Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 08:46 AM
When you think “storage software,” you probably don’t think “IBM” out of the gate. Other companies such as HP have taken the lead in storage management while IBM has focused on other priorities.
That said, IBM does have a couple of useful solutions to offer, especially if you find yourself in a relatively homogenous IBM environment. IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and IBM Information Archive are two of the solutions you should become familiar with. They offer you compelling storage solutions at a reasonable value.
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
IBMs SVC is better than ever. Today, the software utilizes a high-performance storage engine to give you as much as twice the throughput of previous SVC solutions. Today, SVC is highly scalable and has integrated support for SSDs (Solid State Drives), letting you have the kind of high-end storage performance you need for your critical application data.
IBM SVC now also includes support for iSCSI server attachments. This will help to reduce your storage costs, in that you don’t have to rely on fibre channel HBA or switch ports any longer.
The IBM Tivoli FlashCopy Manager lets you integrate the replication functions of SVC with your major server software. This allows you to enjoy reduced backup and recovery times, and it will also improve the availability of your applications.
SVC also features improved replication functions. Reverse FlashCopy helps you to recover from disk backups with greater speed. Multi-Cluster Mirror lets you implement your consolidated disaster recovery strategies with ease.
IBM Information Archive
IBM also has a solution offering aimed at the broader market. IBM Information Archive is designed to act as a “universal archiving repository” to hold the data in midsize businesses and enterprises. IBM Information Archive helps to reduce information management costs, mitigate risks and make sure the organization is compliant with retention needs, whether they are business needs, regulatory needs or legal needs.
IBM Information Archive lets you leverage your various tiers of storage through all levels, be they disk, tape or other. You use IBM Information Archive to create a policy-based management configuration that will automatically move your less active information to your most cost-effective storage media.
In addition IBM Information Archive used both deduplication and compression to not only increase your storage capacity, but to optimize it and to improve the productivity of your organization.
IBM storage software solutions are robust enough to meet the needs of many businesses. If you’re looking for storage management software and you operate in a primarily IBM environment, you should look into both IBM SVC and IBM Information Archive.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, May 28, 2010 @ 06:56 AM
As anyone who’s involved in storage management can tell you, it is business needs and business decisions that must govern a storage management policy, and make technology work for it, not the other way around. Accordingly, much of what we do in the storage management world has to do with policy and procedure, rather than the technology itself. One of the big questions in the storage world has to do with backups, and to what degree backups play a role in storage management.
The conventional backup paradigm suggest that a snapshot of data in a given instant is what qualifies as a backup for purposes of retention and data archiving. Backups are kept in an archival format, as opposed to the original format. There are those in the storage world, however, that are asking the question: can a file copy serve the same purpose as a backup?
Certainly the lines are blurring, and with good reason. Our storage management technology gives us more options today than ever in terms of how we choose to archive data. As such, it’s important to determine at what point a copy becomes a backup for purposes of archiving and/or compliance.
Here are the basic ideas we can start to work from:
1. Start with the basic definition of a copy. A copy is, in the most basic sense, a copy of a set of data.
2. Copies may or may not be protected. Copies may be vulnerable to overwriting or corruption. In some cases, a copy may disappear when the primary data set disappears.
3. For a copy to serve as a backup, it should be separate from the primary data set. Physically, the copy should be stored in a distant fashion, and it should be protected logically within the system.
4. Because a copy is not encapsulated in an alternative format, it may simplify restoration.
5. Copies should receive the same kind of attention that backup receives, including a management process, logs, performance monitoring, indexes and the like.
6. Copies should not affect either the performance or the usability of the primary data set.
Along the way, it’s important to identify the possible benefits of copy-based backup, including:
• Data in its original format is inherently more useful. This speeds the restore and re-indexing process.
• When backup targets are disk-based, they’re more accessible than alternative media. Backups don’t run the risk of unknown media failure.
• Disk-based copy backup lets you use replication or cloud computing solutions to move your data off-site, leading to greater disaster recovery and business continuity readiness.
While it’s not likely that a disk-based copy backup scheme will replace more traditional tape backups and the like, it’s certainly something that the storage management professional should keep on the radar.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Mar 22, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
Your business can’t go on if your IT department can’t go on. You need to be ready to provide continuous access to data services as soon after a disaster as needed by critical business units. If that’s going to happen – if your company is going to survive a major disaster – there are some specific priorities you need to follow.
