According to a cross section of industry sources it is estimated that:

• Structured data is growing at 30 - 40 percent
• Unstructured data is growing at 65 percent – 200 percent (e-mail, word documents etc)
• Unstructured data has been estimated to be as high as 85 percent of all data
• Unstructured data is typically over 50 percent of storage capacity

The real problem with these rates of growth is not cost of hardware, but more the problem of data and supporting infrastructure management together with power and cooling costs. Low storage utilisation costs money According to storage industry analyst Steve Duplessie, storage utilisation is at best 50 percent today, leading to higher management and running costs, more complexity involved in locating data, not to mention a stain on the company's green record. Disk drives are the main power consumer for storage, so having the ability to support growing demands without increasing capacity should be a key objective. Technologies such as virtualisation, thin provisioning and the ability to power down disk drives either on demand or when not being accessed can deliver both cost and environmental advantages by reducing the need for excessive storage capacity and power use.

Is this how your data is growing?

Better resource management for greater flexibility and business continuity
Looking at resource management as the basis for a business continuity strategy and, in particular, how we can better manage and utilise the data storage resources, we should recognise that the highest levels of resource flexibility and agility deliver the highest levels of operational business continuity options based on cost, quality of service and risk mitigation.

Storage of all this new data has the additional knock-on effect of increasing the size of the backup. Bigger backups take more space and more time to complete, increasing the required backup window. Data de-duplication, where any given piece of data is only recorded once, helps to allieviate such problems.

The alternate perspective is to view the problem from the point of view of the value of data to the business, rather than focusing on the IT hardware. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) attempts to achieve this by classifying data then assigning the most suitable data storage based on the value to the business. See our previous article on the subject here.

The consolidated infrastructure should be built on a tiered architecture model encompassing both disk and tape. It should be overlaid with common management tools, including the data protection functionality being aligned to the value of specific parts of the storage pool.
 

Trustco has great experience in helping our clients choose the most appropriate solution for their environment. Talk to us about your requirements.