TD Ameritrade CIO talks up encryption, storage

12.04.2006

So it's more about classifying data? Yes, in a more automated way -- whether it's ticklers that say, "This is the kind of stuff that's coming up in the next few months to be addressed" -- we just haven't explored it yet.

Are you thinking about an in-house solution or something off the shelf? We're reluctant to do something in-house. Our typical strategy across technology is in-house; we build what's a core competency that's a differentiator. This, in my mind, is not a differentiator. There have got to be folks that create these types of products and that's their core competency. My strong bias is that now that we've recognized the need, as we have the cycles and bandwidth to address it, we begin looking at potential partners.

SNIA is working on a standard as part of SMI-S, which would allow migration of data across tiers of storage. How important is that to you? My team does work with SNIA to some extent. My fundamental view is we are, and ought to be, vendor-agnostic. My team's a big believer in standards. In this case, standard interfaces and the ability for a heterogeneous group of vendors to be able to be utilized across the whole data life cycle, I think, is the right direction.

Aren't you mainly an EMC shop? Do you try to standardize on one vendor? We do. But again, in the end, we're vendor-agnostic. We're looking for the best combination of price, quality and availability. Right now, we're an EMC shop, so as we do mergers and acquisitions, we stick with EMC. It doesn't mean we won't continue to look at vendors whose offerings become potentially higher in quality, availability and resilliency at competitive cost points. A fundamental tenet is [that] we're vendor-agnostic.