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Rinku Tyagi
The jogging track that I follow everyday has a Neem tree on the way. On this tree hangs a big honeycomb that must be weighing a few kilograms - as it seems to be - a huge lump that if it fell on your head would make a crater into it. And every time I cross it, I wonder how these bees manage all that honey inside and prevent it from dropping down. And more so when this is against the infamous gravitational force. Think about it and you will find yourselves perplexed at the how artistically honey is stored inside those honey cells and how it is managed for all times-good or bad. And today these honeycells where you store all your data separately are not the only things that need to be managed. Instead you have as much as a sea of data to manage.
To put it in other words, as a CIO, you not only have to manage data sitting at different locations and geographies within and outside office premises but you also have to keep track of loads of data that has to be stored and managed. Most organizations place this task of managing storage at a priority. For this, you must know the ins and outs of your organizational needs and limitations so that you can get the best for your enterprise.
Now data intensive applications such as streaming content production and distribution, surveillance video, compliance archive, remote backup data centers for disaster recovery, etc are all adding to the pile. So its not just capacity planning that you have to do. You must also set appropriate policies for storage management and also know what's the next technology that will cure all your problems.
This is the maze we will help you find your path through. Last month, in our story on Strategies for Managing Storage, we got some crucial insights into what Indian CIOs are planning to deploy in the near future and what is that they have been doing in order to manage storage better. A few interesting trends that emerged show an affinity of most decision makers to plan their capacity better, consolidate and centralize storage and disaster recovery planning. Technologies that scored low on the wish list of the enterprises include e-mail archival and retention, data security and managing multiple islands of data. So let's get straight into it and find out what's best for you if want to harness all storage management resources at hand.
Info lifecycle mgmt
Here is one area that most organizations see as having more potential to become the cynosure of all eyes in the times to come. As much as 32 per cent of the CIOs, according to the survey we did last month, plan to implement ILM in their organizations. Incidentally more and more companies are deploying/planning to deploy ILM for controlling modular costs.
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Unlike what most people think, ILM refers to actively managing data from the moment it is created till the time it is no longer needed, rather than archiving/warehousing it indefinitely. And this is precisely the way to cut down storage costs through better resource allocation. As an effective way to lower TCO, companies can classify data according to its criticality and put most important items on the most expensive storage, and less important data on less expensive storage rather than keeping all information on high-end and more costly storage. This can be done in multiple tiers, depending on a company's data and reliability requirements. And if all enterprises do this, as they indicate their plans are, storage and thereby IT infrastructure costs can be brought down to a great extent.
Consolidation and Virtualization
Consolidation along with storage virtualization are two overriding trends as many companies today are working toward reducing the number as well the kinds of server hardware and OSs. All this is done in order to reduce complexities in managing storage. Most organizations are taking planned routes to do this. This is because it is not only necessary to store data but you also need to ensure where you place your data on a storage array as that is critical to its performance characteristics. And it would be bad if you just store your data somewhere and then one fine day that data black box would turn into a black hole from where it would be impossible for you to get the data back at the right time. Enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of this fact and are working in this direction.
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Storage Deployment Trends
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But there are a few things that need to be kept in mind while going for data consolidation. One, it might be adding to your costs as you end up spending for the bandwidth. Therefore, you must make sure that you keep the data local if more users are located at one particular branch office rather than jamming bandwidth for the same and keeping it all available online all the time. Caching can also be used as a partial solution. For instance, Web caching technology can be used as a very inexpensive procedure that would work for HTTP based delivery.
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Capacity planning
Cut your coat according to your cloth. Old fashion is becoming haute today even when it comes to storage management concepts. That's what seems have gained a lot of potential and most IT departments spend a lot of time on planning and making storage policies today. This enables you to know how much your machines are being utilized. Machine utilization percentages are an important measure of data processing management's competence. And therefore you have job scheduling and capacity planning as important components of management. Taken together these two specialties ensure that the capacity on hand would be just sufficient to get all jobs done-but this can be done only if the people involved maintained extremely high equipment utilization rates.
Most companies only use about 25 per cent of their current storage capacity, yet continue to add capacity as a hedge against rising data volumes. As much as 20 per cent of the CIOs we surveyed said that whenever there was some storage crunch, they just added up additional capacity. But that is not the right thing to do. You must allocate utilize the right kind of hardware as well as storage capacity for each process involved in the workflow. This way you need not pile up unnecessary storage hardware, but you can optimize your existing ones.
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Centralization
Having a centralized team managing your storage requirements seems to be one case where most people seem to have already been there and done that. Not only that, a good percentage of organizations (23 per cent) still have it on the top on their to-do list. This is fairly understood considering the proper strategy making and storage planning that most organizations have begun to do these days. It saves you a good amount of hassles aggregating all available capacity into centrally managed pools and allocating proper storage volumes to all workflow processes.
Organizations not only have centralized teams to handle all storage-related issues, they also are going for readymade solutions for the same that are already available in the market. This minimizes storage costs, helps you make good use of unused storage capacity and helps you avoid over-allocation of capacities. In fact, readymade solutions bring with them another added advantage of being able to manage all processes from one console. So like they say, follow the leader.
CDP
A good number of organizations have already begun to use CDP (Continuous Data Protection) as a means to get the right data at the right time. This is because most organizations have realized that they do not just need to back up live data on the network as it is continuously being changed, but they also want it in their easy reach so that it can be recovered any time. This drastically improves recovery-point objectives unlike those in the traditional midnight backups and incremental backups.
