According to a research study, SMEs across South East Asia alone are set to invest US$630 million on data storage this year. Investments on hardware storage account for 50% of this expenditure. It is also predicted that data storage spending will grow more than 20% in each of the three different categories of storage - hardware, software and services.

As businesses migrate from desktop and server-attached solutions to NAS and SAN-based storage techologies, the need for software-based management and storage virtualization will rise too. Backup and recovery software will grow into another key investment area, driven by increasing needs to manage the hardware investments.

 

Centralized Backup

Information Lifecycle Management

Information Lifecycle Management (ILCM) is a think-tank strategy that uses people, processes and technology to store and tap critical business data throughout its lifespan of economical value.

ILCM emerges due to information’s relentless growth over the past two decades. Companies have been trying to manage an IT storage infrastructure that is getting more and more complex. A typical business entity would see an approximately 10-20 percent information growth rate annually.

Economical Value of Data

Because the value of data to an organization changes over time, ILCM proposes to store data on the media and platform that is most applicable to its current value to the company.

In order to manage this lifecycle process effectively, the investments a business makes in storage infrastructure should support this strategy. In other words, ILCM should be a strategy that aligns your storage technology infrastructure with your business requirements.

Storage Architecture Overview

Based on SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) Shared Storage Model, a framework can be developed by solution architects to help customers determine the most appropriate storage solutions.

Different Tiers of Storage

To keep a curb on storage costs, it is therefore, imperative to allocate storage space to the appropriate tiers. ILCM analyzes the data, depending on the criticality of the data, allocate it to either faster, more expensive storage solutions (such as FC and SCSI disk arrays), or less expensive SATA disks, or even offline tapes.

Continuous Data Protection

The demand for Continuous Data Protection (CDP) has been growing faster than ever as more businesses realize they not only need to backup the data on their networks as changes are been made, but also they must be able to recover that data quickly. But such CDP technologies, especially storage on demand and near-line data recovery, are still very expensive in its implementation and only the privileged can afford.

Case Study: Innovation on Shoestrings

Budgets set aside for IT projects today, particularly with small and medium businesses, can be lean and mean, making it difficult to justify for large-scale investment into CDP technologies. Costs aside, technical staff in these companies, wears a lot of hats, may not have the necessary all the knowledge and skill set to implement and maintain their storage infrastructure.

So how should organization incorporate ILCM into businesses? We would recommend that, instead of taking up large amount of technical resources in one big-bang approach, ILCM should be tailor-customized to businesses from big to small, to suit their business strategies and budget by breaking ILCM into smaller piecemeal, more easily implemented components:

Irene Tay from QQ Entertainment, need to share and retrieve large amounts of data among her 15-staff strong multimedia design team.

Traditionally, a central file server that run on client-server technology would have fit the bill. In its simplest form, a file server would consists of a server hardware running a network operating system such as Microsoft Windows 2003 Server that support controlled file sharing. Hard disks installed on the server provide the shared disk capacity.

But small businesses, like QQ Entertainment, cannot justify the costs of dedicating a fully file server for only data storage tasks. Fortunately, there are a whole class of simple, affordable devices that plug into the network and in addition, provide a host of advantageous over traditional file servers.

Network Attached Storage (NAS), unlike traditional file servers, simplify management and strip away the complexities of a file server administration - the server operating system as well as the underlying hardware peripherals and software applications. They also lower the total cost of ownership without paying overheads for software licenses. In the case of Microsoft Windows Server, that include the server operating system as well as the CAL per user licenses for each connected PCs. And clients can easily access a NAS over Local Area Network via Ethernet connection without much hassle.

On top of that, we configured the NAS to provide RAID level data protection, ensuring data redundancy and availability at a relatively affordable price. Complete with a USB-enabled REV tape drive that run scheduled backups of business-critical data on a daily incremental and weekly full basis.

1000 Miles Network have build its strength around product-centric business model, by leveraging on our systems integration experience and knowledge, to quickly deploy off-the-shelf products and applications in the market. We have designed storage solutions from home office, small business to enterprise-wide, with extensive knowledge in multi-tiered storage architectures, clustering solutions, storage technologies (such as SAN, NAS, and Jukebox etc.), storage network infrastructure, backup design and disaster recovery solutions.

However, over the past few months, we have been realigning our business, moving up the value chain and focusing our resources on Data Recovery and Special Handling Services.