Vendors share their expertise on how companies can implement an effective storage management strategy
STORAGE COSTS ARE falling but throwing more capacity at the ever-growing amounts of data, especially in the form of e-mail accumulating in company data centres, is by common consent considered a bad strategy. Beneath the jargon and the proprietary emphases of vendors, here they share some pearls of wisdom on managing storage needs.
Consolidate corporate data Large enterprises have inherited departmental storage silos created with inconsistent strategies and service levels. Dennis Kwok, advisory IT architect at IBM, says: 'The main problem facing large enterprises is that they inherit islands of servers with separate storage capacity. Banks, for example, may have storage for applications such as retail banking, credit cards and mortgages. Each island of storage has a separate set of procedures to manage it and surplus capacity cannot be shared for other uses.'
In some cases, overall storage costs are rising, even though the cost of hardware and software are falling, while IT salaries and overheads are flat. 'The key issue is that customers don't have a consistent methodology to acquire storage,' Mr Kwok says.
Consolidating islands of storage can provide more consistent solutions. 'We need a standard operating environment to help users identify their needs and match them with service levels ... We believe that this approach will assist users to migrate from islands of storage to consolidated and standardised service levels with a better cost/performance outcome,' Mr Kwok says.
Classify data by retrieval needs Some IT managers classify applications used by a particular group, for example, the finance department, as mission critical and make multiple copies of storage, perhaps using write-once and read-only devices. But this approach is too simple says Betty Lin, Sun Microsystems' country manager, Hong Kong Data Management Group.
'E-mails, for example, have mixed criticality. E-mails from the secretary or clerk have a different business value than those from the CFO, so we may classify data by user. But if the CFO's management reports and e-mails to the Securities Exchange merit tier 1 storage, it does not follow that his e-mails to staff and friends should be treated similarly,' she says.
