David West has served as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development since April 2011. Prior to his current role, he served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from September 2005 to March 2011, and as our vice president of business development from August 2000 to September 2005.

Prior to joining our company, Mr. West served as a director of strategic alliances from April 1999 to July 2000 and vice president of storage solutions in July 2000 at Legato Systems, Inc., which was subsequently acquired by EMC Corporation.

Prior to joining Legato Systems, Mr. West served as vice president of sales at Intelliguard Software, Inc., which was also subsequently acquired by EMC Corporation, from 1990 to April 1999.

Mr. West obtained his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University.

Big Data Causing Chaos – It's the Wild West Out There

Monday, October 17, 2011

One of the big topics here at this week's Gartner Symposium is Big Data. In thinking about today's data center trends – the growth of unstructured data, the universal adoption of virtualization and increasing consolidation – an interesting paradigm is developing. Big Data brings with it a lot of good in terms of potential business value, but also a lot of bad when it comes to the challenges of data management, most notably risk, complexity and cost that can result if it isn't done right. So how do companies wrangle Big Data?

Today's legacy data management tools just aren't up to the task. According to a recent CommVault-sponsored CIO Market Pulse Survey on data protection and management and that polled 111 IT and business management professionals, 42 percent of respondents described their organizations' data management processes as "outdated," and 31 percent called it "chaotic." More than half stated that data searchability and the current level of automated data management is less than adequate.

Overall, those surveyed cited improving operational efficiency, the ability to access and analyze information and flexibility as the top business drivers for investing in data management solutions.

The survey also revealed some interesting information about application integration and the impact of corporate culture on an organization's ability to change solutions, all of which can be found in our latest infographic on the subject.

So what if you could reign in the wild growth of unstructured data in the Big Data era using fewer resources? Managing, protecting and understanding the business value of the data you have can have a tangible impact on business agility and the bottom line.

The advent of Big Data is causing IT to rethink and possibly redesign architectures to accommodate business requirements as data volumes grow. The only way to accommodate such growth is to implement a modern approach to data management. Customers need:

• A highly scalable repository for unstructured data
• Protection and archive from a single pass through the data
• Storage tiering to lower costs

By the way, it all needs to be done from a single management console with application-aware snapshots, replication, data deduplication, encryption, and a range of other built-in features. Each of which CommVault Simpana 9 software does and does well.

Every IT vendor out there is trying to stake its claim to be the de facto standard for managing Big Data environments, while we designed Simpana software for exactly these types of environments.

There is a new sheriff in town, CommVault; approaching things differently is our way of conquering the wild west of Big Data. What gotchas are you facing due to Big Data? We'd love to hear your feedback.

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