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on 06-26-2009 03:47 AM
A more enlightened approach to data management comes from understanding the life cycle of data and applying this knowledge to ensure data is housed in resources that deliver appropriate quality of storage services. In other words, by understanding the utilisation patterns and retention requirements of data sets, IT departments can route data to resources with appropriate levels of performance, protection, availability, retention, immutability and cost.
Administrators can use an information life cycle management approach to assemble the proper combination of storage devices, media types, and network infrastructure to create an appropriate balance of performance, data accessibility, easy retrieval, and data reliability based on the relative value of the data. The information life cycle management approach examines data capture, transfer, processing, analysis, storage, backup, retrieval, archiving, and deletion. In using this approach, you determine whether you need to store data online, near-online, or offline and when data should be deleted.
Information life cycle management (ILM) can be described both from an enterprise customer as well as an overall solution perspective. An ILM target solution focuses on the integration of existing and future data management products, which, coupled with workflow management, provides the tools, infrastructure and services for enterprise corporations and small & medium businesses to operate their respective ILM processes. An ILM solution provides an integrated and automated approach to data availability, data protection and data retention management, while maintaining application transparency and end-user uniformity, including common federated data classification and policy management, as well as an integrated management paradigm.
In many ways, information life cycle management represents the evolution of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) techniques. Vendors first developed HSM products in the mid-1990s in the mainframe environment for distributed computing implementations. HSM offered several benefits. It reduced the total amount of expensive RAID disks an enterprise needs. Increasing storage use efficiency can improve performance. Moreover, you can perform some routine storage housekeeping tasks more easily with HSM products.
In HSM implementations, data automatically moves from expensive hard disks to less expensive optical media or to tape according to specific policies. Users don't have to know that their data has migrated to a less costly storage media because HSM products track data movement and create paths for data retrieval. When an HSM product moves data, it creates a pointer to a file's new location. When a user or application retrieves a file that has moved down the storage hierarchy, the HSM product automatically returns the data to the top level of the storage infrastructure. Companies that use an HSM approach typically use two triggers to move data. The most common trigger is time. Data that workers haven't touched within a specific time period moves to a less expensive storage device. The second trigger is capacity. As disks fill, data can move down the hierarchy.
But compliance is forcing companies to rethink their migration strategies, fearing HSM might be too simplistic an approach. Looking at the effects of Industry Regulations and availability and affordability of disk based type protection a number of observations can be made with respect to the ILM process and the types and timing of media used, the method of discovery and recovery applied and the convergence between various functions. The figure below shows a number of aspects of the “traditional” enterprise data protection.
At the core it shows the different media used for failure protection and preservation mapped against granularity of protection and against time. Time can be seen both as time to recover as well as the age of data (which implicitly assumes some form of decline in data usage/value over time). Traditionally disk based protection provided mirror style protection or point in time snapshot style protection for individual data items of complete datasets. Full tape backups (organically or synthetically) traditionally have been used for full system and/or site recovery. With the exception of a number of vertical industries (e.g. HPC, Seismic, or Medical) where the actual primary data is stored on tape or optical to begin with, typically data was moved to tape or optical for long-term preservation. Alternatively existing full backup tapes were designated as the archive copies of that data such that the data could be removed from the online store without having to copy the data to tertiary media.
ILM gives administrators a framework to understand the value of different records and helps them build storage infrastructures that reflect those determinations. Information life cycle management is an important skill for storage administrators.
Over time, different data has different storage needs
Throughout its life, data requires different levels of performance, availability, protection, migration, retention and disposal. At first, fast read and write speeds simplify editing and sharing. The data is also critical to daily operations and therefore demands high levels of availability and protection. In time, data becomes less important, and is used less frequently. As these changes occur, data can be moved to different tiers of storage that provide appropriate levels of availability, capacity, cost, performance, and protection.
Eventually, data is no longer used. Unused data would either be deleted to save space or stored indefinitely to avoid data loss. However, regulatory requirements and increasing data volumes are rendering these tactics obsolete.
Given the notion that ILM is a process at its core, any solution then primarily exists to support the corporate process and since the ILM scope spans all phases of the lifecycle of data, any respectable ILM solution would need to encompass most, if not all, different types and “versions” of data, whether online, near-line or offline.
