Need for well-managed storage environments
Why have storage management and information lifecycle management (ILM) become such hot topics? Data storage environments continue to grow at a rapid pace. The figures vary depending on the source but, generally speaking, industry analysts predict that external storage system capacity growth (Terabytes shipped) will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 60%. At the same time, IT budgets and headcount remain relatively flat.
Organizations are faced with the dual challenge of optimizing their storage infrastructure while at the same time meeting the increasingly stringent business requirements placed on the stored information. In this paper we look at how these two challenges must be addressed together, and in fact how the definition of storage management must be expanded to consider the business driven lifecycle demands place on stored information.
IT manager's challenge
Clearly, the IT manager's challenge is to find ways to introduce dramatic improvement in data storage management productivity, and soon, or their environments will be overwhelmed by growing storage capacity. At a 60 percent CAGR, a typical environment will have 10 times the storage capacity in only five years. On top of this continuing avalanche of storage capacity growth, most organizations find that data contained within storage systems is more varied and often more critical than ever to their ongoing success.
Thus, growing storage capacity and the critical value of the data comprising that capacity have made storage management and information lifecycle management (ILM) hot topics for IT managers.
Defining storage management
Storage management has traditionally been focused on infrastructure management defined by functionality that includes:
- Storage device configuration and management
- Storage network configuration and management
- Storage and backup software configuration and operation
- Primary storage capacity management and provisioning Also, storage resource management (SRM) tools have introduced functionality like:
- Heterogeneous storage component discovery
- Storage system monitoring
- Global performance and capacity utilization reporting
Recently, increasing automation has been introduced into these tools so that storage management actions can be taken based on pre-defined policies.
The definition of storage management described above is no longer adequate. In addition to managing the infrastructure, there is a growing business focus on managing the information. Information must be managed to meet the needs of business initiatives, while infrastructure is managed to 1) drive IT efficiency and productivity and 2) provide a foundation for information management as it relates to the availability and performance characteristics of the underlying storage.
And information must be effectively managed through its entire lifecycle, not just when it is created. Because there is significant overlap in the technology that underlies storage infrastructure management and ILM, we see growing convergence in how organizations attack these two challenges. Significantly, even though they may share common tools and infrastructure, there is an important distinction between optimizing storage infrastructure management and meeting the business and regulatory demands being placed on information.
Consequently, storage management, broadly defined, is now about effectively and efficiently managing and matching the integrity and availability of business information to business needs. Therefore, it is increasingly important to know about the information and to be able to classify it by type, as this knowledge will drive the ability to meet quality of service (QoS) expectations of business unit users of the information.
Defining information lifecycle management (ILM)
There are different approaches to and definitions of ILM. At the core, there are some common elements driving the interest in ILM. First, data capacities under management continue to grow at dramatic rates. Second, the value of the many data types driving this growth varies widely from the time of creation to the time of deletion (assuming the data is ever deleted).
Therefore, ILM is the strategy of matching storage policies, processes, and technologies to the value of information at the time it is created, and as it ages (its lifecycle) to cost effectively meet the business needs of organizations. To achieve this strategy, organizations must have:
- Clear information definition and classification
- Well-defined management functionality
- The ability to move information among storage tiers as its value changes
A growing part of managing information as it ages involves:
- Being aware of how long to keep it for regulatory purposes
- Being able to demonstrate that it has been completely removed from all systems when it is no longer needed
