Enterprise Storage Management is more than just Backup and Recovery

Enterprise storage management is now a much larger subject area, but is more manageable and can help organisations monitor and allocate their data storage resources and more completely manage the data assets being stored and allows CIOs to better monitor and allocate their resources.

While storage backup and recovery remains a crucial function to an organisation, enterprise storage management also addresses broader issues, such as disaster recovery, capacity planning, data distribution, storage performance, storage administration and storage virtualisation.

Enterprise storage management can save organisations both time and money not only by protecting stored data assets across the enterprise, but also by efficiently managing the organisation's storage resources, and by reducing the amount of labour required in the process.

With globalisation running amuck, enterprises now have storage distributed throughout the organisation, often in different countries and not just sites. The storage management challenges facing fast-growing companies have now become commonplace. With storage capacities running into petabytes and with the need for 24x7 operations organisations can ill afford not to have an effective storage management enterprise-wide management solution.

Because organisation now almost entirely rely on applications and databases (ERP, SCM, CRM, email, data warehousing, and business intelligence solutions) and because there is no let up to the speed at which data storage is growing, the need for a more closely managed, a more comprehensive and automated approach to storage management is inevitable.

To make matters worse the computing environment is growing still more complex with more hardware, servers, platforms, operating systems, storage devices, larger networks, more software applications and all with multiple IT vendors.

And yet, with the downturn in the economy, organisations are trying to juggle all these factors with fewer staff, less time and smaller budgets. So, how do organisations managing storage across their enterprise, an enterprise that is geographically growing pressurising the CIO to manage systems 24x7 for critical applications and data without more resources to do the job.

The key enterprise storage management issue is to ensure the transparent and secure functioning of the storage operation, while cutting the amount of time and effort needed by administrators to make sure it happens.

In the last few years there have been improvements in technology to counter the problems faced by CIOs in the data storage management field. Automated backup, tape management, system failure, alerts notification, replication, clustering, storage area networking, networked attached storage and storage virtualisation have all gone towards helping organisations better manage their storage requirements.

The five main areas within the storage management environment include:

Data Protection - backup and recovery, data is copied to tape or disk and securely stored offsite. In the event data is lost or destroyed, the appropriate tapes can be retrieved and the data restored. This remains a critical function to any operation.

Data Replication And Mirroring - Data replication ensures business continuance and disaster recovery. Should a primary site be affected the operation can be picked up by the second, mirrored site and can continue from the moment the disaster struck the main site.

Storage Administration - capacity planning and event notification. The automation of storage configuration, capacity planning, troubleshooting, event notification can provide significant savings in time and labour as well as warning organisations on a global basis where system errors have occurred.

Storage Area Networking - Storage Area Networks provide greater connectivity for block data storage. Products have been introduced to support, manage, and optimise storage performance, including SAN storage virtualisation appliances, backup systems, and management applications.

Storage Virtualisation - In a virtualised storage system, the storage resources accessed by a server's applications are indirectly related to physical storage. This provides an extra degree of freedom that can avoid the need to dedicate storage appliances, or to pre-allocate fixed amounts of storage capacity and can be simultaneously mirrored elsewhere for reliability.

The return on investment for organisations can be phenomenal. Where 10 administrators were once required to insert tapes, remove, catalogue, run backups, now one or two can manage the automated system adequately, leaving other resources to work on more important management functions.

Administrators can now manage storage, allocation, and configuration, with a simple click. The administrator now defines the policies for storage management and the storage management systems automatically implement those policies. When the situations defined arise, the system automatically initiates the appropriate response, while alerting the administrator and preventing data storage failure.

With the increase in the complexity of an organisation's systems there is now no time manually reroute communication links or reprogram applications. Now systems monitor processes, ensure the accurate replication, backup, or virtualisation of data, sense failures, and seamlessly failover to mirrored sites or servers in the event of problems. Software is now available that carry out these functions across multiple platforms and operating systems, it automates the allocation and reallocation of storage. When storage thresholds are approached, the system automatically reallocates storage, providing more storage where necessary and addresses the performance of the entire storage environment.

By monitoring the usage of data the Enterprise Storage Management system can migrate data used less often, creating additional capacity, as well as retrieving it simply when required. In a sense storage management functionality has been taken to a higher level.

Enterprise Storage Management falls neatly into two categories: saving the organisation's business by ensuring the availability and integrity of its stored data, an essential corporate asset, and saving the organisation time and money by helping the CIO to manage the storage requirements in an organisation with fewer resources. The cost of disasters, where data was not available to the organisation, can easily run into the millions per hour, therefore, the value of ensuring the availability and integrity of the organisation's data is essential to it's existence. An investment in an efficient enterprise storage management system is trivial, compared to the potential payoff.