Managing your data

Introduction

Imagine your sales team needs to get a proposal out the door, a presentation completed or the quarterly report pulled together. The data – the files, the images, the sound clips – are pulled from various parts of the network (i.e., hard drives, file servers) and assembled. Sounds simple. But what we've just described contains a number of hidden costs that have enabled your sales team to pull together documents on time – documents which are central to your business.

Making sure that data is available on-demand requires that your IT team carefully manage and maintain an efficient, reliable storage infrastructure – which can be vast and complex. One of the central and ongoing challenges is in keeping data to manageable levels; without the ability to do so risks overwhelming your storage resources, which fast becomes a drag on network performance and overall productivity. The associated costs escalate accordingly: investments in additional storage hardware to match the data growth, costs associated with managing the new (as well as existing) hardware, and the cost compromised network performance exacts on your productivity. Managing an organization’s storage infrastructure is complex, time-consuming, and, as a result, costly.

Therefore, most organizations look at storage management as a cost center. A recent study by Data Management Institute shows that administration stands for a staggering 80% of the total storage cost, with just 20% for hardware. With stored data increasing 60% annually (according to an IDC report), efficient storage management and efficient storage usage is a critical bottom line imperative – as the above scenario just begins to touch on.

The fundamental challenge is to turn storage management into a profit center where SRM contributes to organizational productivity. Ultimately, this means putting in place a system – or tool – that simplifies management, optimizes network performance and gives users on-demand access to the data they need.

The trinity of SRM: Control, Reclaim, Postpone

While SRM tools do many things, their effectiveness is measured by the degree to which they help IT organizations “control, reclaim, postpone.” Does is efficiently control data growth levels? Does it enable you to reclaim hard storage resources? Will it postpone the need for added storage, thus maximizing your investments in existing servers and NAS devices? Does it give you the ability to plan for growth? These are the basic measures of an SRM tool.

These three components working in unison make storage management software perform adequately at the macro level, enabling administrators to monitor and manage storage capacity; but no piece of software, no matter how sophisticated its logic, can tell mission-critical files from redundant ones. No software can make value decisions for a user, without which important data may be at risk. A storage management solution put in place to manage user-generated data won’t reach 100% efficiency without involvement from the same users that actually generate and use the data.

To lay the foundation for a comprehensive storage management strategy, it is necessary to start by taking a closer look at how you can bridge the gap between how your resources are being used and how you want them to be used, through Control, Reclaim and Postpone.

Control

Users are, without doubt, the most unpredictable element of any network. In terms of storage use and the types of files they store users adjust their habits to match the capacity available. Without any guidelines or policies indicating what reasonable storage use is, users will continue to use storage in the way that suits them and not in the way that suits the organization. In other words; if you don’t control your users you can’t control your storage.

The keyword to control is visibility. IT needs visibility into the organization's storage infrastructure. Comprehensive, detailed reporting gives IT the information it needs to begin establishing storage policies, revealing what is being saved where and in what amounts. These policies are then enforced via quota management, a fundamental SRM component – indeed it has long been its very foundation. A quota management application implements a corporate policy around the amount of disk space allowed per user. Couple that with the possibility to prevent unwanted file types from being saved, allowing you to control content as well as quality, and the first step towards a more comprehensive storage management strategy as been taken.

Northern has close to fifteen years of experience in overcoming the barriers of excessive storage use. The products of this experience range from award-winning quota technologies to a fully-fledged storage management solution. During these 15 years Northern has identified a common truth; that storage management is equally about restricting and controlling storage use as it is about allowing users to store according to their needs and roles – a paradox that is actually very easy to resolve.

Northern Storage Suite enables organizations to intelligently allocate storage resources, which translates into significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. As you move into more challenging environments, Northern Storage Suite meets all the requirement of robust quota management, beginning with the ability to set real-time quotas for disk objects and users based on group, departmental, or individual needs and business objectives. The more intelligence built into the system, the less “cost” it exacts on IT resources. Northern Storage Suite brings this intelligence to your organization's storage management.

Reclaim

Studies show that close to 70% of what is stored on your storage devices can be removed. Cleaning up the network from unnecessary data quickly translates into cost savings. Capacity monitoring and management involves identifying resource usage and using tools to reclaim space and making sure data is available as needed. While some tools offer basic reporting on when and how often data are modified and accessed, Northern Storage Suite takes this a step further to automate actions – data moves, deletions, and clean-up – based on preset triggers (dates, etc.).

Using the comprehensive reporting built into Northern Storage Suite, administrators can identify problem areas and pinpoint space that could be reclaimed. This information can then be used to create an automation job to remove the unwanted files and reclaim the capacity. The job can be triggered to run after business hours; when the IT group arrives the next morning, they’ll see how wasted space has been completely reclaimed. We’ve seen organizations easily reclaim up to 40% of capacity during the initial clean-up. IT can run these automation jobs every night, providing the entire network with transparent protection against unwanted files… significantly slashing backup and restore time, streamlining network performance (and server uptime)… and giving the IT group more time to attend to other tasks.

