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WOULD YOU PASS THE ARCHIVING MEDICAL?

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 3 - April 2006

Just how do you store those large volumes of data that reside right across more and more organisations? Most importantly, what's the secret behind archiving that information in the most efficient and least expensive manner? Poor planning can leave businesses in a bad state of health, unless they put the proper structures, health checks - and solutions - in place. Editor Brian Wall reports

With data growing exponentially for most businesses, failure to archive that precious resource in a way that makes sound commercial sense can seriously affect any organisation's ability to perform to the highest levels. And, with the glut of government regulations now in force, this is a 'must do' situation.

"First, the legal requirements of European and US laws such as Basel II, Freedom of Information Act and Sarbanes Oxley mean there has been a huge growth in the volume of data that needs to be stored and kept over multi-year periods, whilst also being readily available for inspection," says Hugh Jenkins, enterprise marketing director for Dell UK & Ireland. "Secondly, companies need to cope with the sheer volume of email traffic and inbox storage now required. By systematically archiving financial data, email and other records, businesses can also expect to see reduced risk to business continuity and improved operational efficiencies."

Moreover, as most businesses have witnessed during the past 18 months, the sheer volume of rules and regulations is only likely to keep growing. So, short of burying your head in the sand and pretending it isn't happening, how can you deal with these issues? And what are the strategies and solutions you can adopt to ensure you are one of the success stories?

Perhaps the first step for any business is actually to identify the need to archive data and, secondly, to archive it intelligently. That may seem fairly self-evident, which isn't to say most organisations are necessarily doing this, as James Damoulakis, chief technology officer at GlassHouse Technologies, points out.

"Unfortunately, many organisations spend a lot of up-front time focused on hardware selection, when this should be one of the last decision points in the data archiving process. Since data archiving is so dependent on business drivers and application-specific characteristics, it is critical to fully understand these before selecting a hardware platform. The most difficult part of the archiving process is establishing clear data retention policies and determining the application impact. If time is initially invested in these areas, then the hardware selection process will be much easier, the technology will be better aligned with the actual business needs, and overspending will be a lot less likely."

Among the key business-driven requirements that Damoulakis believes should influence hardware selection are the following:

• Retention - how long will the data be kept?
• Scalability - what are the projected growth requirements?
• Retrievability - how often and how quickly must data be accessed?
• Immutability - are safeguards required to prove data has not been altered?
• Data purge - is there a requirement to ensure that deleted data cannot be read?

"Another important consideration concern is vendor lock-in," adds Damoulakis. "Solutions today utilise proprietary technologies. An archive is, by definition, a long-term proposition and the volumes of data will only get larger. This means that, under any circumstance, future data migration is likely to pose a significant challenge. The question to ask your vendor is: 'does their solution make it even harder'?"

Of course, there are many issues that users need to ponder themselves before they approach a potential solutions provider, such as, "how long, where and what method will be used to archive data"? And while the drivers for this may be seen as the latest legislation or cost, they should be both, argues Stephen Watson, HP SWD product marketing manager. "UK businesses need to ask themselves the right questions. Meeting compliance regulations is a real need. Although in its early days in the UK, companies need to think now about the laws affecting the market in which their business sits and the importance of data strata."

Watson argues that cutting costs, complying with legislation and preparing an ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) approach all need to be front of mind in order to maximise resources. "Tiering levels of data according to business and regulatory importance can inform companies as to which data is static, infrequently accessed and could be on low-cost ATA disk or even tape," he comments.

"Recognising the data of high importance, or that which fulfils a critical need, will help identify the need to store it on an easily accessible or fast medium. This strategy will ensure easier restoration of data when legally obliged and the ability to recall information quickly, rather than reinventing it, which costs time, money and energy. Easily accessible top-tier data drives down the TCO [total cost of ownership] of the data itself, as it can be used repeatedly."

Watson believes that working from the inside out (once a strategy is in place, of course), companies are in a position to judge what storage archival and retrieval products will best fit their needs, plan the methods to be used and test them. "There must be a route to recovery of this archived data, either automated or partly manual, in process. Hardware devices, such as tape libraries, will store and retrieve long-term data.

“Archiving systems, such as HP RISS, will gradually migrate data from high-use disk down to static low-cost disk,” he points out, “according to configur- able tolerances of time since creation or last accessed time, and software solutions are available that will help manage this process. Businesses can have a full set of tools to streamline data and give life back to systems that always used to cope."

The looming arrival of Sarbanes Oxley and MiFID has already had many businesses in something of a flurry as they seek to sort out their data stores - and at great expense, too, says Martin Warren, marketing manager, automated tape solutions, Sun/StorageTek.

"Compliance aside, unmanaged and bloated data reserves can undermine and hinder business processes, and lead to overloaded storage systems containing often useless information. Some IT departments might even already have substantial space, albeit space that is slowly shrinking, as more and more information is stored over time. The key is simply to sort data capacity into a coherent infrastructure, helping to automate the handling of data over time for cost and compliance," he stresses.

"For example, data that’s more than 90 days' old is very unlikely to be accessed again. Information lifecycle manage- ment is an example of such a strategy. ILM is essentially a sustainable storage strategy that balances the cost of storing and managing information with its business value.”

Warren claims that, with its ILM Maturity Assessment, Sun/StorageTek has the most advanced ILM methodology. "The maturity model is structured to link business intent - plans, requirements and service levels - downward through a layer of integrating processes (policy management and data classification) and into the model 'gearbox' of storage management integration.

“From the bottom up, infrastructure is linked to information placement (data protection, archive, and optimisation) and into the management integration layer,” he states. “Together, these elements define a top-down and bottom-up model for ILM, integrating business intent with storage reality."

