Storage (Part 2)

You can do even more soul searching by calculating how many real filing cabinets those wooden or steel filing cabinets, cup boards and carpets) are used for storing documents and also calculate time for searching, retrieving, shipping, photocopying etc.

Information Life Management is a key evaluation criteria for data centers and other storage management services. ILM essentially values your data for currentness, accessibility, need for availability and various other parameters and decides if the data can be moved to lesser expensive systems. Most documents, other than those needed for litigations and legal requirements, tend to lose their value over time and can be very well managed to lesser expensive storages such as tapes.

Sample companies that sell ILM solutions are EMC, IBM and Sun Microsystems.


De-Duplication and Compression : De-Dup is a commonly used jargon now and essentially involves using certain data identification and comparison algorithms that will identify all the copies of the same document lying in the data store and create a ‘single instance’ of the document without affecting the accessibility of the document. De-dup is expected to reduce data from 1/10th to 1/100th depending on how granular and identifiable the data itself is. De-Dup also can be deployed on almost any storage type – primary storage, virtual environments, network accessed storage, archives, back ups etc.

Sample companies that sell De-Dup solutions are EMC, Permabit, NetApp and Symantec.

Data Compression has been known from a long time from the simple .zip, .tar to sophisticated techniques that reduce data storage from half to as much as 1/200th.
However there could be performance and operational issues with frequently accessed documents and hence this needs to be balanced with the overall information life cycle policy of the organization.


Thin Provisioning : I call this the just-in-time storage. While logical capacity is allocated to applications upfront, the actual physical storage is allocated on demand. This gave the storage administrator more power to juggle the resources and also increases utilization dramatically. This is still an emergent technology with less than 5% penetration. However with more and more storage devices becoming ‘provisional’ there is hope.


MAID: Massive Array of Idle Disks. The key word here is idle disks. It sounds so synonymous with my maid at home who stashes all the infrequently used stuff up in the attic. It's altogether a different matter that I will never be able to search the attic because I don't have an ILM on top of the attic!

Just like how infrequently accessed documents can be kept ‘away’ for efficiency, MAID is a storage technology that keeps inactive disks from spinning. This results in very good power savings and can add a lot to cost savings if this is configured with low cost SATA drives. Again, an intelligent policy is necessary which otherwise can increase costs due to unintelligent access management and data residing on exactly those disks that are marked for rest.

FCoE: Fiber Channel Over Ethernet is an emerging technology that essentially drives a standard protocol over Ethernet. I don't really know the industry benefits yet. However no need to lose one’s sleep on this now since if this change happens it will be big and wil ensure there is a critical mass to take it forward.

Sample company that is already into this is Cisco.

File Virtualization technologies: This technology ensures that name spaces are created for directories and file servers across network access storages and devices irrespective of operating systems or platforms. The business impact of this is ease of administration, costs saved from management and storage tiering, costs saved from managing multiple environments and many other costs associated with general virtualization technologies. I will talk about security of this separately.

Go-Green: While the first motivation to go digital from hard copies should be the trees we save, we can go a lot more green by employing intelligent storage technologies that can save power consumptions and reduce e-waste. So, Go-Greenest should be the motto!