Marc Dijkstra, chief technology officer, Symantec in charge of the Emerging Region including Russia, the Middle East, Southern Mediterranean and Africa. He has an in-depth knowledge of the data management, storage and high availability landscape.  Marc worked with Computer Work Station Sales as a support engineer before he moved to VERITAS UK as a Storage and Availability Presales specialist before joining Symantec in 2007.  He spoke to emeka okafor.

Promoting Green IT

From Symantec perspective, being a software and infrastructure company and taking into cognizance that we are into storage and virtualization technology, promoting Green IT is something we are heavily into. We have a number of tools that help customers identify areas which they can actually save cooling and heating costs saving amount of storage that they use.  As an example, we have one of our products that can identify when you are underutilizing your storage. One of the biggest problems you can have is underutilization of your storage. When you have all these and they are not being used you still pay electricity bill as you need to cool the systems. . We can identify the storage that is not in use and try to drive utilization up by mopping the underutilization storage to the storage element we can identify. So every thing Green IT, we have a number of tools also as a consulting firm that can identify how much power we can save by dragging up utilization process.

Optimizing Storage Resources Utilization

One of the things we looked at when we started the standardization initiative was that it is part of our bold strategies to identify within the storage management brief. One of the things we did was to identify where we could save customers Tier One storage cost by moving data from Tier One storage to the secondary storage having the same data. We do that in subtle space.  We have a customer in Nigeria who is looking at ways to take their old data   from Tier One old expensive disc and put it on a cheaper disc. He estimated that he could save approximately 80 per cent of his storage disc by moving the Tier One disc into the Tier Two disc at a much lower price than the Tier One disc. It means that the customer doesn’t need to buy a new storage system .He can buy the cheapest disc and a recycle forward will be able to take that data and put it on to shape.

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Overview of Products

Symantec has a number of products. I have lost count but I think it has close to 200 products. Symantec is storage and availability company as well as a security company. We have a very bold range of products from the traditional security products, back up products, duplication, archiving, enterprise desktop management etc, but the joy of Symantec is that we are a heterogeneous company and we have a very broad range of applications on storage. According to IDC Report (late last quarter) Symantec is now the number one leader in the storage management space and we lead significantly over the other competitors. The product I work more is on high availability and storage management space.

Guidelines for a Successful Storage Strategy

Testing, testing, and testing. We did a Disaster Recovery Report in 2008 and one of the problems we had is that people are not testing the disaster recovery strategy enough. People will do DR test once a year but it is not effective. It’s really not effective to cover all the bases. Two tests once every six months is ideal. There is need to do for instance virus test to ascertain what will happen if virus hits the system and that is very important.  Besides testing, DR is expensive especially if you are running critical operations like Telcos and mobile providers of the billing system. You cannot switch that system off otherwise you will be affecting the service of your consumers. So you have to balance how you are going to test your DR without affecting your customers, your bottom line, and your staff. I think the industry is thinking more along how to automate the testing without having disruption and Symantec has ways we actually allow you to automate DR tests without disrupting your actual application.
  It is one key word when it comes to disaster recovery- the planning. Having a good disaster recovery plan and doing your risk analysis is most important in DR strategy because whatever happens we make sure that it works.
  
Best Practice for Disaster Recovery
 
 It is firstly, the plan has to be in place. Be it internal plan or an outside consulting plan, the business has to have understanding of what the risk appetite is. What can they afford to do without and for how long? If it is a financial institution that is doing online trading, it can’t really be down. Government legislation in some cases will actually disallow that so your risk appetite has to be assessed before you can identify. So once your DR plan is actually in place and you have identified your risk appetite then you can identify the way you go. But remember how much you do it depends on cost as we have a sliding scale for various services I think the  most important thing when talking about best practice is that once you identify the risk appetite you must identify plan and once your plan is in place it must be assessed. We have a very interesting statistics that in 2007 we found 55% of our respondents at the C level were involved in DR planning                                                  process. Last year we found that it dropped to 33%. So one question is that has DR become little focused or was it a defect in the organization that it just had to happen? It’s a question I have asked in Nigeria. The people I have spoken to in Nigeria are very more executive level discussions. The C level is involved in the DR strategy, DR process and DR planning. Either that in your office you will have a DR strategy committee to discuss the most important issues on DR strategy and not doing it once and  leaving it because you need to continue with your testing on hourly basis and at the centre. One wrong man point can invalidate the whole outline

Focus of Symantec Products

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It all depends. A lot of people even small to mediums are trying to locate their risks appetite, what they can do to keep their businesses up and running. From small to mediums if they lose their data could mean the end of the business. So you get to look at ways to do it. Small to mediums may not have DR strategy the way a financial house will have with gig net, internet. We play in all spaces, be it small to medium businesses, even to consumer.

IT Risk Management

IT risk management from Symantec perspective, we do certainly get involved in IT risks assessment in understanding the risk appetite with the customer. From my perspective, IT risk management understands the risk of the business either from internal or external, hacking, be it data loss, natural disaster or whatever it could be and und a committee in change control. Remember if you don’t have a change committee you are introducing risk into your environment.

Customers in Nigeria

I met with a number of executives from finance a couple of months back and the interesting thing to me was that although this knowledge is special but what made clear to me at the moment is  that the CIOs  are certainly coming down the line. Nigeria seeing what is going on in the Americas, India, MEA and Europe, there is legislation about keeping your data available, there’s legislation about holding data especially in the finance industry so it is in their minds. I wouldn’t say from my experience in dealing with the people. Email availability all the time is very important to people, I have a very lengthy discussion with CIOs about a month ago around the six points and it is very much in the full front of their minds.

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New Products

What you will see coming down the line in the nearest future is looking at ways of mitigating the risks to the business. We mitigate risk by automating processes and by doing correct testing. What we will be looking at in our new product is that we will be looking at ways to go and test the environment and do risk analysis on the environment, weigh and identify the risks and report home the risk before problem happens. High availability cost ream technology will do the risks of the strategy and help check analysis and find out where issues are. It is one of the control processes you can look at multi- faceted, if one of the PCs fails its all about mitigation of risks      

Energy Problem
 
   One of the things Symantec is driving for is to reduce the amount of heating in the environment. One of the things talked about in the DR report as well as the stage of the data centre report just released is that the strategy of the CIO data center manager is still around consolidation, virtualization and automation. These are the three key areas in the 2007 report that came up again in 2008. By going the virtualization route, you are driving down the electricity needs. The Green IT makes this strong. So if we can tie Green IT with the strategy of the data center we are driving down the huge need of electricity. With our technology you use less service and storage so we are helping the customer drive down demand for electricity used to cool and power the data center. Virtualization is one of the strategies from Symantec through which demand for storage electricity is reduced. With the cost ream technology you don’t need as many services so you are driving down the cost of electricity again.  There is electricity problem even in South Africa also. It is not just Africa that has electricity problem. There was a report in California running out of power. There’s a problem in Florida. Electricity  is a global crisis so Symantec and IT industry have to look at innovative ways to drive down need for this power.