Overall, a well-executed ILM strategy will result in a more agile organisation, reduce business risk, and drive down both storage unit and storage management costs, adds Warren. Ultimately, organisations gain solid and immediate business benefit from information lifecycle management by better controlling information assets for competitive advantage.

One major headache users have to contend with is the fact that the impact of compliance regulations on IT infrastructure is still not fully clear. And yet, as Will Trotman, senior product manager, Sony Europe, is all too aware, technology planners need to be far more compliance aware than ever before. "Regulations will have a significant impact, changing the technology capabilities and features requirements, significantly increasing the volumes of data to be stored, extending the data retention periods and increasing the importance of access to data archives.

"With the issue of capacity and cost, tape is still the lowest-cost solution to long-term data retention and, with tape automation, the capacity can be in to the petabyte range. Tape is also removable and thus data that is no longer being accessed, but needs to be retained, can be stored in a tape vault, freeing up space in the tape library for new data on new tape media.

"When considering the compliance issue, some tapes can be implemented with the Write Once Read Many (WORM) technology. This could be one of the easiest ways to solve some of the compliance issues for permanent record-keeping. Although software solutions are viable, hardware techniques offer the most secure method of ensuring that data on the tape cannot be modified," he adds.

Sony was one of the first manufacturers to introduce WORM-based tape. Indeed, Sony's AIT WORM and SAIT WORM tape products provide the features and functionality that meet the tough records retention requirements for the US securities broker dealer industry. However, even though WORM functionality is offered in the drive firmware and through the media, it is important to ensure the application software also supports the capability. Happily, what was once often only available through specialist archive application vendors is now part of the capability support of the major software providers.

"To create a data archive of integrity that will protect a business and its employees, technology planners must take into account compliance standards," Watson stresses, "and this is where compliance and legal professionals must actively communicate the regulatory requirements so that technology planners can do their job properly."

Another key consideration end users need to keep in mind when looking at data storage solutions is that not all data is the same. "Where some data may need to be recovered instantaneously, other data can afford to be stored on disc or tape and recovered at a later date," states Chris James, EMEA marketing director at Overland Storage. "It is imperative that businesses are aware that not all data should head to the archive room; there are primary, secondary and tertiary storage levels. Once a business acknowledges how much data it needs to hold at a tertiary level (archive), only then can hardware decisions be made.

"It is also important to acknowledge that today's companies may have different locations in a country or remote locations across the globe. In this respect, companies need automated processes to send data to a central location. The most sure-fire way to eradicate the error in data back-up is to automate the storage process, ensure data is non corruptible by using Write Once Read Many (WORM) devices, know where everything is and be able to retrieve it quickly, in case of need. A decent automated backup system will lead to significant benefits in loss of data as a result of human error, but also cost benefits as the need for management costs is eradicated."

The pressure on companies is growing all the time. IT teams today find themselves having to comply with external regulations, live up to internal SLAs and manage both of these demands within budget. From a storage perspective, it is therefore critical to know your data, in terms of how is it managed and classified, if they are to understand what is, and what is not, critical data.

"The key considerations for storage are about the speed and cost of protecting data through back-up and archiving, and restoring that data in case of data loss," says James. "These considerations should be made in the context of the acceptable level of risk, against potential loss of data and maximum time-to-restore data and operations that can be allowed for minimal impact on the business. Answering these specific questions around business applications is the most important step in defining the most appropriate technology platform and putting a price tag on the solution."

According to Henrik Hansen, director of marketing, Quantum, one solution that addresses both issues of most efficient and most cost-effective is the tiered storage model. "Data is first backed up to a disk-based system like a Virtual Tape Library, which enables near real-time accessibility to data and, secondly, the data is passed on to a tape-based system where it is archived. In this model, the VTL allows users to back up specific application servers to their own virtual tape drives and cartridges at disk speed which increases efficiency. The cartridge sizes and retention times can be individually set which, for example, provides flexibility for applications handling very large files and large amounts of data."

Hansen says the beauty of the tiered storage model is that it is managed just like managing a standard tape system. "Once the near real-time retention period has passed, the data is automatically moved over to tape for long-term archiving. At today's capacity of 1.6TB of data on to one physical tape cartridge, the cost per Gigabyte remains way ahead of the cost of disk."

Tiered storage through a VTL shows how the key benefits of both disk and tape can be realised at the same time, with this complementary combination helping to support regulations and SLAs (service level agreements) within the most attractive budget scope, he comments. "The final destination for most data will be tape storage. However, as the data moves through its lifecycle, it will reside on several platforms on its way to the vault in a cartridge, and this is where storage solutions will begin to offer hybridised cost and efficiency benefits."

What is evident is that the complexity of data retention, archiving and retrieval is accelerating all the time, while the onus on solutions providers is to come up with equally sophisticated technology that is relatively easy to use at the operational level.

"Information management sounds like a grand term when you are essentially talking about data storage," says Hugh Jenkins of Dell UK & Ireland, "but there are two very good reasons why today's archiving requirements are much more complex than simply saving to a box. At Dell, we work directly with our customers to archive data, and have found there is an increasing trend towards implementing a pooled storage model and sharing the SAN between servers. Companies are increasingly looking to get better utilisation out of their storage, compared with the direct attached model where storage is assigned by server.”

Once utilisation has been driven up, naturally companies will need to consider very carefully the ways in which data is being stored on the SAN. However, Jenkins also argues in favour of organisations carrying out regular 'SAN health checks' to ensure the data archiving and information management process is working efficiently.

"By looking closely at how a company archives and sorts data, it is possible to advise on how to store data more efficiently and cost effectively, as well as assess the different types of storage offered," he concludes. ST