Today’s IT Managers are faced with the situation where data growth, data management complexity, and storage management costs are rising quickly. Data and information must be considered as having its own life – it’s dynamic. Data is created and as part of its ageing process has different periods of more or less use during its lifecycle. However many organisations treat all data equally irrespective of its age or current use within the organisation. For small volumes of data this tends not to present a problem, however as data growth explodes, organisations are faced with rising storage costs in line with this.

Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) is about setting a policy on how data is stored and treated depending on its age, use, and worth to an organisation at various points in its lifecycle.

The Challenge

Understanding your organisations data, and being able to ascribe a proper value to it during its lifecycle is the challenge. However by doing so an organisation can apply varying technologies to manage and store the data in such a way as to provide a competitive and business edge.
Data Lifecycle Management Overview

By categorising and being able to define a policy for data, organistaion’s can best make use of storage technology to effectively cater for the growing demands data is placing on infrastructure and running costs.

A DLM solution comprises of two major components:

• The appropriate storage devices or hardware infrastructure offering multiple tiers of storage capacity, throughput, connectivity and importantly cost. Typically SAN infrastructure with a combination Fibre and SATA storage array plus a Tape Library provides the ideal platform for this requirement. Three tiers of storage are provided with this solution; high speed yet expensive fibre disk, moderate performance and priced SATA disk, and lower performance but inexpensive Tape.
  
  
• A policy driven data mover or engine that can move mission critical data to and from each of these storage tiers based on its age, size, use and worth to an organisation. This engine should be able to move data from disk to disk, disk to tape, or to other mediums such as magneto optical, without restriction on whether the source or target is locally or remote attached to the email or file server.

Global Storage provides File and Email based Data Lifecycle solutions from leading vendors such as CommVault, Veritas and Legato. We can help you evaluate and identify which solution best suites your organisations requirements.

More Information?

Call Global Storage on 03 9445 3300 and ask for one of our storage consultants to find out how server virtualisation can benefit your organisation.