Un-ingestion

Here’s an interesting point that came up in a meeting at SNW with Archivas.

Let’s assume that you (or some Flashing 12 in the front office) have “ingested” a bunch of data into Centera, EMC’s sticky CAS technology. Now, with new products coming to market that are hardware agnostic, you want to pull your data out of Centera and write it onto new gear under a software-only CAS.

To my knowledge, there are no tools that let you migrate the data off Centera easily when you want to. Kazeon supposedly has some, but they aren’t talking about them until their lawyers have a chance to review the ramifications.

What ramifications? There may be a legal issue with using third party tools to “un-ingest” your data from Centera so that the “de-ingested” data can be “re-ingested” into a different platform. I am being warned that such tools might be challenged by EMC as a reverse engineering of their product.

That’s essentially the argument that was made in court by Cisco to prevent the fellow who found all the IOS security exploits from publishing his findings. (Turned out, he didn’t need to. Blackhat published them for him.)

If this is true, and there is a restriction imposed by the courts on your ability to “un-ingest” your own data from your vendor’s sticky CAS solution, I would think it would create major indigestion for anyone who bought Centera before they knew better.

Digest this before you ingest, please.

(Now we need to re-examine Diligent’s HyperFactor technology from the standpoint of ingestion. Since it uses memory to look for similarities with already-stored data as its factoring method for compression, does that constitute pre-digesting prior to ingestion?)

The solution to all of this may be Pepto Bismol.