Network Storage: Optimizing Solutions

If information is money, storage is the bank. Enterprises can do better in their business with a storage solution that takes care of not only their present needs but also future ones. As information and knowledge has become the key to the success of all businesses-data, next to employees, has emerged as the second most valuable asset of an organization. The data that is stored today could pay dividend over the years and would be key to the achievement of an organization's business goals. In organizations, storage needs have doubled or tripled annually for the past few years. And with much of that storage directly attached to tens or hundreds of individual distributed servers, configuration, backup and other management tasks have become more expensive, time consuming, and staff intensive. That's the reason, network storage in organizations is passing through a transition phase and new technologies are evolving. However, storage is still not a plug and play affair for enterprises. They must go through a complex web of technologies and solution to understand it better.

Issues and Challenges

As the volume of data grows, so does the complexity and therefore the cost of managing that data, not the least the need to ensure 24x7 continuous data availability to those who need it. In the short term, a data interruption can have deleterious effects on a company's bottom line. In the long term a data outage can damage a company's reputation and result in serious financial losses.

Importantly, as more and more business operations are recorded and stored digitally, the thicket of laws and regulations governing businesses and data becomes denser, and the consequences for failing to comply with these regulations become more severe.

Disaster Recovery: For organizations across verticals, disaster recovery and business continuity became a serious issue post the 9/11 terror attacks. Also the recent natural calamities like the hurricane in the US, the tsunami in Asia, the deluge in Mumbai, the earthquake in India and Pakistan have dramatically impacted the thought process of organizations worldwide. Organizations in India too have to look at implementing backup, recovery and archiving solutions that help them to store, archive, back-up and restore their critical data and applications.

The DR/BCM initiative is helping companies to be globally competitive and stay in business. But, companies should not blindly go with the buzzword; they should do their business impact analysis (BIA) before going ahead with the DR/BCM planning, as this initiative requires a lot of investment. Two more issues companies should look at are: Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the time within which a function or business unit must be restored; and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the point (in-time) which data must be restored.

Enterprise Content Management: It has also become an imperative for enterprises in India, driven by the unprecedented growth in data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information, which is estimated to grow approximately 50% per year. Of all enterprise information, over 80% of it is unstructured, 95% of which is not managed. Additionally, organizations in India are also beginning to feel the heat from various compliance guidelines as outlined in regulations such as the IT Act, Sebi Listing Clause 49, Basel II, SOX act etc. These regulations compel organizations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise to content management challenges. The various data theft scandals in the BPO industry have also made the BPO organization carefully analyze their data storage and security strategies. Hence, given the content management challenges enterprises need to look at adopting well defined and well planned content management strategies in association with experts in the field.

Email Management: It is the fastest growing mission critical application worldwide. According to an Osterman Research in association with EMC/Legato revealed that 38% of organizations have experienced more than 50% growth in email volume, 55% of organizations have experienced email storage growth of greater than 50% during the past two years, while 10% have experienced email storage growth of than 200% during this period. Enterprises in India need to implement a centralized data storage and retrieval system that makes enterprise email easier to administer and use.

Content Addressed Storage: When businesses were looking for fixed content (representing more than 50% of the newly created data) storage solutions, they were facing a dilemma. As there was a complete mismatch in what they needed and what the storage industry was offering while, at the same time, maintaining the cost effectiveness. CAS not only assures content integrity for long-term storage, but also guarantees that all data will remain unchanged over time. Through its self-configuration, self-healing and self-managed operations capabilities, CAS can eliminate the need for additional resources to perform data management and data-protection activities, and dramatically lower the total cost structure for fixed content. Its plug-and-play scalability automatically recognizes additional capacity as it is added, and its online capability makes it possible to retrieve data from anywhere on the network anytime.

Technology Options

The challenge is to plan a storage infrastructure that deals effectively with requirement for continuous data access, data security, regulatory compliance, scalability to accommodate growth, controlling storage management costs, and rapid adaptability to change in business needs. To address the increasing burdens of data ownership, CIOs of the enterprises need to clearly analyze the business requirements, the technologies available and what suits them best.

© Source: Voice&Data