Taking the pain out of storage management

When you have a lot of data to manage, how do you decide what's the best solution? We strategize concepts for you

A typical desktop today has roughly 10 GB of data, if you

discount the space used up by applications, temporary files created by those

applications, and files that do not fall under the 'document' category.

Across a corporate network, this data is not unique either. Other workers would

have copies of them as well. They would also typically reside on a server

somewhere. Now, data in an organization is not just in word processor documents

and spreadsheets — you have e-mail (which are again stored in files on the

disk or a central server) and databases of various applications. When all this

gets backed up, it takes up yet more space. If you use a DR facility, that's

simply more copies of those files. Which is why in our Career Guide back in May

2005, we talked about careers for designated Storage Managers.

Storage management is by itself becoming a necessary evil

in all organizations. This deals not only with managing how much storage is

available across all your deployments, but also managing how that's utilized

optimally. Depending on the type of business your organization is into, how

securely and how long you store your data is important. For some organizations,

it is necessary to store documents for periods of ten years or over in an

unalterable form. Your management philosophy must take care of these aspects as

well. Also, the data you store is ultimately the knowledge and the memory of

your organization. It contains all your historical records and forms the basis

for future decisions. As such, however you store this information, it must be

easily retrievable and with its integrity maintained.

Managing storage is not just about managing what you

backup. It goes beyond managing your SAN, NAS and DAS deployments. Even within

each of these sub-contexts, it is vital to use them at the right places to get

the maximum value back to your business. In this story, we look at the various

'pain points' in managing your storage effectively, such as capacity

planning, data classification and management. We've even done tests in our lab

to figure out which RAID solution gives what level of performance.

Anil Chopra, Rinku Tyagi, Sanjay Majumder, Sujay V Sarma and Kunal Dua