Here are the top 5 areas your IT department must focus on in order to recover from a disaster and provide business continuity:
1. IT disaster recovery must be informed by and inform the overall business continuity plan of your company. This means dialogue. You need to have key business units identify which resources are mission critical. From there, you can allocate specific planning and disaster preparation activities, based on the idea of providing services as rapidly as possible after a disaster. Likewise, IT needs to be able to give the other business units a reasonable estimate of how long it will take to restore services and under what circumstances they will be restored.
2. IT disaster recovery must be explicit in its recovery point objectives and recovery timeframe objectives. For some firms, that might mean zero data loss. For others, it may be start of business or end of the previous business day. For less mission-critical applications, it might mean period ending, or a weekly or monthly backup. The same holds true for how long it will take to get back up and running. The plan needs to provide the other business units with a reliable estimate of how long it’s going to take before they can be back in business.
3. IT disaster recovery plans must detail specific activities needed to restore business critical IT services. This includes step-by-step methodology for switching over to a failsafe data center, for example, or detailed instructions on how to restore from backup. While there’s some disagreement as to what level of detail is necessary, the most effective IT disaster recovery plans will have enough detail that even someone not entirely familiar with the particular environment could accomplish the tasks.
4. IT disaster recovery plans must include a communications structure. It’s going to be necessary for IT personnel to communicate with one another, as well as with key individuals in various business units across the enterprise. The specific lines of communication should be defined within the disaster recovery plan.
5. IT disaster recovery plans should include a detailed description of the specific roles and responsibilities of anyone involved in the recovery process. That way, anyone that is assigned to a specific role within the recovery process team will have a clear expectation. If at all possible, the plan should refer to position titles rather than names, in order to make the disaster recovery plan workable beyond the confines of the immediate future.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Jan 06, 2010 @ 08:01 AM
Your enterprise rises and falls on its data, and the ability of your enterprise to keep functioning even in the face of catastrophic loss is what will separate you from your competition. To this end, your enterprise must have an effective and efficient business continuity plan.
An effective business continuity plan will describe how your enterprise will recover its business functionality after a disruption or disaster. Whether you’re talking about hard drive failure of a critical system or a data center flood, you need to be able to keep the enterprise machinery humming right along. Even if you’re not in a high-risk area, where you need to be concerned with earthquakes or hurricanes, there are still plenty of threats to your enterprise. If you don’t plan effectively to address them before they arrive, your business could fall.
Business continuity planning for the enterprise is going to cover a number of important issues. It should address rebuilding servers and workstations. It will involve installing and configuring operating systems, application software and user data. It may include repairing or replacing network infrastructure, telephony systems or any number of other systems.
Here are the characteristics that a good business continuity plan for the enterprise will do:
• Provides appropriate protection. You need to be able to match the level of protection to the business value of your data. This means that different types of information will get different types of protections.
• Tailors solutions to your enterprise. Your company has specific business needs and processes. Your business continuity plan can’t be taken from a textbook.
• Reduces risk. A business continuity plan should meet requirements set by trade groups, regulatory agencies and even your business’ leaders and owners.
• Increases your company’s resilience. You want your company to be protected against natural disasters, equipment failure and corruption of data. A business continuity plan for the enterprise helps you d just that.
• Improve uptime. While a business continuity plan doesn’t always have an immediate effect, going through the process can help you implement a strategy that’s comprehensive enough to address minor issues that lead to downtime across the enterprise.
• Utilizes solutions appropriate to your environment. There are many technological solutions to any given business continuity problem. In some cases, you might need a simple tape backup. In other cases, you might need a fully cloud-based data backup solution.
• Identifies new areas of efficiency. Business continuity planning for the enterprise gives you a good reason to look under the hood and see how your company’s infrastructure really works. This process lets you identify areas of improvement in the here and now, not just avoid future difficulties.
Business continuity planning for the enterprise isn’t glamorous, it isn’t cheap and it isn’t easy. However, by going through the necessary steps, you can come out the other side with an information technology infrastructure that is more stable, more robust and more able to handle the challenges it will face in the future.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 @ 07:00 AM
Now more than every there is pressure on IT to offer higher levels of service and a greater degree of availability all while cutting back on costs. As such, making sure your technology environment is efficient and effectively managed is absolutely essential. The data center, by its very nature, is the one place where IT resources are most concentrated, and the one place where potential strategic gains are most likely to occur. If you want to improve your computing environment and cut costs at the same time, you need to start with the data center.
