Storage Tips: Advice from storage experts

April 19, 2006 —

Storage administrators can never have enough creative troubleshooting ideas. Here are tips for every day storage dilemmas and advice for more challenging, strategic issues.

Storage Tip: Access storage arrays remotely, securely 12/03/2007)

Your business can benefit from remote management, but take the necessary actions to ensure security.
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Storage Tip:Mitigate pain of storage growth with active archiving, data deletion, and data de-duplication 11/28/2007)

Estimates of annual storage growth are 60% and annual budget growth around 4-5%. While your storage growth may not be that high, the growth rate of storage is still likely to exceed the annual overall decline in storage prices. Can you afford it? This problem isn't new, nor is it only about how to squeeze out enough dollars to pay the bill. It's also a question of management. Throw in power and cooling requirements, and will you be able to handle the extra environmental demands?
Here's what you need to know.

Storage Tip: The rise of thin provisioning 11/21/2007)

Thin provisioning gets you out of the guessing game as to how much storage a server or application will demand, but it's not a panacea.
Here's what you need to know..

Storage Tip: Employ storage technologies in the right order to maximize benefit 11/13/2007)

Sooner or later you'll need to buy into technologies that manipulate the layout of bits on storage media, and the order in which you deploy these technologies is important. Repeat after me: Data de-duplication. Compression. Encryption. Here's what you need to know.
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Storage Tip: High availability and disaster recovery are not the same thing 11/07/2007)

IT organizations may confuse the terms "high availability" and "disaster recovery." You need both, but if you think that the two are synonymous you may do one or the other and think that you have done the other. And that could be a problem as the two, while interrelated, are not the same.
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Storage Tip: Eliminate unnecessary tapes 10/30/2007)

Long-established procedures for doing backups often result in having to maintain a large number of physical tapes. Nowadays, backup tapes serve not only to restore application data (their traditional purpose), but also serve as a target for e-discovery purposes (as part of the emerging trend toward litigation support). Eliminating tapes where possible not only saves costs and reduces tape administration complexity, but also makes the e-discovery process easier. But eliminating tapes may not be easy. Here's what you need to know.
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Storage Tip: SNIA turns 10, continues to offer resources for ongoing learning 10/24/2007)

Storage Networking Industry Association just turned 10, and if you haven't been to its site in awhile, you may be suprised at the wealth of resources available.
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Storage Tip: Preserving information in perpetuity 10/18/2007)

Previous storage tips have discussed the need to preserve data for the long-term -- a minimum of 10 to 15 years, but it's actually likely to be 50 to 100 years or more. A general solution does not yet exist, but there is a way to preserve carefully-selected and targeted documents for the long-term. What do you need to know? iForem offers a digital archiving service where enterprises (or individuals) can store selected documents for what it says is perpetuity. How can iForem make what appears to be an outrageous claim?
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Storage Tip: Data de-duplication in limelight for data protection 10/11/2007)

From a business perspective, reducing both the operational and capital costs of doing backup would seem to be the goal of every IT organization. From an operational perspective, improving service through improved onsite data restore times via using online disk for backups is probably another goal. But how to meet those objectives is the question. Data de-duplication technology has shown great promise in helping companies.
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Storage Tip: Getting more performance out of high transaction-rate databases (9/18/2007)

Your organization may have an online transaction processing (OLTP) system with a high transaction rate. High transaction rate databases may place a high I/O resource demand on performance that may result in response times outlined in the SLA not being met, batch jobs take too long, etc. You'll need a solution. Here's what you need to know.

Storage Tip: Protecting PCs against logical data protection problems (9/04/2007)

Snapshot technology is one approach to solving the logical data problem. A snapshot creates a virtual copy of a disk volume at a designated point in time. At the time the snapshot is taken the original disk image and the snapshot are identical. Thus no additional physical space is required at that instant. The original data and snapshot diverge as writes change the original data.
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Storage Tip: Tools assist proactive disaster recovery testing (8/21/2007)

Some enterprises may spend what seems like a fortune for their disaster recovery architecture, but too often disaster recovery testing is done infrequently at best. However, the software tool cavalry seems to be riding to the rescue for disaster recovery testing. Here are a few tools to consider.
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Storage Tip: Tools assist proactive disaster recovery testing (8/21/2007)

Some enterprises may spend what seems like a fortune for their disaster recovery architecture, but too often disaster recovery testing is done infrequently. However, the software tool cavalry seems to be riding to the rescue for disaster recovery testing.
Here are a few tools to consider.

