Dear Mr. Storage:

I am a new CIO in a company who fired my predecessor due to some very bad press after a failure to produce relevant documents in a law suit.  How do I protect myself from the same thing?

-- Nervous New CIO

Dear Nervous,

Keeping your name out of the news should not only be your desire, but your teams desire as well.  The new acronym that you should start to focus on, if you haven't already, is the PONI (Price of Non-Investment).  Everybody is so concerned with the ROI of new solutions, and many companies do not put risk aversion in their ROI calculations.  However, the negative press and pain your company, yourself and other top-level managers could suffer for not investing in certain technologies is something you want to avoid.

My first recommendation is to consider all areas of risk under your control.  Can customer-affecting applications go down and stay down for long periods of time?  Can pertinent data not be able to be accessed or restored?  The answer to these is, "Yes", though some are very improbable of ever happening.

A highly probable area though for failure is the failed attempt to restore older data from off-site media that is accessed in the event of a legal discovery or disaster.  It is the single greatest data access risk in your enterprise, and is 100% avoidable.  I know and have worked with the few on the market.  The Crossroads Read/Verify Appliance (RVA) with Archive Verify (AV) is an affordable and easy to manage appliance-based solution that plugs this chasm of risk in your environment.  Without it, every time a file is needed to be restored for an external mandate, your job is at risk. Please look deeper into it at http://www.crossroads.com. Though there are several areas to make investments in, the RVA is by far the best you'll ever make.  

Dear Mr. Storage:

I am new to the WAN replication world.  What I've been reading seems pretty straight forward. Any 'gotchas' I need to look out for?

-Remotely Aware

Dear Remotely,

There is an area that I think is extremely important.  In TCP-based networks, performance and assured delivery are always an issue based on the inherent inefficiencies of TCP.  Many vendors will tell you there product is better than the next, but until the founding problems are fixed, they will all have issues.  For a true solution, check out NetEx's HyperIP (www.netex.com).  This easy to install, searchstorage.com award winning product actually solves this issue, improves performance and guarantees delivery.  I'd recommend it be a high priority product to evaluate, then made an integral part of your WAN solution.