The Benefits of Data Center Consolidation
One of the best ways to do just that is through consolidation. By simplifying your data center environment, you achieve several goals:
• Increased manageability
• Reduced costs in areas of human resources, facilities, complexity and capital expenditures
• Improved service levels
• Higher availability
• Minimization of impact from outside factors
In short, if you get your data center humming along the way it should, your business will ultimately do the same.
Factors in Data Center Consolidation
Data center consolidation is about more than just combining servers. While that’s certainly part of the process, there are a number of areas that go into data center consolidation. Each of these factors is an opportunity for reduced cost and greater manageability.
One factor to start with is the issue of physical locations. A business that has multiple physical data centers has multiple cost redundancies, all of which are ripe for cutting. By combining physical locations, you greatly reduce overhead. While multiple data center locations can be one way to address disaster recovery and business continuity, there are much more effective (and cost-effective) ways to address those concerns.
Another important issue is server consolidation. This doesn’t just include combining like servers, however. It also includes looking at issues like application consolidation. If two departments are handling the same data from two different applications, you have another opportunity for improved efficiency. The obvious concern here, of course, is making sure that you can provide the same features to both departments that they had pre-consolidation.
Infrastructure is another area of data center consolidation. This includes creating more efficient networks, as well as more efficient storage management. It also includes utilizing shared services to whatever degree is possible.
The final area of data center consolidation is the most difficult, and it relates to people and processes. While you can switch out a server in a matter of hours or even minutes, bringing personnel up to speed on those changes can take much longer. Still, for your company to be at the top of its game, it’s sometimes necessary. The key to dealing with these kinds of issues is to have buy-in from someone in upper management, as well as department heads, who understand the business case for consolidation and can really get behind your consolidation efforts.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Dec 23, 2009 @ 08:00 AM
The marketplace for Enterprise Storage Management (ESM) is changing rapidly. Storage utilization is growing in many enterprises by as much as 60 percent to 100 percent each year. Experts suggest that the ESM market will continue to grow by at least 10 percent a year for the foreseeable future. For your business to keep up with these trends, you need to not only know what’s going on but also know what types of solutions will best fit your business’s needs.
It’s important, first of all, to recognize that ESM encompasses more than just technology. Your people and the processes your company uses are also an integral part of ESM. Implementing a new technology is futile if it doesn’t fit your company’s culture, the way it does things, and even its business purposes.
ESM and Business Continuity
Some of the most pressing issues in ESM right now are the twin imperatives of disaster recovery and business continuity. As data need grow in volume, the ability of backup systems to keep pace without demanding network or SAN resources is no easy task.
Still, an effective ESM solution has to take disaster recovery and business continuity into account. As many as 90 percent of companies that experience a significant data loss due to a disaster will go out of business within five years. Just under half of businesses never open their doors again after a disaster. Effective ESM can greatly improve the odds of your company to survive these kinds of trials.
ESM and Heterogeneous Environments
Another significant problem for ESM right now is heterogeneity. Today’s enterprise is typically no longer a one-vendor shop. Enterprise IT personnel recognize that you need best-in-class solutions for many business functions, and that a single-vendor solution is almost never the most efficient way to go.
This is, of course, a challenge in many IT areas, not just ESM. Heterogeneity affects performance management and data sharing as much as it does ESM. However, an effective ESM solution is one that’s able to serve multiple environments and still keep utilization and management from becoming a logistical nightmare.
ESM and Legacy Data
A third issue facing ESM today is the issue of legacy systems. When you transition a business function from one environment to another, you will ideally pull archived data along with the transition. In cases where this isn’t possible, you not only need to maintain the legacy system, you need to provide an effective storage solution for that data.
A workable ESM solution takes into account legacy data. If the ESM can’t offer legacy data to both old and new systems, it still needs to be able to preserve the data for whatever archival purposes are required by business process or by industry regulations.
The Right ESM Solution for You
When you’re choosing an ESM, you need to focus on several factors. All of these issues should be addressed in the process of evaluating solutions:
• Necessary data performance throughput,
• Availability of business-critical data and applications,
• Scalability,
• Backup and Recovery,
• And, of course, your budget.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Oct 21, 2009 @ 08:53 AM
No matter how big or small your company is, you need to have plans in place for when something goes wrong. A single disruptive event , whether it’s drastic and dramatic like an earthquake or relatively small like a computer virus, can bring your company to its knees if you don’t know how to handle it ahead of time.
One aspect of disaster recovery is business continuity. Business continuity planning is a comprehensive approach to a disaster that helps to insure the business continues to operate, even after a disaster strikes.