Storage Tip: Identify data pattern recognition (8/15/2007)

You're company is subpoenaed, and must produce key parts of corporate data, but your obligation doesn't end there. You must help the legal department get in the best possible position to review the data. Here's a tool that can help.

Storage Tip: Steps to long-term retention of digital information (8/15/2007)

According to a recent survey from the SNIA's Data Management Forum, over half (53%) of the respondents have information that must be retained permanently, and 83% have information that must be retained over 50 years. Before you can put together your long term data archiving strategy, you must identify how long you need to keep your data.
Here are some things to consider.

Storage Tip: Data protection for business PCs (7/23/2007)

Pundits often state that much of enterprises' key information is contained on desktops and laptops. In fact, the disk space used by all of those computers may be more than in the organizational data center. If that's the case, two questions must be asked: how do you backup this data, and how to ensure that no key data is lost? Read more.

Storage Tip: Register your e-mail for legal proof (7/18/2007)

One of the biggest targets for e-discovery is e-mail. When you search your e-mail archive you must able to retrieve all internal e-mail that was sent and received. But what about external e-mail, which is all the e-mail that goes to or comes from outside your enterprise - partners, competitors, customers/clients, or any person/organization outside your own? Yes, you should have all the relevant e-mail that was sent from the outside and also that which was sent by someone in your enterprise to someone outside your enterprise. But can you prove that what was sent to someone outside the organization was also received by that someone? And therein lies the rub. If you cannot prove that someone outside your organization actually got an e-mail, you do not have legal proof of receipt, and that can be a problem.
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Storage Tip: Choosing an e-discovery tool (7/09/2007)

When you search through a stack of documents, you want only relevant documents identified by a search technique, but you want all the relevant documents identified. Precision is the proportion of retrieved and relevant documents to all documents retrieved. (You do not want to have to separate the data wheat from the data chaff especially if there are a lot of documents.) However, you also want to identify all the documents that are relevant. Recall is the proportion of relevant documents that are retrieved, out of all relevant documents available. (You need to make sure that you get all of the data wheat.) Unfortunately, there tends to be a tradeoff between precision and recall in that there is a tendency for precision to decline as recall increases. Your goal is to try to improve both precision and recall simultaneously even though you may never be able to completely reach your goal. Now, powerful e-discovery search tools exist and they may be very helpful in giving you both good precision and recall results.
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Storage Tip: Authenticating a document through timestamping (6/27/2007)

The changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) emphasize the requirements to have sound processes and procedures to prove the authenticity of documents. IT administrators must work with their colleagues in the legal group to ensure that those processes and procedures happen properly. Key to this is to ensure the authenticity of particular pieces of content to specific points in time. And that starts with digital fingerprints. Read more.

Storage Tip: Mix and match come to disk drives (6/19/2007)

RAID has been a boon to physical data protection, but one of the requirements of traditional RAID is all the drives in the same RAID group have to be the same fixed size. For very small organizations (including parts of larger organizations) that need to add just one or a few different-sized drives over time or who have mismatched drives now that means that they cannot take advantage of RAID. Here's what you need to know.
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Storage Tip: A simple backup for single drives (6/01/2007)

Carbonite offers a service that makes desktop and laptop data backup easy, continuous, all for a nominal price.
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Storage Tip: The authenticity of a found document (5/17/2007)

Consider this scenario: Your IT organization has put proper procedures in place for deleting electronic documents, including e-mails. During an e-discovery process, a particular document cannot be found. However, it turns up on your CEO's laptop. You must know whether the document is admissible as evidence in a civil lawsuit. Here's what you need to know.
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Storage Tip: Practicing information-centric security (4/23/2007)

Information-centric security, from a data security perspective, is protecting data at its core. Not only must you prevent the wrong people from getting a key to the data vault, but you must also know how to prevent those who have a key from misusing the data. Here's what you need to know.
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Storage Tip:Choosing what data to protect with encryption (3/27/2007)

Planning what to do about encryption should be part of an overall data governance planning process that can also address such issues as data quality and master data management as well as how to meet the requirements for responding to the changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for civil litigation.
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Storage Tip: Intelligence for unstructured data (3/20/2007)

IT organizations have the skills to deal with the data growth caused by unstructured data - and deal with the growth you must. But just as with previous data revolutions (first to a focus on online transaction processing systems, which use structured data, and then to semi-structured information, such as e-mail, office productivity, and HTML documents), the heightened awareness and utility of unstructured information can only make the place of data even more central to an enterprise.
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Storage Tip: Not your father's backup/restore software (3/13/2007)

