BANGALORE, INDIA: What would you do if your doctor tells you that your lifestyle is putting your health in jeopardy? You would exercise, eat a balanced meal and try to remain stress free.

Making sure that everything is in the pink of health is not just limited to your own self. What about the machines you deal with, the data you deal with?

Also Read: Cloud data services to push data centre boom

Technology is driving data explosion, however when it comes to managing the health of this data, many enterprises are ignoring daily best practices and letting those stores grow morbidly obese.

The result is overflowing data centres leading to a tough situation. An effective and trim data centre is critical to the operations of any organization  In fact, given the exponential data growth being experienced today, the demand for data centres is expected to grow in the future.

A recent IDC India report, "Assessment of Business Opportunities in the India Data Center Services Market", predicts that the India data centre services market will touch nearly Rs. 10,000 crore by 2011 end, representing a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.7 percent over the two-year period 2009-2011.

Keeping this in mind, any IT manager should ask the following questions:
Is my data centre living an unhealthy lifestyle?
Does it need to go on a diet?
Do I need to put measures in place to protect it from growing obese?
               
The answer is a resounding YES!!

This is validated by the findings of the 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey, conducted by Applied Research and Symantec Corporation. A global survey covering 26 countries, it reveals that a whopping 87 percent of respondents believe in the value of a formal information retention plan, but only 46 percent have one in place. 

A gap exists between information management goals and what is being implemented. This causes rampant storage growth, unsustainable backup windows, increased litigation risk and expensive and inefficient discovery processes driving serious enterprise problems.

A comprehensive information management plan is essential to effectively manage growing data volumes but it is the fear of accidentally deleting important information that keeps enterprises from moving away from this wasteful strategy. An absence of a formal corporate retention plan leads to incessant hoarding. 

Legal hold (a process which an organization uses to preserve all forms of relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated) is a big issue for organizations. A majority of organizations are using their backup systems to perform legal holds – something backup systems were not designed to do. Hence, an environment is created wherein nearly half of backup storage comes from legal holds alone. But this goes against the original reason for having back-ups.

So let’s explore some recommended dietary tips to get that data center fit and agile:
The following tips will enable organizations to regain control over their information, control storage spending, soaring backup windows and litigation risks. It will transform the data center into a faster more efficient and cost effective information management tool.

Restrict the Backup cycle to 30-60 days: A backup is not an archive. It is not recommended to use backups for archiving and legal holds.

Automate retention beyond 30-60 days: Information that cannot be deleted at 30-60 days due to business, legal or regulatory reasons should be automatically assigned a retention and deletion policy by an archiving system. 

Delete confidently and apply rapid data protection: 30-60 days of backup data means that enterprises can backup and recover faster while deleting older backup sets within months instead of years. 

Dedupe Everywhere:  Start at the source application with archive dedupe, and then move to the backup environment, deploy deduplication as close to the information sources as possible to free network, server and storage resources. Finally, eliminate the review of duplicates in discovery to speed the process of early case assessments.

Discover Efficiently:  Search, preserve and review information more quickly – and with more granularity than possible in a backup environment.  This will reduce the time and cost it takes to evaluate litigation risk, resolve internal investigations and respond to compliance events.

Protect Against Data Loss: Enterprises should deploy data loss prevention technologies to measurably reduce their risk of data breaches, demonstrate regulatory compliance and safeguard their customers, brand and intellectual property.  IT administrators should look for a solution that discovers, monitors and protects confidential data while providing insight into the ownership and usage of information.

There exists a big gap between an organization’s information management goals and the reality in today’s day and age.. There is no need to continue your datacenter’s unhealthy diet. The above mentioned steps will go a long way in ensuring that your datacenters remain fit 24/7, 365 days a week. No need for the doctor now!

The author is vice-president of Information Management Group at Symantec.