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Taking the pain out of storage management
Monday, January 23, 2006
When you have a lot of data to manage, how do you decide what's the best solution? We strategize concepts for you
A typical desktop today has roughly 10 GB of data, if you
discount the space used up by applications, temporary files created by those
applications, and files that do not fall under the 'document' category.
Across a corporate network, this data is not unique either. Other workers would
have copies of them as well. They would also typically reside on a server
somewhere. Now, data in an organization is not just in word processor documents
and spreadsheets – you have e-mail (which are again stored in files on the
disk or a central server) and databases of various applications. When all this
gets backed up, it takes up yet more space. If you use a DR facility, that's
simply more copies of those files. Which is why in our Career Guide back in May
2005, we talked about careers for designated Storage Managers.
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Storage management is by itself becoming a necessary evil
in all organizations. This deals not only with managing how much storage is
available across all your deployments, but also managing how that's utilized
optimally. Depending on the type of business your organization is into, how
securely and how long you store your data is important. For some organizations,
it is necessary to store documents for periods of ten years or over in an
unalterable form. Your management philosophy must take care of these aspects as
well. Also, the data you store is ultimately the knowledge and the memory of
your organization. It contains all your historical records and forms the basis
for future decisions. As such, however you store this information, it must be
easily retrievable and with its integrity maintained.
Managing storage is not just about managing what you
backup. It goes beyond managing your SAN, NAS and DAS deployments. Even within
each of these sub-contexts, it is vital to use them at the right places to get
the maximum value back to your business. In this story, we look at the various
'pain points' in managing your storage effectively, such as capacity
planning, data classification and management. We've even done tests in our lab
to figure out which RAID solution gives what level of performance.
Anil Chopra, Rinku Tyagi, Sanjay Majumder, Sujay V Sarma and Kunal Dua
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