Data storage growing out of control? How will your infrastructure cope?

With data storage capacity requirements growing by around 30-40% in each of the past three years, the time to look at tiered data storage has arrived. IT managers widely acknowledge that the rapid rise of storage volumes cannot continue, especially when much of the data stored is of little or no business value. Often the sheer volume of data available clogs business processes, dragging down corporate efficiency and hindering regulatory compliance efforts.

Thin provisioning, content-addressable storage and de-duplication technologies all have their place, making more efficient use of existing or new storage capacity. Data classification and tiered storage approaches address physical storage problems but more importantly they reduce the volume of information that needs to be considered when querying the archive. It is this that helps the business to avoid sinking under the weight information overload.

To meet today’s business demands, strategic data management based on classifying and managing data via policy is essential. And that is something demonstrated by Information Age’s 2008 Effective IT Survey. Though Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) may still not be widely adopted (only 22% of the respondents have gone down that route), where companies have implemented it the impact has been overwhelmingly positive. Around 56% rated ILM as either effective or very effective.

Essentially, an ILM strategy recognises that storage spending has to be optimised. To achieve this, ILM technologies and processes move different data between storage devices depending on its changing value. So high-value, frequently accessed data is assigned to high-end arrays that are constantly available to servers, while lower-value data cascades down, perhaps ending up in a tape archive or being deleted altogether.

Data Classification
Data classification is key to this process. Some of the storage heavyweights, such as EMC and Hitachi Data Systems, have chosen to partner with data classification solution providers. Others, such as IBM and Symantec, are building their capabilities in-house.

Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II may have kick-started the first wave of interest in data governance but new legislation, such as MiFID and the UK’s Civil Procedure Rules are reinvigorating corporate efforts to get to grips with the unwieldy volumes of data.

Landmark legal cases have already alerted business leaders to the risk of not knowing what data resides within their enterprise stores. But again, tactical implementations, in this case e-discovery tools, will help reduce corporate exposure.

While a significant proportion of organisations may not formally adopt ILM, they are working towards the same principles – and the real business benefits.

Trustco provides storage solutions and advice. Contact us to discuss your requirements or see our storage page.