10 Things you need to know about data storage

1. You can’t ignore it! - 70% of companies go out of business after a major data loss Source: DTI… Without an effective recovery policy (where you wish to recover to and how long you can afford to take) the business will suffer. Companies only have 4 recovery issues: a) Files need to be restored immediately when they become corrupt or deleted unintentionally; b) Systems still have hardware failures and are attacked by viruses; c) Disasters can take out the whole of your operation; d) Archive should be resilient and robust as it may be the only asset that keeps you out of jail
2. The problem with hindsight - Too often it is only when problems strike that businesses realise the value of their missing data and the costs of trying to recover or do without it. By this stage it is too late to avoid significant downtime and the associated loss in revenues. 42% of all tape restores fail - source: DTI. By exercising the recovery processes you can ensure that when it happens for real, you are ready and there are no surprises.
3. You can’t afford to ignore it! - 61% of companies took more than a day to recover from system failures Source: DTI. With 24x7 operations, system and data availability are critical to the success of a business. The cost of not being able to take orders for an hour or not being able to send email for half a day is continuously increasing. Look at different types of data differently, understand the business value of each and ensure that you can make the data available in the appropriate time.
4. Facts about compliance - If not having an archive of your data could mean a jail sentence, then that archive is very important. Currently, archives are generally a by product of the backup process. A tape is taken out of the backup cycle at the end of each month and put into a cupboard somewhere. On the basis that tapes are a single point of failure; they have a limited shelf life; you may not have the hardware available to read them in 5 years time; and they only provide intermittent snap shots of the storage environment, their value for archiving data is pretty limited. A continuous data collection and storage process that captures data at source more frequently than every day, that remembers all the changes not just those at the end of day or end of month, and that delivers full audit trail capability are the requirements that are driving change.
5. Storage: Capacities and costs - As data archiving requirements tighten, more versions of more data are going to be retained for longer periods of time driving growth in data volumes. Significant optimisation is needed to contain the costs of this growth with single instance storage, block level backup and efficient compression algorithms being key aspects to consider. The cost of archiving isn’t just on the storage side however, it also includes the people time to manage the manual processes and offsite storage to ensure any problem locally (i.e. flood, fire, theft, etc) doesn’t affect your long term archive.
6. Most compliance laws these days are written to solve issues that IT normally has let into the cracks. Government wants those cracks covered, so you need to understand the transactions that are out there, the code that's been written, the data that's coming through - all those things that are happening whether you wrote it or had it outsourced. No matter where it came from and no matter how it was entered, when the CEO and CFO are signing the piece of paper, which they're attesting to all the data that you processed, manipulated and transformed in some way.
7. The economics around storage have shifted significantly over the last few years. The burden has shifted from capital to expenses, and the only way to drive economy from storage is by controlling operating costs. Critical to this is automating all data collection, replication and storage processes. If you can take people out of the equation you reduce costs and improve the resilience of the process. Take a tape backup. An operator has to insert the tape, check it’s usable, take it out once it’s been written to, give it to a courier for offsite storage, warehouse operators then log it and put it in a rack. If data held on the tape is needed for recovery, this process is reversed. Lower cost options are disk-based solutions where a click on a mouse returns the data immediately.
8. The price to performance ratio in storage management is probably the worst of any discipline today. There's a definite price/performance gap that you need to focus on. Being able to drive all storage management processes via automated company wide policies is critical to reducing management costs. This automation then needs to be complemented by management systems that can drive critical recovery functionality from anywhere in the business, without having to leave your chair. By reducing the time needed to manage the storage, more effort can be expended on supporting the business.
9. Keeping costs down from a data availability perspective suggests that a common platform be used for backup, recovery and archiving. This ensures that data is only captured once, stored once, replicated offsite once, and yet can be used for all recovery and archive purposes.
10. In house vs. Outsourcing - Key aspects to this decision are if you have the facilities it may be best to keep the backup, recovery and archive functions within the organisation. If you are relatively small, using an external service to augment your capabilities may be essential.