With CDP you can save every change to data as it is made. As a result, the users can retrieve data such as e-mail from any point in time as it was. So in case, a data file you are working on gets corrupted at some point in time, which you came to know only later, there would always be a clean copy available from an instant just before when it got spoilt. Not to forget that being time-stamped, CDP is closely integrated with ILM as well as DR and BCP. This makes it all the more important for IT departments to make CDP a necessary element of the storage management policy. There are two types of CDP products that are in use: Continuous and near-continuous. With the near-continuous types, the data isprotected after every few hours or after every hour while continuous type of data protection enables snapshotting data after seconds.
So be ready to buy a solution that contains both the necessary disk storage as well as the CDP software. You might incur additional cost on it but that may be justified if the higher data availability saves you loss of revenue.
Storage resource mgmt
Storage Resource Management or SRM, as it is fondly remembered, is catching up with every organization-big or small. Even then, there are various myths associated with it. While most people think it is something to do with tracking, monitoring or backing up data, SRM is a function of all storage information and management features. That is, it comprises all the processes and concepts that are necessary to manage all data generated in an organization from the time the data is generated to the time it is finally archived or deleted permanently.
Different IT managers use SRM to be able to do many things. For instance, some want their SRM package to manage their storage resources and others favor using it strictly for information gathering and reporting. In the later case, the actual management is done with other storage management tools. Though not many people have SRM implementations operating in their enterprise environments right now, many are planning to do so in the times to come.
This not only shows its rising popularity, but also the need of the hour to deploy solutions that will do it all for you-logical and systematic storage, tracking and monitoring workflow and resource allocation. As most enterprises use heterogeneous environments and different solutions for various tasks, you should go for an SRM package that can make use of multiple platforms and OSs.
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| Harish Shetty, Vice President, IT, HDFC Bank |
In your opinion, have Indian enterprises started taking storage mgmt seriously? Is there proper planning involved as far as managing storage is concerned?
Storage is procured based on users' business requirements. These requirements include performance, speed of data
retrieval, volume of data, impact of failure of storage devices, archival of data for compliances or business needs, MIS needs, etc.
How does your organization go about managing data and make storage related decisions?
For us, storage needs are evaluated, requirements consolidated and procurement decisions made by a centralized team. We have a set about 25 questions that need to be answered by individual departments to gather data and analyze their requirements. These question are related to the need for storage, response time required, amount of data which will be stored, type of application whether LTP/DSS/ mail, etc, redundancy required, backup, DR/ BCP and so on. We have implemented tiered storage strategy where we have different types of storage solutions with varying cost or performance based on users' needs.
Do you foresee a trend in the way things are moving in the storage management arena? If yes, which technologies do you think are to be watched out for?
Here they are: Continuous Data Protection, Information Lifecycle Management, Storage virtualization and E-mail archival.
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IP SAN & FC SAN
Sans fiber channel-that's what most organizations today seem to be doing to save on cost, time and deployment hassles.
IP SANs are more popular amongst decision makers and IT managers to be deployed considering that they have to budget their decisions and still be able to get more functionality out of what they buy. IP SAN solutions provide significant savings over traditional FC SANs through lower costs
of acquisition, lower costs of administration, and simplified deployment.
Not only that, they also eliminate the interoperability problems. So now you can install an IP-based SAN for a fraction of the cost of a similar FC solution. Disk-disk backup, near-line archive, and remote DR sites are some key applications where the native iSCSI storage arrays are
being considered and applied. In these cases, IP SAN is used as auxillary storage to the more expensive FC SAN.
Content & doc mgmt
Enterprises generate huge amounts of data daily, which calls for an ever-rising demand to manage it. There are a lot of documents, e-mail and other types of content that are taking birth daily in the enterprise environment and this population explosion also needs to be controlled before it becomes
unmanageable.
Output volumes are also increasing due to the use of technologies such as the ERP systems, the Internet and intranet.
There are readymade content and document management solutions available that can be used. Note that document management is not only to do with scanners, MFDs, filing systems, data centers, and so on. Instead, it comprises issues such as document conversion, storage, integrity and security, deployment and maintenance as well as legal issues.
Organizations have begun to set up content management policies, and CMS and DMS (content and document management solutions) are already being used for the purpose.
An effective document management process should aim to reduce IP (Intellectual Property) access and retrieval times; increase use and value of IP; increase knowledge about accessing files; support knowledge sharing; reduce the time and energy spent; reduce work and document duplication; improve document security; abide by the legal rules and regulations; ensure better space utilization; improve quality; reduce distortion; and enhance information flow. Also it should help avoid data duplication.
All this is incomplete unless such a system aids in the reduction of the various costs involved. So unless you ensure that your enterprise is adopting and exploiting the correct document management systems, you cannot address the issue of huge expenditures that you have been incurring over documentation.
DR and BCP
This is one area that seems to have a lot of juice. More than 50 per cent of the organizations, we surveyed, do DR and BCP and about 30 per cent say that they have this to be implemented in the near future. Organizations, who don't have full-fledged teams to do disaster management for them, are increasingly going for partnerships with others. There are independent organizations that would work in close integration (onsite or offsite) with your organization and come up with strategies for disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
The need of the hour is that the storage management teams work in close correlation with the information security groups. If this can be ensured, the utopian dream of having bulletproof storage can soon be a reality.
Data encryption, for instance, could be one step in this direction. And thank your stars that at least the backup solution providers have begun to act this way by providing solutions that encrypt data while backing it up.
Source: PCQuest
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