IDS has been written by Veritas, and is maintained by Veritas. We are an OEM for Veritas and actively market their HSM and Netbackup products. We believe that IDS is a much simpler I/O layer than Veritas's Media Manager, with the added advantage that we can make your robots work 24 hours a day because any application can interface to IDS, so silo's for backup, HSM, and general near line are eliminated and concentrated on a single I/O layer and a single tape library run by IDS.
Our focus is on reducing the cost of data. Hardware costs maybe reducing very quickly but the cost of ownership of, and the cost of data is rising as rapidly as volumes increase almost out of control. Enigma believes that it has products that can cap the cost of ownership of data and make data accessible to your users in a timely manner - personnel costs are sometimes the highest cost of all, and having them wait hours, or even days for data is a major barrier to productivity.
I promised to be brief, but have failed!!. I hope that I given you an understanding into Enigma and our products. We have offices in Houston and the UK, and support customers all over the world in countries like Brunei, Nigeria, Egypt and far off lands like Australia from our bases in the Texas and Sussex. We have a pedigree in managing large volumes of data of a diverse nature and will be delighted to work with you on your HSM requirements. We are working with Network Appliance to provide an HSM solution to its clients.
Thank you for your time, and I look forward to the possibility of working with you in the future.
Kind regards
Duncan Wright
----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Luchtenberg" joe.luchtenberg@data-line.com To: "'Cormier, Darleen'" Darleen.Cormier@netapp.com Cc: dwright@enigmadata.com Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 11:25 AM Subject: RE: HSM with filers?
Thanks. I saw your previous reply to Neil and realized that I need to
learn
more about Enigma Data, so I have requested additional info from them.
Joe
-----Original Message----- From: Cormier, Darleen [mailto:Darleen.Cormier@netapp.com] Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 12:16 PM To: Joe Luchtenberg; Cormier, Darleen; 'Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau'; 'toasters@mathworks.com'; 'dwright@enigmadata.com' Subject: RE: HSM with filers?
What you are saying is true, Joe. A customer does not buy Veritas' Storage Migrator and then buy Enigma Data. Enigma Data has Veritas Storage
Migrator
already integrated into their "stuff". Veritas' package, by itself, is not compatible with filers.
-----Original Message----- From: Joe Luchtenberg [mailto:joe.luchtenberg@data-line.com] Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 8:59 AM To: 'Cormier, Darleen'; 'Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau'; 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: RE: HSM with filers?
Darleen, Would you please elaborate? A cursory look at Enigma Data's website
reveals
that the HSM part of their solution is Veritas Storage Migrator, which is not interoperable with NetApp filers (unless I am completely misinformed). Am I missing something here, or are the customers to which you refer concurrently using NetApp and Enigma/Veritas storage solutions but not integrating them? Joe
Joe Luchtenberg Dataline, Inc. 757.858.0600 757.285.1223 (cell) 757.858.0606 (fax) joe.luchtenberg@data-line.com www.data-line.com
-----Original Message----- From: Cormier, Darleen [mailto:Darleen.Cormier@netapp.com] Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 10:57 AM To: 'Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau'; 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: RE: HSM with filers?
Hi Tom, Just to let you know, we do have some NetApp customers both using and evaluating a package called Enigma Data. www.enigmadata.com You
might
want to talk to them and see if their package will meet your needs.
-----Original Message----- From: Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau [mailto:MadDog@fool.com] Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 10:48 PM To: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: HSM with filers?
I just took the NetApp backup survey that they sent out and one of the questions was about using hierarchical storage management with filers.
Does anyone know of any HSM products out there that currently work with filers?
Thanks, Tom