This strategic view is the proverbial "gold" that can be mined from your data protection systems; it is the asset that will enable IT management to prioritize activity to bring activities in line with business objectives and communicate policy compliance to corporate officers and data owners.
The Critical Role of Data Consolidation for Your Data Protection Systems
Technology Brief
March 2005
The Critical Role of Data Consolidation for Your Data Protection Systems Bocada, Inc. Abstract Data Consolidation: The To present an enterprise-wide view of data Key to Enabling Business protection measured against business Intelligence objectives, a management application must be able to consolidate data. Consolidation is Most enterprise applications provide the process of collecting data on activities operational reports rather than presenting and outcomes from disparate backup strategic business information. These applications across multiple servers and reports are commonly designed only to then storing it in a uniform database that support the application or improve enables business intelligence controls. Only component performance, such as network consolidated data delivers a high-level, throughput. Data collection therefore mirrors strategic view of data protection, ensuring the operational aspects of the application mission-critical data is protected and instead of providing insight into-and recoverable. This strategic view is the benchmarks against-business objectives. proverbial "gold" that can be mined from your data protection systems; it is the asset Presenting higher-level business-relevant that will enable IT management to prioritize information requires the additional step of activity to bring activities in line with data consolidation: the process of mining business objectives and communicate data from multiple sources and then storing policy compliance to corporate officers and it in a uniform database with a consistent data owners. structure. Data consolidation is more than merging databases by importing tables. It also requires canonizing data to create consistency across data elements so that all
Figure 1. Consolidated Data for Data Protection. Only through consolidation can data in disparate formats and from different sources be canonized to create a consistent, enterprise-wide view of data protection.
The Critical Role of Data Consolidation for Your Data Protection Systems Bocada, Inc. fields and tables contain the same class of refers to "save groups" and "save sets." information. The structure of a consolidated While these terms reflect approximately the database specifically supports business same concept, this concept is nonexistent in intelligence operations, while still Computer Associates BrightStor® maintaining "hooks" to native data sources. ARCserve®. Moreover, all three of these These hooks are critical to support applications apply and report on both full troubleshooting and auditing activities and incremental backups, but IBM® Tivoli common in data protection. Storage Manager does not. Even when applications use exactly the same terms, In the data protection business, only they often have completely different consolidated data enables IT to move meanings. beyond a simplistic reporting of backup application status to delivering information Canonizing this data requires extensive about SLA performance, asset utilization, knowledge of each application. For audit and bill-for-service functions. example: the time since the last backup of a Consolidated data yields accurate, strategic critical server is essential to its and actionable information about the recoverability. In one application, this data operational and systemic aspects of data may be found in a table with the retrieval protection. based on the name of either the server or the tape library. In another application, the The Challenge of time may be calculated by parsing the log file and extracting the timestamps. If the Consolidation for Data backup failed, information about the causes Management Protection for failure may be reported as text strings, error codes or both. Because no two As previously noted, consolidation for data vendors share a common methodology, protection management involves more than unconsolidated data derived from disparate merging fields and records. Restructuring sources cannot offer insight into data data for business intelligence requires recoverability. thorough operational knowledge of each backup application. It also requires an A data protection management appl... [download for more]
