Data storage solutions

1. Leveraging tiered storage

2. Performing an extensive application workload analysis.

Here are the remaining 3 best practices for data storage.

3. Consolidate storage pools as much as possible.
Another helpful strategy for managing costs is physical centralization of your storage. This not only centralizes troubleshooting and remote maintenance, it centralizes administration, which eases task automation and reduces human intervention. Physical centralization o­ffers better information life-cycle management across the storage pools and shares peripheral storage—that ultimately increases overall reliability. Additionally, physical centralization reduces business continuance (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) costs and improves failover execution.

When you consolidate storage pools, you also increase your data availability without su­ffering the exponential costs often associated with it. This allows non-disruptive online modifications, provides multiple and redundant paths between applications and data, and off­ers better overall data protection options and facilities.

You might also consider creating a highly scalable and configurable storage solution when you consolidate storage pools. This o­ffers the ability to adapt to unpredictable growth, as well as the ability to separate your storage access from your data access.

4. Implement staged backups.
Although tape is seemingly inexpensive, you can easily underestimate the total cost of ownership. However, if you incorporate disk into the backup and recovery process, you can implement an eff­ective strategy that trims IT costs and reduces the complexity associated with data protection.

Disk-tape backups separate the backup target from the backup archive. Disk-based backups allow backup software to operate normally, except this strategy first writes backups to disk. Once copied on disk, the backup image is then cloned to tape.

When you incorporate disk-based backups into existing data protection processes, you can greatly simplify data protection management.  That’s because you can perform disk-based backups virtually any time without a significant impact on primary applications and databases. And when you keep backup images on disk, end-users can quickly recover their own data without intervention from IT personnel.

Disk-backups also extend the investment life of existing tape media and tape devices. Often, incorporating disk backups allows IT organizations to defer and even eliminate the need to invest in additional tape resources, backup media, and IT staff.

Once on this secondary storage, you can back up your data to tape and send it off-site, possibly in encrypted format, for robust data protection.

5. Automate discovery and reporting.
Simply storing data isn’t enough—you also need to be able to locate and retrieve it. Without adequate discovery and reporting, storage documentation is incomplete and inaccurate.

Unfortunately, as storage grows, so does the manual process of administrating it. Rather than investing in more resources, however, you can implement automation tools to automate discovery and reporting. Not only do such automation tools help manage IT costs, they also make your existing storage administrators more e­fficient, reducing potential mistakes.  Storage administrators can manage more storage, more effectively, while still meeting growth needs.

Automation tools provide valuable information that you can use to closely manage the most expensive tiers of storage and focus the majority of growth in lower-cost tiers. Again, it’s important to maintain the balance your business requirements with the tier of storage in order to make the most of your resources.

Although you can’t control all the potential problems disk drives present, you can implement these data storage solutions and strategies to help minimize threats and maximize opportunities for your business. Data affects your business so you should have the storage infrastructure that makes sense for your company, to get the most out of all your resources.

Data storage solutions, and subsequent best practices, vary greatly by manufacturer and implementation, which makes a universal perspective difficult to articulate. However, all companies require a robust storage infrastructure. And these days, everyone needs to make the most of limited resources without sacri­ficing service levels, limited budgets, and future scalability.

Here are ­the first two of five tips to help you establish a storage infrastructure that makes the most of your resources and realizes the highest possible ROI.

1. Leverage tiered storage. Like most businesses today, your company depends on the availability of electronic data. While your data storage needs grow exponentially along with your business, your budget does not.  To make the most of limited resources, organizations should ask, “What data and applications warrant the added cost and complexity of a SAN? What storage should remain on less costly server-attached RAID? What is the ratio of application ­les (fairly static) to data ­les (very dynamic)?”

Every company has several types of data and applications, and each piece provides different value to the company. When you implement a tiered storage structure, you align your storage infrastructure costs with the business value of each kind of data and application. When your business requirements correlate with your storage tiers, you save money.

The concept behind tiered storage is simple: You invest the majority of your storage resources in the fastest, most reliable devices for your highest-valued data and applications. This investment helps your business operate more effectively, more reliably, and more productively—ultimately making your business more profi­table. Today, this storage might include the new Solid State Drives (SSD) emerging on the market.

Likewise, you place your less-critical and less-valued data and applications on slower and less expensive storage. This includes any data that requires large amounts of storage, but users don’t access very often—such as e-mail data retained for U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, for example.

2. Perform an extensive application workload analysis. Once you implement a tiered storage structure, you need to populate the tiers with data and applications. To make the most educated decisions about the range of data storage solutions you need and determining which data and applications belong on each tier, you should perform an extensive application workload analysis.

