It`s a well-worn theme - enterprise data is spiralling out of control, leaving companies gasping for air as they struggle to cope with immense and inexorably growing information stores.
But all is not lost, and the situation is not as dire as it appears, says Vic Booysen, enterprise storage product manager at Business Connexion. With an effective strategy in place that takes account of the data type and its value to the enterprise - which changes with time - companies can, and are, coping with the information overload.
"As data storage requirements grow at enormous rates the value of resulting information to companies is growing at a similar rate. This necessitates that businesses put in place an effective storage strategy to protect data at a level that reflects how important that data is to them - from highly valuable information which may have an additional requirement of high availability - through to data which is less valuable, and may not need to be accessed as rapidly," he says.
As such, an effective storage solution requires an understanding of the specific needs of a business, including identifying all data within the enterprise and grading it according to its value. Once this has been achieved, the `nuts and bolts` of the solution - the enabling hardware and software - can be implemented.
"The design of solutions around company information has become more complex; the simple installation of a storage platform does not solve a lot of the specific needs in today`s demanding business environment," says Booysen.
He explains that storage infrastructure solutions require the design and architecture of well-defined blueprints for companies` storage infrastructures.
"The design of such blueprints is typically driven by the information management strategy of the specific business," he notes.
Companies have to design these strategies around the information lifecycle - typically, the value of information `degrades` over time, so that which is business-critical today may become relatively unimportant within a week or a month. "Information has a lifecycle that must be matched to an appropriately priced device - information lifecycle management (ILM), quite simply, defines how information will be managed from date of creation to date of deletion, if ever," he explains, noting that various legislative and regulatory requirements around the world, to a large extent inform the ILM strategy.
Implementing an effective strategy to take control of an enterprise storage environment, companies need three foundation layers of hardware, software and services.
At the hardware level, an ILM design will typically consist of a tiered storage infrastructure to ensure information resides on the right level of storage at the right time as determined by the value of that information. From fast, high performance, fully redundant disk, to slower, lower performance, fully redundant disk, to slow, low performance, non-redundant storage, the information is stored according to its value.
Managing the tiered environment in an automated manner requires software; data should move through these tiers automatically according to defined strategic policies.
Finally, the services around the ILM strategy are required pre- and post-implementation, and include services from consulting, defining strategies and drawing up blueprints, to installing and managing the environment.
"With these foundation layers in place, the challenge of taking control of the enterprise storage environment can be soundly addressed, with planning and capacity management that removes the need for any panic," Booysen concludes.
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