PA extract:
Alastair McAulay, a senior IT infrastructure consultant at PA Consulting, also recommends a strategic approach to storage management: "At the moment some companies are buying ILM tools as a knee-jerk reaction to fears of non-compliance, " he says. "But they must look at the bigger picture. The tools are becoming more capable and can, for example, give you data ageing reports to support proper archiving."
Full article:
Imagine for a moment that computers can dream. One of the purposes of human dreaming is, supposedly, to prioritise information and store it in short- or. long-term memory. This is exactly what modern storage management systems aim to do.
Important information needs to be stored where it is easily and quickly available - the equivalent of short-term memory. Less immediately important information can be stored further down a hierarchy of storage - say on tape or optical disk - comparable to long-term memory.
Computers do not dream, of course. But organisations are increasingly installing information life-cycle management (ILM) software which aims to achieve a similar purpose. Computer short-term memory - fast access disk - is expensive, while long-term storage media such as tape is not. Organisations can, therefore, use ILM to save on storage costs by moving less-important data to less-expensive storage media.
There are other reasons for using ILM. In addition to the money saved by using lower-cost storage, organisations can make better use of their storage resources.
"The rationale for ILM boils down to three things: optimisation - because you don't want to spend too much on storage and you want to make the best use of resources; simplification - to improve productivity and, finally, availability of capacity, " says Mark Lewis, executive vice-president of storage vendor EMC's software group.
Along with its rivals EMC has shifted its marketing efforts to concentrate on ILM. It has reorganised its product range to support it, offering storage at three different levels from front-line, mission-critical storage to bulk archiving. It has also developed a suite of control software to manage the movement of data between the tiers. Other leading vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems offer similar packages of hardware and ILM control software. Software developers such as Computer Associates are also providing ILM products to manage data movement.
ILM software automates the movement of data according to sets of rules or policies which define its current value. An unpaid invoice, for example, sits at the top of the "value" stack until it is paid, then it can be moved to an archive where it is stored for auditing. Rules can also be applied to unstructured data such as e-mail or video clips. An e-mail about the company Christmas party might not be archived at all - but a message outlining an important contract could have as much value as a monthly sales forecast.
"Over time information needs to move through different tiers of storage because its value changes. This is the foundation of ILM, " explains Neil Gisler, managing partner for data centre technologies at Accenture. Organisations installing ILM should start with an overall storage strategy, he says. They can then develop a 'tiered model' of their storage systems, based on business requirements and a clear understanding of their data.
"We typically look at five categories of data with mission-critical data in applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) data at the top. Then, down through business-critical and business-important data to archival and non-critical. With this analysis we can underpin each application with the tier of storage that is appropriate."
Alastair McAulay, a senior IT infrastructure consultant at PA Consulting, also recommends a strategic approach to storage management: "At the moment some companies are buying ILM tools as a knee-jerk reaction to fears of non-compliance, " he says. "But they must look at the bigger picture. The tools are becoming more capable and can, for example, give you data ageing reports to support proper archiving."
ILM tools can help to define the "business value" of data and, more importantly, how the value changes over time. "In our experience only about 26 per cent of data is business critical so companies need to understand the data they have and the current value it has to the business, " says David Liffe, vice-president of BrightStor product marketing at Computer Associates.
There are other potential benefits from ILM, he says: "By fully understanding the value of their data, companies can also cut back-up and recovery costs. They only need to back up regularly that quarter of their data that is business critical."
Some business critical data is not easy to identify. Andrew Barnes, managing director of e-mail archive specialist, KVS/Veritas, says unstructured data such as e-mail is now as important as structured operational data - and places extra demands on ILM.
"E-mail is now part of the enterprise information base. Companies are obliged to archive it properly to comply with data protection and governance regulations. The fundamental components of ILM are there for structured data. But unstructured data needs more 'intelligence' - things like spam detection, for example. Companies don't want to fill up their disk with useless content. They need intelligent analysis at the point where the content is first created."
Long-term ILM is about more than the task of storing data, says Mr Barnes. "It is not only about storage. There is no final destination for data in ILM - it must allow for movement from one place to another. You need policies to manage where data is stored - but, in the long term, you also need to be able to read the storage format or you can no longer access the data."
It is reassuring, perhaps, that it is still possible to buy needles for 78rpm record players - a format that disappeared half a century ago - and film is still available for cameras made in the 1930s. Let us all hope that data recording formats are as persistent.
