Datadobi recently announced version 5.8 of its DobiMigrate software and introduced a “Chain of Custody” feature. I had the opportunity to speak to Carl D’Halluin and Michael Jack about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts on it here.
Don’t They Do File Migration?
If you’re unfamiliar with Datadobi, it’s a company that specialises in NAS migration software. It tends to get used a lot by the major NAS vendors as rock solid method of moving data of a competitor’s box and onto theirs. Datadobi has been around for quite a while, and a lot of the founders have heritage with EMC Centera.
Chain of Custody?
So what exactly does the Chain of Custody feature offer?
- Tracking files and objects throughout an entire migration
- Full photo-finish of source and destination system at cutover time
- Forensic input which can serve as future evidence of tampering
- Available for all migrations.
- No performance hit.
- No enlarged maintenance window.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Why Is This Important?
Organisations are subject to a variety of legislative requirements the word over to ensure that the data presented as evidence in courts of law hasn’t been tampered with. Some of them spend an inordinate amount of money ensuring that the document management systems (and the hardware those systems reside on) offer all kinds of compliance and governance features that ensure that you can reliably get up in front of a judge and say that nothing has been messed with. Or you can reliably say that it has been messed with. Either way though, it’s reliable. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever (not even those Centera cubes we put in years ago).
So what do you do when you have to migrate your data from one platform to another? If you’ve just used rsync or robocopy to get the data from one share to another, how can you reliably prove that you’ve done so, without corrupting or otherwise tampering with the data? Logs are just files, after all, so what’s to stop someone “losing” some data. along the way?
It turns out that a lot of folks in the legal profession have been aware that this was a problem for a while, but they’ve looked the other way. I am no lawyer, but as it was explained to me, if you introduce some doubt into the reliability of the migration process, it’s easy enough for the other side to counter that your stuff may not have been so reliable either, and the whole thing becomes something of a shambles. Of course, there’s likely a more coherent way to explain this, but this is tech blog and I’m being lazy.
Thoughts
I’ve done all kinds of data migrations over the years. I think I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never specifically had to deal with a system that was being relied on seriously for legislative reasons, because I’m sure that some of those migrations were done more by the seat of my pants than anything else. Usually the last thing on the organisation’s mind (?) was whether the migration activity was compliant or not. Instead, the focus of the project manager was normally to get the data from the old box to the new box as quickly as possible and with as little drama / downtime as possible.
If you’re working on this stuff in a large financial institution though, you’ll likely have a different focus. And I’m sure the last thing your corporate counsel want to hear is that you’ve been playing a little fast and loose with data over the years. I anticipate this announcement will be greeted with some happiness by people who’ve been saddled with these kinds of daunting tasks in the past. As we move to a more and more digital world, we need to carry some of the concepts from the physical world across. It strikes me that Datadobi has every reason to be excited about this announcement. You can read the press release here.
