Entries categorized under “Data Management”

Determining a solid foundation for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans are a significant challenge for enterprises of all sizes and shapes. Understanding the business value of your organization's data is the first step to achieving that solid foundation as it provides a framework for what's critical and what's not so critical to the operation of your organization. (read more)

Last Friday, May 8, 2009, the latest unemployment figures were released by the US Bureau of Labor and it was not a pretty sight with US unemployment rates reaching 8.9% in April 2009. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Granted, a lot of individuals are now looking for work but I also speak to a lot of IT staff who are still employed that now need to get their job done plus do the jobs of the individuals who were let go. These individuals need more integrated solutions that require less time to manage, not more. In that vein, the announcement that the Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) 8.0 will continue to be powered by CommVault (now in more ways than one) should be welcomed by enterprise organizations that need a robust and integrated data management and protection solution that extends across both hardware and software platforms. (read more)

Every organization knows its data stores are growing annually by 30%, 50% or more and, as they do, archiving is taking on a greater role to help organizations more economically store and manage this data. But, what organizations can fail to consider is the downside of not having an archival data store that can scale to meet their current and future data storage requirements. For example, today science departments across the nation are grappling with the inability to cost-effectively manage and scale their archived data stores. Their experience will provide enterprise organizations some insight into the types of problems they can avoid if they act now. (read more)

Whether taking on a new plan, or retrofitting an existing Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plan, it's extremely helpful to have a strict set of goals on how to accomplish, not only the DR when an actual incident occurs, but also to ensure that an appropriate test matrix is in place and utilized. Surprisingly the organizations I visit all seem very dedicated to DR and Business Continuity. (read more)

Among the vendor teams that I met at SNW this year, the team from STORServer stood out to me as having the best use of appliance technology built using VMware systems. STORServer offers an appliance built on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to simplify data backup. STORServer was there to talk about their VCB capabilities, which simplify VMware Consolidated Backup adoption - certainly a good use of an appliance solution approach. But more interestingly, I felt, was their use of VMware technology built into their appliance to speed the delivery of new applications capabilities to their customers. (read more)

But because of the internal nature of databases, migrating to thin provisioning can pose some interesting dilemmas if the free space is not dealt with before or during migration--resulting in a thin provisioning system that contains the same wasted space and consumes as much storage as the original system. (read more)

Moving information from primary to secondary storage to relieve operational and performance issues is only half the issue; archiving the data is the problem. Financial institutions that might use Oracle as a back end database will find that relocating information to lower cost storage can be quite difficult. (read more)

Lately I have spent some time mulling over the results of the recent Symantec 2008 State of the Data Center Report. Specifically, I have been examining how much money an enterprise can potentially save by starting to place data on different storage tiers instead of following the path of placing most of their data on primary storage as many do now. What I quickly discovered just doing some back of envelope calculations was that an enterprise with 100+ TB of storage could potentially realize over a million dollars in storage savings by placing the right data on the right tier of storage. (read more)

Over the past year there has been a lot of talk and speculation about Electronic Health Records (EHR). The topic started making headlines last year as President Obama and Senator McCain sparred over how to best fix health care with EHR touted as the single best way to control the ever increasing costs of medical treatment. Although it remains to be seen if this is actually the case, the recent stimulus bill passed by Congress on February 13th, 2009, has ensured EHR projects will be funded. (read more)

Data protection is top of mind with more enterprise organizations today as they look to redesign data protection. Rapidly changing economic forces, new technologies and steadily growing volumes of data are prompting enterprises to rethink how they can best protect, manage and recover their data by leveraging these new technologies without introducing new people or extraordinary costs to accomplish these objectives. To get Symantec's take on these new challenges facing organizations, DCIG lead analyst, Jerome Wendt, recently met with Deepak Mohan, Symantec's senior vice president of the Data Protection Group, to discuss these topics. (read more)

A clustered server environment is only as reliable as the system administrators who maintain it. The challenge they encounter after they configure and deploy the hardware and software that make-up a clustered environment is, "How to maintain it?" Most system administrators leave the configuration alone for fear of disrupting a mission critical application after it is initially deployed. Crucial details such as patches and configuration changes are not completed just due to the nature of the system itself. But what catches organizations off-guard is that at some point down the road when an event does prompt a failover from one server to another, the failover fails to occur because smaller changes have occurred in the environment that now preclude the failover from successfully taking place. (read more)

The use of tape as a primary target for backup has supposedly changed in large part due to the onslaught of new disk-based backup solutions with many features that are enticing data centers to change course. One could even say that vendors and analysts have abandoned tape for greener pastures by seeking to associate themselves with disk's sexier features--all the while forgetting about tape's evolving role within the data center. (read more)

As I travel around talking to companies of all sizes, one of the biggest concerns that they have and ask me about is how to drive costs out of their storage environment. Most of them dedicate a certain percentage of their overall IT budgets to counter the exploding growth in their storage environment but, due to the current economic crisis, that budget is now shrinking. My answer to them is always very straightforward, "You need to get a solid handle on what storage is allocated and what is used. (read more)

