Intelligent data management (IDM) has been highlighted at the IT risk symposium in Sandton this week as a fast and cost-effective way to store and retrieve information.
Amit Parbhucharan, Channel Data technology MD, told delegates to the International Research Institute hosted symposium that IDM is a flexible storage methodology based on the principle of separating active and inactive data.
"IDM is one of the latest data protection techniques to be adopted locally and it is proving to be very popular because it is disk-based, offering faster storage and retrieval times."
IDM is tiered storage along the lines of hierarchical storage management (HSM) commonly used in the mainframe environment, explains Parbhucharan.
"From the user`s perspective, nothing changes. The data appears to be where it always was, but in reality, all inactive data is migrated seamlessly according to set criteria to other disk storage. All that remains on the user`s desktop is a pointer or shortcut to the new location."
Parbhucharan says by reducing active storage requirements, the lifespan of existing systems can be extended without having to be replaced, often representing a significant saving and increased return on investment.
One of the most effective applications of IDM, says Parbhucharan, is in the management of e-mail systems. "By separating attachments from e-mail messages, around 70% of active storage can be freed up, which drastically reduces backup times and associated costs."
Parbhucharan says IDM in e-mail systems is a two-step process. "In the first step, the e-mails are scanned and all attachments migrated to longer-term, lower-frequency access storage. In the second step, shortcuts or references to the migrated attachments are created and the original attachments are deleted from the e-mail server, reducing the amount of data that has to be backed up on a regular basis by as much as 80%."
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