In particular, you should determine I/O processing demand and latency requirements before deploying primary applications on SATA storage. Ultimately, this helps your company balance the availability and redundancy of the diff­erent data types with the various storage costs. You can determine which performance trade-o­ffs your company can accept—specifically, which data and applications can leverage lower cost storage infrastructures and which cannot.

Our next blog will cover the remaining 3 data storage solutions best practices, so check back shortly. In the interim, what are your best practices that you can share?

Art Center relies on a heavy computing environment, the result of offering data-intensive courses in film, photography, graphic design, and many other art and design programs. With their original decentralized storage infrastructure, Art Center found it difficult to manage and protect its growing data. They needed to consolidate their storage resources into a single unified platform to allow them to more effectively manage their IT environment while gaining efficiencies.

Here’s what they did…

Art Center worked with us to leverage NetApp’s unique storage efficiency technologies to reduce storage costs and requirements. With thin provisioning, Art Center now utilizes just 3.5TB of NetApp storage to manage a total storage allocation of 27.5TB for students and faculty, saving the college more than $90,000 in storage costs. The school has also saved an additional $45,000 with deduplication technology that reduces VMware storage requirements by 44%.

To reclaim much needed storage space, the college used to purge student data at the end of each academic year. With NetApp’s ability to quickly and easily reprovision storage combined with the increased efficiencies, Art Center is now able to provide 5GB of personal storage to students for the length of their time in school and 20GB to faculty members. Now, the college can more effectively respond to and manage the school’s hard-to-predict and expanding storage needs with improved flexibility.

Finally, Art Center leveraged SnapManager® for Exchange and Single Mailbox Recovery to enhance the college’s e-mail availability. As a result, recovering mailboxes—which used to take as much as 2 hours—now takes just 45 minutes, getting staff and faculty back online faster for improved productivity.

NetApp’s advancements in storage efficiency make these savings realistic for many organizations that have big data requirements.

DISC produces a comprehensive line of automated Blu-ray optical archival storage library products with online capacities ranging from 1.5TB to 70TB and more. The optical Blu-ray technology was appealing to us because of the benefits that it affords, including:

• Longevity
• Readability
• Authenticity
• Operation costs
• Environmentally friendly

We’re confident that they can deliver on the need for long-term retention of digital data while including a 50 year media life, scalable design, and true green storage.

The addition of BDXL Blu-ray data storage automation technology to our product line helps satisfy the growing demand that we see for automated, cost-effective tiered data storage solutions for companies of all sizes. It will allow us to provide customers with the scalability to drive the overall value proposition and ROI from data inception to archive.

Here are 5 data archiving best practices for better data storage management…

1. Leverage data storage management tools to improve budgeting and long-term planning. Establishing a baseline of your current data storage management environment is a good first step. By identifying and classifying various data pools inside your organization, you’ll have a better understanding of your archiving requirements. Storage resource management (SRM) tools will help you get a more accurate snapshot of your infrastructure and establish trends and statistics to identify data usage patterns.

2. Implement an email archiving strategy to save on backup costs and avoid legal trouble. Your company can save as much as 50 percent on backup costs with an archiving strategy in place. Although you may face legal requirements for email storage, storing email on your corporate server affects its performance over time and creates hassles in the event of a server disaster.

3. Implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) to help prioritize and store data according to its value. I could write an entire blog on this (and I probably will), but ILM will help you determine what data is most important, which will help you design a roadmap for where, and on what media, your data should be stored.

4. Ensure your data has the proper privacy controls to protect both the data and your privacy. We’ve all seen the headlines of one data breach after another. Most of them are avoidable, mainly because data breaches caused by human error. Laying out a process for handling data and encryption keys—including the creation, distribution, deployment storage, transmission and destruction of the keys—is an important best practice.

5. Establish a data retention policy that spells out how to categorize data and the retention period for each category. Set minimum and maximum retention periods for each category and address the disposal process. Educate employees on your policy and enforce it.

These data archiving tips and best practices can help you establish a data storage management program that can help you effectively trim down your essential data and the costs associated with the archiving of that data.

Even if you didn’t know anything about your data, would you know the best way to classify it?

Your best bet? Build an archive: This will quickly identify your “working set of data.” By using a file virtualization solution across the storage infrastructure, we’ve seen up to 50% cost reductions in disk and maintenance of a backup infrastructure AND a reduction in backup windows. (In one case we saw it decrease from 14 hours to 3 hours.) That means disaster recovery is vastly simpler and a great deal faster!

We’ve deployed other solutions, like Synthetic Fulls, to accomplish similar results. Backups have greatly reduced I/O loads on clients and improved the full server recovery process. Synthetic Fulls creates new backup sets offline without touching the source data or communicating with the original host server. This improves the ability to create new full backup tapes for other uses such as vaulting or setting up a new site or test system. Replicate and replay.