Good disaster recovery and business continuity planning looks at potential points of failure, rather than at specific disasters. The question isn’t so much “what would happen if our datacenter was struck by a hurricane” as “what would happen if our Exchange cluster was physically damaged.”
A plan must include specific issues. It needs to cover how employees will communicate in the event of a disaster, where they will be located, and what they will need in order to keep doing their jobs. These details depend, to a large degree, on the size of a business as well as on its business processes.
Disaster recovery planning has to consider issues like the supply chain, as well. Certainly, one type of disaster is simply one in which a vital supplier cannot be reached, whether it is because of physical limitations or whether the business has just stopped operating.
A significant area of disaster recovery and business continuity planning has to do with information technology. IT is critical in a company’s ability to communicate and to do business. For example, a company may need to identify specific timeframes. A backup mainframe at an offsite location might need to be up within two days, or a mobile PBX system might be required for the remote operations center.
Unfortunately, many executives tend to ignore disaster recovery and business continuity planning. The best way to convince many executives of the importance of disaster recovery and business continuity planning is with a risk assessment. Risk assessment takes into account the damage to a company caused by a disaster, and compares it to the likelihood that the disaster will occur.
This risk assessment identifies the most crucial systems and processes in a business, and examines what effects their unavailability would have on the organization. Some systems aren’t critical, and can take a back seat to others. Some systems are vital, and may require the creation of redundant systems or processes as a part of the disaster recovery and business continuity planning process.
Finally, a disaster recovery plan is only as good as your company’s willingness and ability to implement it. An important part of the planning process is not only getting buy-in and full support from management, but also distributing the necessary procedures to key personnel. In some cases, training and/or disaster recovery walkthroughs may be useful, especially when it comes to the
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Oct 07, 2009 @ 06:00 AM
Many businesses are not prepared to deal with a major catastrophe. Without the same vast resources that are available to larger corporations, many businesses often face limited options after a disaster. Sadly, closing the doors is all too often the only choice available, especially when the business has little or no disaster recovery plans in place.
According to a recent study by the NFIB, around a third of all businesses will face some form of disaster or another during their operation. Whether it’s something as massive as a hurricane or as commonplace as an electrical storm, disasters can put the brakes on a small business.
A study the U.S. Department of Labor offers even more sobering statistics. Over 40% of businesses that experience these kinds of disasters never reopen. Another 25% will close within two years.
There are a number of important factors you need to take into account when it comes to disaster recovery:
• Disaster Preparedness: Businesses who have taken the time to establish a business continuity or disaster recovery plan will be better prepared to rebuild than a business that was ill-prepared. If your business wasn't ready for the disaster, all is not lost. Documents and important business data can be restored in time by working with your accounting department, the tax department, and any other public records department.
• Damage Assessment: Before you can decide what to do with your company, you need to figure out exactly how bad it all is. Look at the costs of the damages and what it will take to rebuild. Estimate the replacement or market value costs to replace damaged aspects of your business operation. Disaster recovery will be more challenging for small businesses with large inventory losses. Contact your insurance agent to calculate what and how much will be covered.
You need to get a picture of how much you will have to reinvest in the business as well as factoring in the interruption to cash flow. Determine what you'll receive for business interruption insurance from your agent.
• Market Reach: After a disaster, the market will take time to reestablish itself. With no need for certain goods and services for some time, you must consider what alternatives exist. International, national, and regional business will have a much easier time rebuilding following a major disaster than local businesses. Businesses reliant on heavy foot traffic will have greater challenges in rebuilding. Can your business reach out to new markets unaffected by the disaster or provide goods or services to help in disaster recovery for the community?
• Customer Spending: Rebuilding efforts following a disaster can be an economic gain for certain businesses participating in the rebuilding. Certain industries and sectors will have an easier time gaining new business. Essential businesses in a disaster zone such as grocery, medical, and construction will be in high demand. If customers are greatly impacted by the disaster, they may have very little need or money for your service or product. Think of how the disaster will affect your customers spending habits.
• Financial Position: Vital to any critical decision making to reopen your business is determining your financial position. What is your current financial picture? What amount of money will you need to make your business operational? Are you eligible for SBA disaster loans and other forms of assistance? If you have insurance; what will be covered and how much? These questions must be answered before moving forward. Disaster recovery will be more difficult for businesses experiencing financial difficulty prior to the disaster.