However as the number of MSPs proliferate, the decision about which MSP to dial up gets harder, not easier, since more and more VARs are jumping on the SaaS bandwagon to offer Managed Backup Services. Further, companies need to quantify their own needs and expectations as they select an MSP. Below are some examples of questions that they need to ask and answer internally and externally before making this important decision. (read more)

Being the last calendar day of 2008, I thought it only appropriate to take a moment and look back at the most viewed blog entries on the DCIG website for the past year. While some were topics that I expected to receive a lot of attention when the blog was posted, others were blog topics that essentially came out of nowhere to garner a large number of page views. To be honest, I never thought that entries on topics like cable management and cable labeling would resonate with readers but ended up capturing a couple of the top spots for 2008. Meanwhile topics like the FTC's Red Flag Rules were so popular on DCIG's web site that it led me to write columns that eventually were picked up by websites like Network World and BusinessWeek. (read more)

Managing today's data center infrastructures is not for the faint of heart. Administrators have to verify new gear works with existing gear, existing gear works with other existing gear in new configurations and current configurations will not fail under peak loads. While vendors provide hardware and software compatibility lists in efforts to help administrators address this task, there is still usually more work than hours in the day to verify all of this gear is optimally configured and in an optimal state. It is this void that the new Veritas Operations Services seeks to fill. (read more)

The general economic malaise of the past few months is not going unnoticed by anyone as it seems every day more companies are cutting back and tightening their belts in anticipation of a lean 2009. Just in the last months, numerous companies including 3M, Dow Chemical, and Hewlett-Packard, just to name a few, have announced cutbacks in staffing. But for those individuals that remain, the task does not get any easier. Most if not all end-users that I talk to are getting a hard push by their IT executives to cut costs as the days of simply purchasing more infrastructure is an unacceptable solution. (read more)

The data archiving landscape is undergoing a transformation and no where are these changes more evident than in how companies archive data found on their corporate file servers or in their Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SharePoint data stores. While the impetus for archiving this data in the past was driven by either operational (save storage space or performance improvements) or compliance concerns (satisfy legal concerns), today's companies must take both objectives into account when selecting an archiving solution. But to do so companies need software that can access these application data stores, move the appropriate data and archive it on various kinds of media (disk, optical or tape) and then later search, manage and retrieve this data when it is needed from this media. (read more)

We have all pondered, postulated, and probably even pouted a bit during this current economic crisis. Even so, isn't it time we just realize that the crisis might be beneficial for IT? While I don't like it, I personally think it comes at a great time. Green IT has come a long way since those Energy Star ratings on monitors. (read more)

If companies thought that times were tough over the last few years, 2009 is shaping up to be a doozy. Corporate layoffs, cutbacks in spending and decreased revenue coupled with the looming threat of more government regulation and oversight will make the last few years seem like a cake walk compared to what is to come. But as companies prepare to make even more cutbacks in IT staff and budgets, the "Do more with less" mandate that seems to accompany every round of corporate cutbacks remains. This directive leaves IT survivors needing to identify technology providers that can help them better manage their company's data, recover their enterprise applications more quickly and perform these tasks with minimal training, time and effort. (read more)

Providing value-add in any market can become increasingly difficult as the competition continues to mimic your every move and steal you thunder. But keeping pace with Bell Micro, and their ever expanding programs, might leave some of the competition a... (read more)

All enterprise businesses backup their data but how confident are they that they can restore it? As more companies adopt disk as their primary target for backup, they can be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that their issues associated with recovery are gone. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what some companies are finding out is that while their immediate backup problems are solved, their issues surrounding recovery are just beginning. Tape typically remains part of many companies' backup processes so the movement and recovery of data from tape media cannot be ignored and even recovering backup data from disk after it is copied to another disk system is not without its challenges. (read more)

Robert: One of CommVault's objectives is to leverage the experience we gain at each customer account and make that experience extensible throughout our services and support organization so we can use that regardless of where our customers are located. By doing this, CommVault can treat every customer as a special project and not try to fit them into one specific mode. (read more)

If you ever wanted to create war within the confines of an application design meeting just bring in someone with an eye for architecture. I don't care if the person is a database, storage or system administrator or some sort of system architect. These guys will often start questioning the application in relationship to the physical requirements of hardware. How much data will there be? What does a typical transaction look like? How many updates will there be? What will be the growth pattern? (read more)

If there are any two disciplines within corporate IT that should be in the process of becoming best friends, if not inextricably linked, it is security and storage. Storage management teams routinely send data offsite on tape or optical media, grant administrators or users permissions to search production or archived data stores during eDiscoveries or change backup policies on the fly with minimal or no supervision. The problem that emerges is that when companies are asked to prove that they can comply with certain laws or to respond to a legal eDiscovery, it turns into a corporate fire drill with security and storage scrambling to prove they managed corporate data according to preset corporate policies. This begins to change with today's announcement between CommVault and McAfee, Inc, as it creates a new mechanism for companies to proactively monitor corporate data while preventing corporate data leakage. (read more)