The 4 key data management segments are:
Storage Management
This segment is focused on management of the storage container resource (including volume management) for data. Data allocation, data availability, data growth, data migration are managed across specific classes of storage (QOSS) with the necessary storage resource management tools to view, track, analyse, report and (de)-provision. Other key functions include quota, capacity management, growth management, charge back and media management (disk, near-line, tape, optical)
Protection Management
Key objective for this segment is to provide multiple methods for data protection for various recovery purposes: single data item corruption, dataset corruption, storage, server failures, and disaster recovery. Typically media copies that are kept for extended periods of time (for example the monthly or quarterly full backups), are re-purposed as archival versions through a vaulting process
Retention Management
Though not exclusively, this segment is typically associated with archiving. The focus is on specific data retention and all aspects of near-term and long-term data preservation across a variety of media and media technology generations. Archival key functions include: data organisation, navigate, search, retrieval, export, collections/grouping & co-location management, data quality management: security, integrity, immutability, disposal,
Preservation focused functions include: format management, application version tracking, vendor/application/technology neutral formats (VTNF), platform & technology migration and transformation
Content Management
This segment is focused on the discovery and retrieval of content and data by virtue of providing in depth search and dynamic & static data organisation. While in general content management applies to online/primary data, storing a significant, if not a majority, percentage of data in an offline archival type solution drives the need for offline content management as well. Traditionally version management would fall under this segment as well.
Centralised administration empowers IT departments to dictate how data is stored across the enterprise. Integration with other backup and migration software allows the use of backup storage resources, including SAN attached devices, as part of the Information life cycle management environment. Automated enforcement of archival policies delivers the reliability and repeatability needed to address regulatory compliance issues. Software needs to support unalterable media such as WORM tape, optical platters and role-based security must ensure that only certain users have access to specified functions.
Information life cycle management exists in some form or another in most current organisations. The key benefits of a software based Information life cycle management solution however can be expressed both as a pure storage TCO savings as well as through indirect business process gains:
Uniform data access; common API’s exist for access to data irrespective of where the data is located and whether the data copy exists for protective, retention, versioning purposes. Uniform File / folder view and search & discovery across all online and offline data copies
In response to pressures to remain competitive, global businesses are increasingly aggregating employee or customer information collected by branch offices throughout the world, and collecting and processing it in one central location. Consequently, multi-national businesses need to take a strategic and systematic approach to ensuring compliance with data protection legislation across their operations. Setting up a uniform privacy program can help to ensure appropriate levels of compliance on an international basis, including those countries with more stringent data protection requirements than, say, in the home jurisdiction of the data controller.
In terms of administrative ease, the simplest form of program is one that requires compliance throughout the business with the most rigorous standards in any of the jurisdictions in which the business operates the highest common denominator approach. However, a compliance system should aim to balance the merits of this approach with the merits of being able to take advantage of the opportunities available in less rigorous jurisdictions. The balance that is struck between these two considerations will depend on the individual business, the nature of its operations, its size and geographical scope.
IT and business professionals are quickly headed towards a future where less time and cost is spent managing storage systems and more time is spent managing, accessing and protecting information. Information, now more than ever, is seen as a vital corporate asset with intrinsic value. Much like other assets, the value of information changes over time. When discussing the value of information, it is important to remember that the intent of regulatory compliance is to protect some of the most valuable and potentially dangerous information from improper use.
Organisations that can efficiently and quickly address compliance are those that can remove the internal barriers between IT and the lines of business and take a proactive approach towards compliance. Reacting to compliance or to an audit of your e-mail system means that it is too late; this doesn't mean that you have to throw out your entire IT infrastructure and start fresh, but it does mean that you have to understand the requirements that affect you, that you identify the data and content types that are required to be retained, and for how long, and that you develop auditable processes to ensure that these information assets are being protected as outlined in the regulations.
… and even if you are not regulated in such a way why should you care about ILM?
Storage Resource Management (SRM) storage and file reporting provide an overview of disk consumption as well as information required to manage space effectively. Reports can provide a whole pile of information to help identify inappropriate file types, files and applications being stored on designated servers. SRM reporting provides visibility to understand what data exits within the storage environment allowing classification and profiling to identify the types of data in the organisation and determine actions that need to be taken.
ILM has been hyped over the last few years – but it is just about coming to maturity, with a few holes left to be filled (policy based data/information classification for example) – giving IT organisations the opportunity to re-visit data archiving in order to take control of ever growing storage infrastructure, to simplify management and reduce costs.
What's the future of ILM? DLP technology now givers us the oportunity to contextualise unstructured data - better than simply indexing everything, or, for that matter leaving the classification of documents to the SysAdmin - so when DLP and ILM technologies come together with SRM and storage management it'll be awesome!
Administrators can use an information life cycle management approach to assemble the proper combination of storage devices, media types, and network infrastructure to create an appropriate balance of performance, data accessibility, easy retrieval, and data reliability based on the relative value of the data. The information life cycle management approach examines data capture, transfer, processing, analysis, storage, backup, retrieval, archiving, and deletion. In using this approach, you determine whether you need to store data online, near-online, or offline and when data should be deleted.