• Network Communication: To make the best decision to move your business forward, you must have a grasp of how the disaster has impacted those connected to your business. Call suppliers, employees, and customers to inform them of your situation. Many will offer support or alternatives for you to consider. Manufacturers might be able to ship directly to your customers or suppliers can assist in payment schedules. Knowing these options exist for your business can help in making the final decision.
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Sep 28, 2009 @ 08:43 AM
A disaster recovery plan is only good if it can actually be implemented in the event of a disaster, and if it addresses the real concerns a business has when disaster strikes. Accordingly, there are some significant mistakes that have to be avoided when making your disaster recovery plan. What follows are some of the most often-repeated, yet most dangerous, disaster recovery planning mistakes.
Lack of proactive and evident senior management support
Having a tacit approval, or even a mandate from senior management doesn’t mean that, when the time comes, they’ll be willing to implement the disaster recovery plan. For a disaster recovery plan to be truly effective, senior management has to buy into the plan early and enthusiastically. This, of course, has a lot more to do with corporate culture than it does with anything else. Getting the company’s leadership to understand a disaster recovery plan and back it publically and thoroughly is one of the most challenging, yet most necessary aspects of an effective disaster recovery plan.
Lack of employee support
While management support is integral to getting a disaster recovery plan in place, you need to have employee support in order to carry out a disaster recovery plan effectively. At a minimum, you need to reduce or eliminate employee resistance to the disaster recovery plan.
Building employee support is often much more subtle than building management support. To build employee support, you need to involve each department in the disaster recovery process in such a way as to allow them to influence the planning process and, to some degree, take ownership of their own area’s disaster recovery.
Your disaster recovery plan is only effective if those tasked with its implementation are willing to execute it thoroughly and enthusiastically.
Delegating disaster recovery to a single person
While there is surely something to be said for the way a committee can slow down a process, when it comes to disaster recovery a senior committee is essential. Because disaster recovery tasks are mission-critical, no one person should be solely responsible or accountable for the process.
If nothing else, relying on a group of individuals during the disaster recovery process builds some redundancy into the plan and helps insure that a second or corollary disaster affecting one person doesn’t diminish the disaster recovery process altogether.
A lack of substance
There is always the danger, in disaster recovery planning, that you’ll wind up with a whole lot of generalizations about how important disaster recovery is, with very little real substance. Unfortunately, the majority of corporate disaster recovery plans seem to be ensconced in a beautiful yet shallow veneer of concern for the company with very little in the way of ability to preserve mission critical data and processes.
Accordingly, an effective disaster recovery plan has to be specific. While it doesn’t have to detail each and every procedure, it should at least acknowledge those procedures and indicate which are to be used and when.
Insufficient or non-existent budget
Planning for a disaster takes money. However, it takes far less money to plan for disaster recovery than it does to reactively try to recover from a disaster.
A budget of both material and human resources is essential to effective disaster planning. In addition to systems and technological aids, a good disaster recovery plan will tap key employees throughout the organization and utilize their expertise, both in the planning and the execution of the plan.
Budgeting, of course, goes back to the first mistake of disaster recovery planning: management buy-in. By convincing management of the necessity of disaster recovery planning, you’re opening up channels through which the disaster recovery program can gain the assets it needs.
Posted by Dan Webber on Mon, Sep 07, 2009 @ 06:00 AM
I was chatting with fellow CIOs recently and discussing architecture design in the era of server virtualization and disaster recovery. The one idea that I brought up was that data deduplication should be considered. I noticed a few blank stares which made me realize this may be a new term or concept.
Data deduplication (often called "intelligent compression" or "single-instance storage") is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data. Only one unique instance of the data is actually retained on storage media, such as disk or tape. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy.
The absolute best example for practicality is email. In a typical email system, there might be 100 instances of the same one megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requiring 100 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored. Therefore each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100 MB storage demand could be reduced to only one MB.
Data deduplication offers other benefits. Lower storage space requirements will save money on buying more storage, i.e. disks. I realize that the cost of disks has continually gone down, but for those who rely on tape for offsite storage, it reduces the time for tape backups to run and may ensure a clean backup.
Data deduplication also reduces the amount of data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication, and disaster recovery.
In actual practice, data deduplication is often used in conjunction with other forms of data reduction such as conventional compression and delta differencing. The triad of techniques can be very effective at optimizing the use of storage space.
Again, If you do not know what you are doing in this space, back away, and hire experts to help you out.
Dan Webber is a CIO in Atlanta, GA. He delivers his unique
perspective as Chief Information Officer on technology, business, and
the Atlanta IT industry. He is a recent recipient of Oracle's CIO of the quarter award.
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