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Disruptive Innovations in Data Management

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Managing data is a tougher task and to keep up with the pace of the ever

increasing data is a cumbersome job for IT admins in every organization. The

rate of growth of data being managed within any typical enterprise is over 50%

per year and it is the job of IT admins to make sure that the data is managed

and stored effectively without any increase in their IT budgets. Number of data

management related issues faced within an organization are:

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1. Storage and management of email, which is a critical business application

is one of the challenge.

2. Another challenge is management of the data centers of the organization

which are active 24 X 7. With increasing data being stored in these data

centers, completing backup of data in limited time is another daunting task for

the IT administrators.

Direct Hit!

Applies To:

IT managers, storage managers



USP:
Tech to manage ever-increasing data within organizations

effectively



Google Keywords: Data management
techniques
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The crux of the modern data management challenge is that this ever-growing

data must be retained for longer durations and this data needs to be backed up

in lesser time without any considerable increase in their IT budgets. For this

organizations need not only to look for new technology innovations but they must

also adopt these innovations to gain a competitive edge in the market.

The Innovations



There are a number of disruptive data management techniques which initially

might not sound like a great technical innovation, but which when used properly

then they can drastically change the way data is being managed. Let us talk

about a few such innovations.

Generating Snapshot copies of data



Traditional backup techniques take some time to backup a data set and if the

data is being updated using a certain application along with the backing up

process, then chances are that the backup may not be valid or data may not be

usable when they are restored. One way to tackle this problem is to generate

snapshot copies of the data and stop updating data while the backup process is

on. For this one can instantly freeze a copy of disk volume and easily backup or

copy data from that frozen copy. Once you've created a snapshot copy on the

disk, you can use it for taking backups to tape or another disk even when live

data on the disk is being changed.

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Every snapshot copy is a complete and consistent image of the data-the user

need not to apply the incremental updates in sequence to get back his data; he

merely has to revert to the most recent snapshot. The key benefit of such an

approach is one that the snapshot copies cannot be changed. Another highlight is

that it contains only the changed data from the previous snapshot, so the cost

of keeping a snapshot is just the incremental space consumed. Moreover, restoral

of data from snapshot copies (kept on disk) is instantaneous and completely

reliable.



Overall, snapshots help in consolidation of resources, aid data migration and
they also result in cost savings. Companies should maintain multiple copies of

data in snapshots and use a tiered data retention approach in order to get

maximum benefits.

Thin provisioning



Storage users generally over-estimate their disk space requirements as they

have very little idea about how their requirement will grow over time. So each

user tends to keep a little 'buffer' in their storage capacity estimates and

this adds on to a huge storage capacity out of which only less than half the

storage capacity gets consumed. For whole of the storage capacity the

organizations pay a huge sum and if they are paying for something which they are

not even using then it is a drawback. To avoid this one can use thin

provisioning; this dramatically improves the storage capacity utilization within

an organization and thereby reduces costs significantly.

Thin provisioning works on the principle that all users are not going to use

whole of their allotted space at the same time. Keeping this in mind, the

storage administrators allocate high-storage space quota to a user, but actually

reserve only a fraction of the physical disk capacity. So for instance, if a

user is allotted a quota of 100 GB, the disk space reserved for the user may

only be 50 GB. Coupled with thin provisioning, the administrator installs a tool

which monitors the real disk usage and sends an alert to the administrator when

the real usage starts approaching the reserved space.

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IP SAN



When Storage Area Networks appeared in the market, they were seen as an

expensive storage solution, which only a large data center could afford. But the

speed of access and the security provided by SANs made them an attractive choice

for large data centers.

Then came IP SAN, a Storage Area Network implemented using the Internet SCSI

(iSCSI) protocol. IP SANs provide all the benefits of SAN (security, speed and

scalability) but at a lower cost as the ISCSI uses regular Ethernet adapters,

cables and switches for storage-server connectivity. Thus the organization

adopting IP SAN can use the existing local area networks for dual purposes; for

data and storage connectivity. In fact, since this technology is based on IP

standards, so one can easily connect remote offices over the WAN, using IP

protocols, into the central data centre for consolidation and back-up of data.

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The organization can migrate from locally attached storage islands to IP SAN

and adopt FC only for some really demanding and performance-hungry applications.

Mirrored storage arrays



Because of the increased risks of natural and man-made disasters, each

organization has their own disaster recovery plans. Most of the organizations

keep a backup of  their data on tapes in a remote location. But since

transportation of these tapes from one place to another and then loading them on

to an alternate server to bring the data online consumes hell lot of time. For

faster disaster recovery, a live secondary server site which has a replica of

the production data at the primary site is required and this is what Storage

mirroring technology makes possible. Here, two storage systems kept at a large

distance from each other transparently send data packets to each other and in

the event of a disaster at one site, the other site can take over almost

instantaneously because it has the most recent copy of whole of the critical

data. Since the mirroring is done by the storage system, it does not add any

additional load to the data center servers in this process. There have been some

dramatic improvements in reliability and disaster readiness because of this

technology.

De-duplication



A recent innovation, which has a huge potential to reduce storage costs is
De-duplication method, it avoids duplicate copies of data. It searches for

duplicate copies kept on a storage system and eliminates all the duplicate

copies. This is beneficial as there are a number of files whose duplicate data

exists-for instance consider a presentation sent by one user to all other

team-mates. There will be multiple copies in each user's mailbox and a few

copies will also be there in shared folders. So, there is a lot of scope for

detecting and eliminating these duplicate blocks of data. De-duplication just

does that and it is transparent to the end-user. It saves storage costs and also

speeds up the data backup processes.

Since de-duplication is a relatively new innovation, the implications of this

technology haven't been completely understood by the user community. But one can

be certain that this is bound to cause some disruption in the way data is

managed.

What to expect in future?



We have seen how adopting disruptive innovations in data management offer

competitive advantage to the adopters. The pace of innovation in the data

storage industry will only grow in the coming days. Many start-ups are entering

the storage industry, eager to solve specific data management challenges. And

the already established storage systems vendors are also ramping up innovation,

hence, taking advantage of the technical talent available in countries like

India. But the real winners will be those users who are ready to adopt the

disruptive innovations in their workflow, and make good use of them to meet

their IT challenges.

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