Plan now for future data storage needs; poor choices can be costly

Guest Opinion

The solutions an organization develops to handle data storage and storage management issues must be arrived at by thoroughly assessing current capabilities and future needs to ensure that storage capabilities are maximized while minimizing the management requirements.

In today’s e-business environment, properly assessing current and projected business needs is an absolute.

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Data storage solutions come in a number of flavors today:

* Server-centric. The main bulk of active data in this solution is maintained on a production network server.

* Network-attached storage (NAS). The main bulk of data in this solution is stored in devices that are accessible to users on the network

* Storage area networks (SANs). A number of different storage devices are linked together in a networked “pool” that is accessible to all users.

* Outsourcing storage. In this solution, primary disk space is leased from a vendor that maintains its own storage facilities.

Server-centric storage is rapidly declining as the mass explosion of data has made this solution the most expensive, least efficient drain on management resources. NAS and SAN solutions are usually viewed as two competing choices for data storage, with outsourcing as an alternative for companies that can’t afford the costs of acquiring or managing their own data storage solutions.

A Meta Group forecast predicts that by 2004 it will cost $116 million to manage 300 TB of data. International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass., says corporate networks will store 57,000 petabytes of information by 2004 (one petabyte equals one million gigabytes).

The costs of managing the skyrocketing volumes of data are soaring almost as fast as the data is growing. These costs cannot be ignored during the planning process.

Some important things to consider while assessing current and anticipated data storage needs are:

* How data storage is currently handled within the company.

* The future growth projections of stored data.

* The current in-house IT staff capabilities.

* What resources will be needed to handle future growth projections of stored data, including IT staff capabilities, expansion of the existing infrastructure and best practice business rules governing data retention.

Once an organization has established what its current state is, what kinds of data must be managed and what the future anticipated growth should be, then a solution path can be constructed. Assess whether adding network attached storage would resolve data storage issues or whether a larger storage space such as a SAN is needed. Then determine if the expertise and resources to manage either solution exists in-house. And finally, determine if there is enough money to support the purchase of a NAS or SAN.

Always consider resources for disaster recovery, data protection and security. Determine if there is data so critical that it should be duplicated in a different location and backups maintained for full disaster recovery and redundancy.

Another consideration is to evaluate the data itself. Managing a database requires different techniques than managing real-time, active operational data. Additionally, structuring how the data is stored on different hardware devices also influences the management costs.

A two-tier system of classifying data according to the type of access users need shows that approximately 15 percent to 35 percent of the total data are active files involved in real-time operations. The remainder, approximately 65 percent to 85 percent of the total, are considered high-volume, less-active files and archived files.

Hardware devices vary in cost to acquire and in cost to manage. The faster, more expensive devices such as RAID arrays, should handle the active files involved in real-time operations, while lower cost, alternative storage technologies such as tape should be used for files that are less active, or can be archived. Simply moving the high-volume, less-active data to lower cost, alternative storage technology has been proven to dramatically lower management costs and reduce investment in total storage hardware.

The technology with some of the lowest data storage costs has been, and still is, tape. A tape library can offer substantial savings for the storage of bulk data such as e-mails, graphic files and other large files that are not operational but require user availability.

Integrated subsystems, incorporating data-caching for performance, automated data management for availability and cost control, and implementing tape library systems that can archive data for capacity, or other types of removable storage media, can provide a solution that is scalable enough to handle an organization’s current needs, expand to handle exponential data growth and support future expansion into a SAN network or more complex data storage solution.

Any solutions an organization puts in place will have to be lived with for some time to come and in an unforgiving environment that mandates 365/24/7 availability, poor choices will cost the business far more in the long run than the investment into proper planning and implementation.Mike Holland is president of Grau Data, a Louisville-based innovator in virtual disk storage technology. Holland has 30 years experience in operations management and as a technology provider. He has been instrumental in steering vendor companies to solutions-oriented strategies that bring significant value to data storage customers. Holland has worked as director of open systems marketing at Storage Technology Corp. and director of marketing-storage automation and solutions at Exabyte Corp. Grau Data can be reached at (303) 665-3018.