 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Managing -- and thriving with -- your firm's data growthPosted on: Friday, December 14, 2007 As just about every IT professional knows, the growth of stored information in today's businesses and institutions is causing us to rethink operational strategies for storing and archiving data. Simply put, the two forces creating back pressure on the IT manager's data storage and management strategies -- time and money -- are even more acute today with the explosion of data across organizations. And, storing and archiving data efficiently are not ends in themselves. Secure data is the overall objective, and hence archiving becomes a part of a larger scheme to safeguard corporate data. With the continued demands on data retention requirements being driven by U.S. Supreme Court Rulings on electronic information discovery, regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and health care's HIPAA requirements, companies and institutions -- particularly the financial kind -- are struggling to find solutions that can keep up. Efficiency in storing and archiving data is the key to managing data. Time pressure results when solid data management techniques create the demand for daily data backups to storage media such as tapes or hard disks. In many organizations, backups are relegated to off-hours, say 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. However, while the amount of data to back up continues to grow, the number of off-hour time during the day remains the same. Smart organizations are getting ahead of the curve by implementing archiving and "data de-duplication," today's fancy term for data compression. While industry has historically looked toward denser storage devices and faster network pipes to store data in those devices, data is burgeoning to the point where that approach is simply not adequate. It's clear today that reducing the volume of data that needs to be stored may be the better approach. Driven by industry demand, storage innovators determined that intelligently recognizing and eliminating redundant data in files, before storing those files, could drastically lower the amount of data that needed to be stored. For example, in an e-mail system that contains 20 copies of a 1 MB file attachment, storing those 20 copies would require 20 MB on a disk or tape. However, with e-mail and data archiving technologies, only one copy of the attachment is stored, and each subsequent instance of that attachment is referenced back to the one stored copy. The result is a 95 percent savings in stored data: reducing 20 MB to 1 MB. Of course, the savings also mean that less storage hardware is required -- and, just as importantly, greatly improved operational performance. Data de-duplication takes the same approach, but does it on a much more granular level. It looks at the raw storage and identifies redundancy at the bit level before writing to disk or tape. This technology can offer as much as 50-1 compression, regardless of whether the data is an e-mail message, a corporate database or a Word document. But how does operational performance come into play? Remember that your company's storage specialists back up data for a reason: to restore it in the event of a system failure in which data corruption has occurred. In a "restore" operation, perhaps the largest variable is the time required to bring systems back to full operation in the event of a failure. This is known as RTO (Recovery Time Objective). The less data that has to be stored, the faster it will be to implement a disaster-recover operation that brings systems back up and enables personnel to become productive again. Today, small and midsize companies and institutions can implement disaster-recovery strategies that have historically -- due to their cost -- been available exclusively to only the largest companies and institutions. This benefit is the direct result of lowering the amount of data that needs to be replicated to a disaster recovery site. As a result, your network requirements are diminished considerably, but even in ways you may not have imagined: the mirrored storage requirements -- duplicate copies of data stored at sites close to their users -- are reduced as well. If your institution is experiencing any of these difficulties managing data growth, compliance challenges or disaster recovery, it's time to look at these technologies as key enablers to your company's information technology strategies. It's not a matter of rolling with the punches, but of thriving with the changes. Robert T. Murphy manages the Northeastern division of Presidio Networked Solutions in Woburn. He can be reached at 781-638-2200. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