Information life cycle management (ILM) can be described both from an enterprise customer as well as an overall solution perspective. An ILM target solution focuses on the integration of existing and future data management products, which, coupled with workflow management, provides the tools, infrastructure and services for enterprise corporations and small & medium businesses to operate their respective ILM processes. An ILM solution provides an integrated and automated approach to data availability, data protection and data retention management, while maintaining application transparency and end-user uniformity, including common federated data classification and policy management, as well as an integrated management paradigm.
In many ways, information life cycle management represents the evolution of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) techniques. Vendors first developed HSM products in the mid-1990s in the mainframe environment for distributed computing implementations. HSM offered several benefits. It reduced the total amount of expensive RAID disks an enterprise needs. Increasing storage use efficiency can improve performance. Moreover, you can perform some routine storage housekeeping tasks more easily with HSM products.
In HSM implementations, data automatically moves from expensive hard disks to less expensive optical media or to tape according to specific policies. Users don't have to know that their data has migrated to a less costly storage media because HSM products track data movement and create paths for data retrieval. When an HSM product moves data, it creates a pointer to a file's new location. When a user or application retrieves a file that has moved down the storage hierarchy, the HSM product automatically returns the data to the top level of the storage infrastructure. Companies that use an HSM approach typically use two triggers to move data. The most common trigger is time. Data that workers haven't touched within a specific time period moves to a less expensive storage device. The second trigger is capacity. As disks fill, data can move down the hierarchy.
But compliance is forcing companies to rethink their migration strategies, fearing HSM might be too simplistic an approach. Looking at the effects of Industry Regulations and availability and affordability of disk based type protection a number of observations can be made with respect to the ILM process and the types and timing of media used, the method of discovery and recovery applied and the convergence between various functions. The figure below shows a number of aspects of the “traditional” enterprise data protection.
At the core it shows the different media used for failure protection and preservation mapped against granularity of protection and against time. Time can be seen both as time to recover as well as the age of data (which implicitly assumes some form of decline in data usage/value over time). Traditionally disk based protection provided mirror style protection or point in time snapshot style protection for individual data items of complete datasets. Full tape backups (organically or synthetically) traditionally have been used for full system and/or site recovery. With the exception of a number of vertical industries (e.g. HPC, Seismic, or Medical) where the actual primary data is stored on tape or optical to begin with, typically data was moved to tape or optical for long-term preservation. Alternatively existing full backup tapes were designated as the archive copies of that data such that the data could be removed from the online store without having to copy the data to tertiary media.
ILM gives administrators a framework to understand the value of different records and helps them build storage infrastructures that reflect those determinations. Information life cycle management is an important skill for storage administrators.
Over time, different data has different storage needs
Throughout its life, data requires different levels of performance, availability, protection, migration, retention and disposal. At first, fast read and write speeds simplify editing and sharing. The data is also critical to daily operations and therefore demands high levels of availability and protection. In time, data becomes less important, and is used less frequently. As these changes occur, data can be moved to different tiers of storage that provide appropriate levels of availability, capacity, cost, performance, and protection.
Eventually, data is no longer used. Unused data would either be deleted to save space or stored indefinitely to avoid data loss. However, regulatory requirements and increasing data volumes are rendering these tactics obsolete.
Given the notion that ILM is a process at its core, any solution then primarily exists to support the corporate process and since the ILM scope spans all phases of the lifecycle of data, any respectable ILM solution would need to encompass most, if not all, different types and “versions” of data, whether online, near-line or offline.
The 4 key data management segments are:
Storage Management
This segment is focused on management of the storage container resource (including volume management) for data. Data allocation, data availability, data growth, data migration are managed across specific classes of storage (QOSS) with the necessary storage resource management tools to view, track, analyse, report and (de)-provision. Other key functions include quota, capacity management, growth management, charge back and media management (disk, near-line, tape, optical)
Protection Management
Key objective for this segment is to provide multiple methods for data protection for various recovery purposes: single data item corruption, dataset corruption, storage, server failures, and disaster recovery. Typically media copies that are kept for extended periods of time (for example the monthly or quarterly full backups), are re-purposed as archival versions through a vaulting process
Retention Management
Though not exclusively, this segment is typically associated with archiving. The focus is on specific data retention and all aspects of near-term and long-term data preservation across a variety of media and media technology generations. Archival key functions include: data organisation, navigate, search, retrieval, export, collections/grouping & co-location management, data quality management: security, integrity, immutability, disposal,
Preservation focused functions include: format management, application version tracking, vendor/application/technology neutral formats (VTNF), platform & technology migration and transformation
Content Management
This segment is focused on the discovery and retrieval of content and data by virtue of providing in depth search and dynamic & static data organisation. While in general content management applies to online/primary data, storing a significant, if not a majority, percentage of data in an offline archival type solution drives the need for offline content management as well. Traditionally version management would fall under this segment as well.
