Balancing storage TCO against availability, security needs

CIOs and IT managers are grappling with the challenge of balancing cost of ownership in their storage environments against the need to provide high service levels as well as bullet-proof protection for data in case of an outage or a breach.

Regulatory and business pressures are forcing companies to put processes and systems in place that allow them to quickly recover lost data as well as protect sensitive information from unauthorised access.

To manage these pressures, enterprises need to put sound information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies and processes in place. ILM is a set of processes and technologies that help companies to manage data from the moment it is created to the instant it is no longer needed and can be discarded.

It helps companies to assess and classify data (according to metrics such as type, age and value), match data to the right storage medium, and automate data management processes.

ILM helps IT managers come to grips with challenges such as under-used storage, the costs of storage management, data security and growing the storage environment to cater for data replication, disaster recovery/business continuance and backup.

Data security is becoming a focus in most organisations, in the wake of widely publicised security breaches around the world and new regulatory requirements. ILM helps organisations to understand where and what their mission-critical data is and put security (encryption, for example) and disaster recovery policies in place to protect the integrity of this information.

By helping organisations to understand the real value of their data, ILM allows them to more effectively distribute data across multiple resources with less wastage of storage resources. They can use tools such as virtualisation to ensure optimal use of storage subsystems and eliminate unnecessary copies of data.

Continuous data protection (CDP) has become a buzzword for the storage industry. CDP refers to the tools and technologies used to automatically save of a copy of every change made to the file. CDP uses hard discs, like those used in PCs and storage arrays, as a storage medium.

That means an administrator or end-user should be able to quickly able to recover the most recent data following changes a systems outage, providing access to data from minutes or seconds before the outage rather than forcing users to go back to the backups performed the day or week before. The technology can often allow users to recover their own files without help from the IT department.

However, CDP is not without its challenges. The agents used to automatically backup every change a user makes to a file can slow PCs and servers down to a crawl, and CDP tools can also place the network under strain. ILM policies can help companies to understand where CDP tools are truly needed.