We’ve been working on this concept with a lot of our clients lately. Why not just move files that are candidates for being backed up to a separate tier of storage, keeping them as files in their native format, and organizing them in time coherent views? Originally it was because of cost, but not anymore. Solutions now cost the same as LTO4 media!

Users can restore files themselves from any point in time using a search engine. You don’t need backup software to do this, which means it’s simpler to deduplicate and compress, apply compliance and regulatory rules to it as policies, and use it as an archive. Indexing is easier, plus data mining and replication or other data moving requirements are more simply met. Copy-based backup is now a default paradigm for consumers, i.e. Apple’s Time Machine and EMC’s Mozy.

If you’re looking into this or other data protection or backup solutions, check out the Active Archive resources from our partner, Spectra Logic.

~ Storage, server, and data center virtualization
~Cloud deployment, including the benefits and differences between private and public cloud infrastructures
~And the latest on disaster recovery and business continuity in today’s data center environments.

These are all hot topics today, so be sure to mark your calendars.

Or if you’re in Boise December 12^th, look for ASG at the Idaho CIO/IT Symposium. This is an inaugural event and will surely be a great place for knowledge sharing and networking.

We hope to see you at one the events!

Fortunately, the industry is rapidly developing a variety of solutions, so you can reap the benefits of virtualization without compromising backup and disaster recovery.

1. Traditional host-based agent

To implement this approach, organizations first license a backup agent and install it on each server. The backup software on their dedicated backup server initiates the backup of all servers through the agents. This method is suitable when each server is running one application, but it’s cumbersome, inefficient, and costly when dealing with virtualized servers.

2. Service console-based agent

In this method, an agent running on the VMware Service Console executes the backup. It can leverage VMware snapshots for crash consistency and back up the entire VM file (VMDK). Unfortunately, there’s no file-level restore, and it still requires processing by the ESX (VMware virtualization) server. However, in the future, VMware is investing in ESXi as their sole hypervisor. ESXi is a very light weight hypervisor, so it doesn’t maintain a console server.

3. Consolidated backup proxy agent

This approach takes advantage of the VMware Consolidate Backup (VCP) proxy, which removes processing chores from the ESX server. It improves manageability of IT resources by using a single agent running on the proxy server rather than an agent on every VM. It expedites recovery by recovering individual files, even from an image-level backup, without having to recover the entire image first. It also allows volume-level backup and recovery for VMware environments and can leverage other options, including the ability to perform incremental delta block image-level backup to expedite backup operations, save storage capacity, and enable single-pass, full VM recovery.

4. Intelligent advanced host-based agent

For this method, an agent with snapshot and deduplication capabilities works in conjunction with a data deduplication backup repository to store only unique data blocks, eliminating up to 90% of what a traditional backup agent would require.

5. Event-based data protection

This method provides replicated data protection with rollback capabilities using Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with on-demand consistency point generation, while low server overhead allows scaling to hundreds of servers. It allows both failover and failback and can replicate data across any distance.

Here’s a quick overview of the strengths and weaknesses of these options:

Every organization is different, so no single backup and recovery solution fits all. Your choice depends on the level of recovery you want, how much VM performance impact you can accept, and your capacity and infrastructure requirements. For example, if you only need local image or local file recovery, any of these options will work. If you’re primarily concerned with VM performance, the VCB proxy or controller options are your best choices.

Backup and recovery is critical. With the progress the industry has made and the options now available, organizations can move forward with virtualization confident that they can effectively protect their critical data and quickly recover it when needed.

Check out the press release with all the details here.

If you’re backing up to a virtual tape library (VTL), don’t use multiplexing. Even if your deduplication solution can de-multiplex data, consider turning this feature off. Often a carryover practice from writing to physical tapes, multiplexing data merely wastes computing cycles— cycles that could otherwise be used to dedupe your data faster. For example, instead of multiplexing ten backups to two virtual tape drives, create twenty virtual tape drives and turn off multiplexing.

Before selecting your deduplication solution, try to pilot several deduplication systems in your environment. While current vendors offer many good solutions and various deduplication approaches, you may also find some products with real limitations. Only by comparing multiple products can you best determine the optimum approach for deduping your data, whether it’s inline, post-process, target-side, client-side, via backup software, etc.

Common challenges of deploying a deduplication solution involve problems related to performance, increased complexity of management, and proliferation of deduplicated data silos. To avoid unnecessary complications, first ensure ease of integration into your existing environment and get customer references in your industry. Take time to understand the vendor’s roadmap, but test everything. Once you’ve selected your data deduplication solution, make sure you follow the best practices suggested by your deduplication solution vendor.