Postpone

At some point, no matter how efficiently or aggressively you manage user data, you will need to add more capacity. The longer you can hold off while maintaining peak productivity, the more value your organization wrings from your existing hardware. Since more hardware requires more IT oversight, you also realize cost savings the longer you can defer a purchase – by slowing usage growth rates IT departments are able to maintain service levels with a smaller storage footprint.
 
An SRM tool that controls growth rates, reclaims capacity and reduces unwanted data will, by definition, allow you to streamline and maximize your existing storage infrastructure, while enabling you to defer investment in additional hardware. Using Northern Storage Suite you can establish global trends and manage users by keeping them within acceptable thresholds. It gives you the ability to track and reliably project usage over 6 or 12 months, allowing the IT team to carefully monitor and manage growth – unobtrusively and automatically – and remain always several steps ahead of any potential problems. A reactive IT organization – one that puts out fires rather than prevents them – is inefficient. All too often storage investments are made with little or no information which results in short-lived emergency solutions or overly complex, redundant solutions. Northern Storage Suite is a perfect solution for organizations seeking to implement a systematic approach to storage resource management that maximizes your existing hardware; when it is time to invest in new capacity, you can also realize significant productivity gains in adding newer, possibly even lower-cost technology – as six (let alone 12) months is an eternity in the world of IT innovation.

The ‘missing’ link to maximized storage efficiency

While the components just described – control, reclaim, postpone, using reporting, quota management, and optimization – are all fundamental in efficient storage resource management. Although, engaging users and giving them a stake in economical and responsible data storage remains the single best approach in making storage management, well, manageable – which adds an important component to core SRM functionality: refine, as in letting users pare and “micro-manage” their data.

Administrators spend significant amounts of time in monitoring and reporting on storage utilization, managing file distribution, archiving old data, removing non-business related content, evaluating and implementing infrastructural development. While quotas are a handy – indeed necessary – tool in keeping data to manageable levels, it can cause user backlash and additional administrative headaches. What happens when someone realizes a three month old file that he suddenly needs is not there, as he inadvertently deleted it to stay within the quota? How does an administrator deal with several project teams requesting their quotas be raised for a limited time? A quota system alone can’t respond to issues that crop up on a case-by-case basis.

With comprehensive reporting functionality and advanced quota management in place, administrators’ jobs become less time-consuming but managing storage will never reach maximized efficiency without involving the user as well. Only they can evaluate the value of the data stored on their home shares and weed out the ‘bad’ data from the ‘good’, ensuring that only data of the highest quality – of most important business value – be stored on the network.

The best SRM-system is both self-policing “on the ground” and administered from above. The user-portal built into Northern Storage Suite gives IT departments the ability to manage storage on a global level, while giving users the tools they need to efficiently and responsibly manage their own storage. The portal coaxes more responsible user behaviour by making them more accountable for – and simply more aware of – their storage use…and introducing incentives and imposing penalties to demonstrate why responsible storage use is in their (and the organization’s) best interest.

Northern’s “shared” storage management is an entirely new model designed for today’s challenges; it is the simplest and surest way of maximizing your existing storage infrastructure, while allowing you to plan and prepare for incremental investments over an extended time horizon – translating into significant cost savings, organizational efficiencies and overall productivity. Which is precisely why over 60% of the Global Fortune 100 have entrusted Northern Storage Suite to help them manage, protect, access and use their most critical assets: their information.

Conclusion

Assuring that information is up-to-date and that critical information is available on-demand has implications for just about all aspects of business, from efficient and responsive customer relations, to arming your sales force with real-time information they need to be effective. This is how storage management stops being a cost center and starts being a profit center.

To control the data growth through quota management, to reclaim capacity through automation and reporting, and to be able to postpone and plan for hardware investments have long been accepted parts that make up a solid SRM-tool. However, in order to truly reach the level of storage efficiency that will increase across-the-board productivity and minimize administrative overhead, user self-management needs to be enforced and implemented. Only then can you truly bridge the gap between how your resources are being used and how you want them to be used.

Northern Storage Suite is a real-world tool that’s evolved over the course of over twelve years of experience working with more than 28,000 organizations of all types and sizes – from the Fortune Global 100 to medium-sized businesses. Over the years, we’ve partnered with leading storage vendors, including EMC, HP and NetApp, to provide the broadest range of solutions, even for the most challenging and diverse storage networks.

The suite is more than a tool to manage storage devices. It is central to an organization’s ability to manage, access, and use information, which is the first and most critical measure of an SRM tool’s value…as it has a direct correlation to an organization’s ability to conduct business and compete.