What’s in a name?

Historically we have used very specific names for software applications. For instance “Migration Software for Centera” (MSC) is the name of our migration application that copies data off Centera to another storage system. Later we added Atmos and Hitachi HCP as source systems we kept the name the same and it did lead to some confusion. However at the time recreating the 150 page system administration guide for what amounted to adding an option in a pull down menu was a crazy amount of work.  Learning from this lesson we introduced a more generic name focus on the benefit with “Recovery and Backup Software.” This software application would backup CAS (CAS), object storage systems (Private Cloud) and Public clouds. Yes, I know every storage vendor tells the world that replication to a mirror system is the answer to their data protection needs. I will deal with this topic in a future post.

A few years past and we were getting ready to release a data management application and the question of what to name it was being debated. We let everybody in the company have a say in the early stages of branding, then what ever is decided is saluted by all.

The new application was generally a compliant data management application, but it also spanned several markets. It provided robust archiving features, enabled compliance with regulations for retention and data verification. It was also a gateway enabling Public clouds and Private clouds to be used as a storage target. It also packaged data, metadata and permissions so it could replicate data to heterogeneous storage systems and recover it from any of them. This software spanned so many areas it took 6 months to finalize name. Then to our horror Dell announced a product with the same name. Although the applications had different use cases we had to abandon ship simply due to magnitude of mentions that the Dell marketing machine would generate and bury us pages down in the Google search results.

Our historical focus was working with organizations and their regulated data, which typically was generated by an ECM. We decided to narrow our focus to “compliance” and “archiving” and named the application Secure Archive Manager. At this time products in this space were appliances like EMC Centera, Nexsan Assureon and Plasmon. The only S3 private or public cloud option with compliance was AWS Glacier (tape backend). We opted to deliver just software and some reference architectures and let customers build their own complaint archiving systems with servers from their favorite server manufacturer and storage vendors. The software only distribution coupled with the most flexible and comprehensive retention management allowed us to carve out a successful niche.

As time marched on we continuously added features and supported more storage options. By 2020, our implemented customer environments expand to:  Backup-less Edge storage for remote offices, consolidation of Windows servers to eliminate backups, hybrid cloud gateway with a fast copy on-site and a second copy in a Public Cloud, a multi-cloud gateway writing to both Private and Public Clouds and multiple Public Clouds. This increased functionality raises the question of whether the Secure Archive Manager has expanded to the point that it needs a new name?