Almost half a year ago I was at Storage Field Day 7 in San Jose (CA) where we had a couple of awesome presentations by multiple companies. One of these companies was Catalogic who presented on their ECX copy datamanagement platform. A couple of my fellow delegates have written some great content on this technology and I’ll include them at the end of this post, and encourage you to read them. Also I’ll include the first presentation done by Ed Walsh (CEO Catalogic)
As said we’re almost half a year further, and I was curious what changed in this time with the companies that presented at SFD7
Copy Data Management
So what is Copy Data Management according to Catalogic, and what challenges does it solve? If you’ve watched the above video you’ve seen that Catalogic defines three challenges: data growth, manageability and business agility.
In a world where data seems to exploding it seems more then iminent to have a mechanism to create order in this data sprawl and that’s where ECX comes in.
By implementing an OVF (docker based) and without any agents on your servers, you’ll get a system which provides you with: Orchestration, Automation DR and Data analytics. Using this for Test/Dev better RTO/RPO, reduce Capex/Opex, create orchastration to use the power of the cloud, and analyze and report on your data is very interesting.
And hearing about all these awesome posibilities, it kind of struck me that this was only possible with NetApp storage. I understand you need to start somewhere, but for a company in business since 1996 it must be doable to support more then just NetApp…
Fast forward 6 months
As mentioned this was what I absorbed during the presentation during Storage Field Day 7 and I kinda lost track, mainly because of the NetApp only thing, to be honest. I really think that ECX has a lot of potential, but it just needs to be available for all (or almost all ;-P) storage systems.
In the week before VMworld Catalogic announced ECX 2.2 which introduced support new storage vendor IBM. As of version 2.2 the IBM storage customers can use ECX to do the amazing things ECX provides. Although I would love to see more storage vendors on the list, it shows Catalogic is working hard to get more and more on the HCL 😀
But that’s not all for the 2.2 version ,the other new key features are:
- Enhanced Policy-Based Copy Data Management Workflow Automation
- Copy Data Management for IBM platforms
- Improved Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Expanded scalability and performance
- Improved fault tolerance
I’ll be keeping a close watch on Catalogic to see what news will follow in the next couple of months.
Other resources
A couple of my SFD7 friends also wrote some very interesting posts on ECX and I’ll include their post here (just click the links):
– Jon Klaus: Storage Field Day 7 – Catalogic ECX reducing copy data sprawl
– Chris Evans: SFD7 – Catalogic Software Addresses Data Copy Management
– Dan Frith: STORAGE FIELD DAY 7 – DAY 1 – CATALOGIC SOFTWARE
– Keith Townsend: CopyData yeah… Long live Data Virtualization
Also for all SFD7 videos visit the techfieldday website: