I have been working for Symantec for more years than I care to remember. I joined through the Veritas acquisition some 6 years ago. In that time the datacenter has changed incredibly, before joining Veritas I was a systems administrator, this was long before the concept of SANs were mainstream and most UNIX systems simply had direct attached storage. I think it’s fair to say that at some point over the past 10 years the datacenter began transitioning from physical to virtual and we at Symantec were very guilty of not adapting our solutions quickly enough. We went on selling our traditional clustering and storage management tools which while they have always been best of breed weren’t necessarily a good fit in virtual environments. Thankfully due to the strength of our portfolio our product team began to reinvest into adapting our solutions specifically into the virtual space. The upshot is now although there is still much development and innovation under way we have a...

Are you battling with strict yet conflicting retention requirements for your unstructured data? Do you even know who owns those files or folders in the first place? Find out how you can keep up with your organization's retention policies through this blog by DCIG.

What does Big Data mean to enterprises?

How does this change their storage architecture?

Does the need for taking advantage of Big Data analytics mean a cluster of 1000s of compute nodes?

The answers create lot more confusion than clarity and it depends on who you ask. In an attempt to add clarity to the conversation I sat down with  V.R.Satish, CTO of Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec to get his thoughts on how enterprises should approach the Big Data storage problem.

Here are some excerpts from my conversation.

Rags: Satish, we keep hearing about the data deluge, growth and variety. How do you think enterprises must approach Big Data?

Satish: As always with any business decision, start with the problem we are trying to solve, focus on the value realization and how it will help you better serve your internal and external customers. How you approach the problem and...

Unstructured data growth is exploding. According to Gartner, the growth of data is 40% to 60%, but for unstructured data in the enterprise, the growth rate can be up to 80% (2011). With this challenge in mind and after months of collaboration, NetApp and Symantec have developed Symantec Data Insight - a solution that integrates with NetApp storage systems, among others, to discover and collect data activity and permissions in unstructured data in order to improve an organization's data governance objectives. Data Insight is also integrated into Symantec Data Loss Prevention enabling organizations to discover, monitor and protect confidential information residing in CIFS and NFS file shares on NetApp storage systems.

To learn more, download the free joint-whitepaper from NetApp and Symantec entitled "...