Active vs. Passive Storage Resource Management (SRM) (page 1 of 2)

One characteristic remains constant regardless of organisation type: users leveraging IT deployments generate data and create information. As we turn data into information we create more unique data. The commonality between data and information is that they both need to be stored.

Storage can be within a file system on an individual laptop, hosted on a company intranet or within a corporate relational database. The storage of data or information will usually end up on physical disk, via Direct Attach Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN) attached storage.

The problem faced by organisations of all types is how to predict the levels of data that is being regularly generated and how to match those patterns into available storage or the acquisition of new storage. This requires an understanding of how much storage capacity exists within an organisation. Once the amount of capacity is determined a correlation can be performed between capacity and data.

The best utilisation would be achieve if capacity equals data, but this will rarely happen since you are always generating more data and have a requirement for excess capacity. The results of the correlation typically follow a standard relationship. Smaller companies have a smaller range between capacity and data. Larger companies find they have much greater capacity than data, hence poor utilisation.

Storage Utilisation
Keeping multiple copies of the same piece of data results in using additional space above and beyond the size of the actual data. In a simple disk-mirroring example for every one megabyte of data you will need two megabytes of storage capacity. Therefore only 50% of an organisation's storage capacity would be used to store unique data.

Additional copies of data can be kept for archive purposes, but more commonly these copies are used for data protection and disaster recovery. This is not an incorrect business practice, if it's applied to the correct applications and data types, but does yield lower utilisation rates.

Storage can also be wasted when multiple versions of a file are retained, usually because a newer version of the file exists. Management of the older versions becomes very difficult since there are no standard policies to enforce regarding version management. The version problem becomes exponential when files are being distributed between a group of users within an organisation for review, comment and modification. This results in each reviewer retaining at least two or three copies of the same file, each one with slight modifications.

To gain higher utilisations rates data needs to be profiled and understood. This will determine if too many copies of the same data are being maintained, taking into account that maintenance is not just about storing data, but covers the whole spectrum of data management from fragmentation to backup and recovery.

As the characteristics of the data are highlighted certain attributes draw attention to themselves. For instance, large amounts of aged data, data owned by individuals who are no longer in employment of the organisation, and even large numbers of picture and video files using excess capacity for storage. So, how are organisations going to manage these data storage anomalies and capacity wastage?

Storage Resource Management (SRM)
Storage Resource Management (SRM) is a fundamental requirement for organisations that want to take back control of their data.