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Today's business challenges
IT departments are under constant pressure to utilize their budgets to support business with technological initiatives that provide a clear competitive advantage. IT managers themselves are measured on strict ROI terms and, for this reason, are anxious to avoid ever-increasing expenditure on the mundane and tactical tasks, which, as fundamental as they are to the business, do not offer the potential of a true strategic differentiator.
The information environment has become a focus for increased efficiency and effectiveness. The growing amounts of data that are stored, replicated, backed up, and possibly restored are absorbing large proportions of the IT budget in terms of new products, new licenses, and increased management costs. All too often, this increase in expenditure is not equally matched by an increase in competitiveness or productivity. There is more information to manage and a bigger infrastructure needed to support it.
The challenges businesses face today include:
- Explosive growth in data and storage requirements
- Insufficient time to complete critical backups
- Slow and costly single file restores from tape backups
- Increased need for 24 x 7 operations
- Budgetary pressures
- Increased cost of management
Customers are looking for innovative ways to improve the efficiency of these environments and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is an umbrella of approaches and solutions that attempt to provide this.
What is HP StorageWorks File System Extender?
HP StorageWorks File System Extender (FSE) is a new-generation data management software that is part of the HP ILM portfolio. FSE has data migration functionalities beyond traditional hierarchical storage management (HSM) software that makes it a cost-effective solution to managing massive amounts of file system stored data.
Unlike traditional HSM products, an FSE-managed file system can be optionally upgraded to a read only write once, read many (WORM) file system to support growing demand for legal compliance of electronic documents. In addition, FSE supports intelligent media management.
While FSE offers multiple business benefits as a standalone solution, it is an integral part of the broader ILM product portfolio from HP supporting customers as they embark on the journey of managing information stores for increased productivity and competitiveness. This white paper describes the FSE position within the ILM journey.
Key FSE business benefits
- Increases business productivity by increasing speed of access to critical data by moving and storing data on the most economic location in accordance to the value and importance of that data to the business
- Saves time by enabling faster backup and recovery by reducing the data in primary storage
- Reduces TCO by moving data from the FSE file system to the most appropriate secondary storage based on policies and reduces downtime for capacity upgrades
- Ensures business availability in that the applications and end users can continue to seamlessly access files regardless of where data resides with optimized seek times for current online data
- Streamlines operational management by integrating with archiving management software to provide a tiered storage infrastructure for all leading business applications
The ILM journey
Step 1: Classifying data?not all data is equal
The HP ILM methodology builds on a logical, sequential approach or metaphoric journey.
The first step in increasing the efficiency of the information environment is to clearly define what information is vitally important to the company, what is less important, and what is perhaps of no consequence whatsoever. Another variable in defining or classifying the data is the impact that aging will have on the data.
In assisting customers to manage and understand their environments, HP proposes HP Storage Essentials to assist in managing and understanding environments. HP Storage Essentials is designed as a suite of value-added plug-ins that offer advanced heterogeneous storage management functionality including storage area network (SAN) management, storage resource management, provisioning, and application infrastructure monitoring. The HP Storage Essentials File System Viewer plug-in provides information on file aging, type, user, and size.
In addition, HP Consulting and Integration (C&I) provides Data Classification Workshops to assist customers with analyzing and segmenting their data stores.
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