Centralised administration empowers IT departments to dictate how data is stored across the enterprise. Integration with other backup and migration software allows the use of backup storage resources, including SAN attached devices, as part of the Information life cycle management environment. Automated enforcement of archival policies delivers the reliability and repeatability needed to address regulatory compliance issues. Software needs to support unalterable media such as WORM tape, optical platters and role-based security must ensure that only certain users have access to specified functions.
Information life cycle management exists in some form or another in most current organisations. The key benefits of a software based Information life cycle management solution however can be expressed both as a pure storage TCO savings as well as through indirect business process gains:
- Lower Storage TCO per unit of capacity
- Improve hardware utilisation
- Enable hardware consolidation
- Improve efficiency of IT management
- Enable management by exceptions
- Eliminate disk and mailbox quotas
- Improve performance; move most critical data to highest performance storage
- Improve uptime; copy most critical data with highest level of protection
- Improve data retention; with automate retention and disposal action to reduce non-compliance risk
- Provide seemingly infinite disk storage for users and applications
- Store data where appropriate without impacting user or application workflow
- Eliminate unnecessary copies of data to aid hardware consolidation efforts.
- Reduce data protection backup & recovery times as well as media consumption.
- Improved utilisation – ILM will result in better utilisation of the proper storage resources that will decrease and/or limit HW costs.
- Common central administration for all aspects of data management.
- ILM automates the use of specific classes of storage and media types for data and data copies.
- ILM through automated policy-based management engines, enable “management by exceptions”
- Improved performance – move only the most critical data to highest performance storage (on a “as needed” basis)
- Improved uptime – copy most critical data with highest level of protection resulting in an higher average uptime for data for which uptime counts most.
- Improved/Guaranteed data retention – ILM policies drive automated retention and disposal action and as such provide a higher degree and better verifiable levels of compliance. This applies to both industry segment specific regulations as well as internal corporate governance.
Uniform data access; common API’s exist for access to data irrespective of where the data is located and whether the data copy exists for protective, retention, versioning purposes. Uniform File / folder view and search & discovery across all online and offline data copies
In response to pressures to remain competitive, global businesses are increasingly aggregating employee or customer information collected by branch offices throughout the world, and collecting and processing it in one central location. Consequently, multi-national businesses need to take a strategic and systematic approach to ensuring compliance with data protection legislation across their operations. Setting up a uniform privacy program can help to ensure appropriate levels of compliance on an international basis, including those countries with more stringent data protection requirements than, say, in the home jurisdiction of the data controller.
In terms of administrative ease, the simplest form of program is one that requires compliance throughout the business with the most rigorous standards in any of the jurisdictions in which the business operates the highest common denominator approach. However, a compliance system should aim to balance the merits of this approach with the merits of being able to take advantage of the opportunities available in less rigorous jurisdictions. The balance that is struck between these two considerations will depend on the individual business, the nature of its operations, its size and geographical scope.
IT and business professionals are quickly headed towards a future where less time and cost is spent managing storage systems and more time is spent managing, accessing and protecting information. Information, now more than ever, is seen as a vital corporate asset with intrinsic value. Much like other assets, the value of information changes over time. When discussing the value of information, it is important to remember that the intent of regulatory compliance is to protect some of the most valuable and potentially dangerous information from improper use.
Organisations that can efficiently and quickly address compliance are those that can remove the internal barriers between IT and the lines of business and take a proactive approach towards compliance. Reacting to compliance or to an audit of your e-mail system means that it is too late; this doesn't mean that you have to throw out your entire IT infrastructure and start fresh, but it does mean that you have to understand the requirements that affect you, that you identify the data and content types that are required to be retained, and for how long, and that you develop auditable processes to ensure that these information assets are being protected as outlined in the regulations.
… and even if you are not regulated in such a way why should you care about ILM?
- Are your customers file servers constantly running out of space?
- Are they struggling to stay within your file server backup window?
- What safeguards do they have in place for other legal exposure (e.g. music, movie, copy written materials)?
Storage Resource Management (SRM) storage and file reporting provide an overview of disk consumption as well as information required to manage space effectively. Reports can provide a whole pile of information to help identify inappropriate file types, files and applications being stored on designated servers. SRM reporting provides visibility to understand what data exits within the storage environment allowing classification and profiling to identify the types of data in the organisation and determine actions that need to be taken.
ILM has been hyped over the last few years – but it is just about coming to maturity, with a few holes left to be filled (policy based data/information classification for example) – giving IT organisations the opportunity to re-visit data archiving in order to take control of ever growing storage infrastructure, to simplify management and reduce costs.
What's the future of ILM? DLP technology now givers us the oportunity to contextualise unstructured data - better than simply indexing everything, or, for that matter leaving the classification of documents to the SysAdmin - so when DLP and ILM technologies come together with SRM and storage management it'll be awesome!