If you are looking at traditional backup/restore with the extra-added appeal of disk, contact the vendors in your market space with whom you are familiar (and those could be through your current storage hardware vendor). If you are interested in overall recovery management or a new technology, such as continuous data protection, you can contact companies that focus in those spaces. If, on the other hand, you are looking at a storage hardware solution, then you will know that the vendor that you are choosing also has a backup/restore story and probably one that involves disk-based backup as well. In any event, although there are a lot of options, you are likely to find at least one -- and probably more than one -- company that will meet your needs.
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Storage Tip: Testing with confidential data (2/26/2007)

IT personnel will eventually need to use a copy of confidential information for test and development purposes. Data security cannot be compromised, but the business must continue to move forward with new tested software functionality. What are the options?
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Storage Tip: Putting privileged information on hold (2/20/2007)

As part of the process of putting data on litigation hold in anticipation of or because of an actual lawsuit against your company, you may put privileged information on hold. Privileged information is any of the following: trade secrets, financial information, or other information that has nothing to do with the lawsuit at hand and can be considered confidential to your company. Your problem is to prevent producing (i.e., delivering) privileged information to the requesting party (i.e., whoever is suing your company) or, if you do produce it, getting it back. Here's what you need to know. Read more.

Storage Tip: Expect digital video to expand its data security role (2/13/2007)

Digital video will expand its data security role and move further into mainstream IT. In the digital era, digital -- not analog -- is the way to go. View it as a good idea to be proactive about taking on additional responsibility. After all, it can provide a little more spice in your life, but more importantly you can view it as a job growth opportunity. Take advantage of it.
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Storage Tip: The role of data protection in governance (1/23/2007)

You and your organization have to come to grips with trying to understand the impact of the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). One way of helping you do this is to organize your thinking around how the changes relate to the need for data protection. Here's what you need to know when comparing and contrasting data protection for risk management and governance.
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Storage Tip: Is good faith always a safe harbor? (1/16/2007)

What electronically-stored information can you safely delete without exposing your company to sanctions, fines, or money-award judgments against it? Rule 37(f) in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure states in part that "absent exceptional circumstances, a court may not impose sanctions as the result of the routine, good faith operation of an electronic information system." That applies to the deletion of potentially discoverable information. Your challenge, if your company is being sued, is that you must show that the data destruction occurred as the result of the "routine" operation of an electronic information system. You must also show that such "operation" occurred in "good faith."
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Storage Tip: The legal burden of inaccessible data (1/09/2007)

When you start to understand the implications of what is necessary to bring your company in line with the changes of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) as they impact the process of e-discovery for civil litigation in the U.S. court system, you may recognize the large gap between what your company can do now and what it needs to do.
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Storage Tip: What errors of data classification can you afford? (12/19/2006)

Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require you to carefully preserve all relevant data (i.e., data that needs to be saved as possible evidence in litigation). But what is relevant data? You'll find separating the relevant data from the irrelevant data may seem intractable, but here's some perspective on how to approach the issue. Read more.

Storage Tip: Litigation holds require a formal data retention strategy (12/12/2006)

The new changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) will have considerable impact on IT in general and storage administration in particular. Litigation holds are likely to be an especially thorny issue. A litigation hold means that you are required to preserve data that may be the target of a lawsuit against your company so that you can make the necessary information (e-discovery) available if required. But a huge gap exists between your legal department asking you to put a litigation hold on data and your ability to actually do so. And that is your challenge.
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Storage Tip: New e-discovery rules mean no more business as usual (12/05/2006)

You may not have heard of the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), but complying with them will have a significant impact on data and storage management. Why is this important? The FRCP rules govern discovery in civil litigation. Discovery means that you must provide legitimately requested company information to those who sue your company. FRCP Rule 26(a) clearly defines electronically stored information as discoverable. Electronic discovery is the process of making available electronic records. Read more.

Storage Tip: Why complete and correct backups are even more important (11/28/2006)

If you haven't lost the flexibility of occasionally missing a backup, you may soon. Missing a backup or deciding to bring an online system back up instead of rerunning a failed backup job are no longer options as requirements for compliance and the changes in overall corporate governance have intensified. That increases the burden on you to get backups done correctly and completely all of the time. Here's why. Read more.

Storage Tip: RAID 6 to replace RAID 5 (11/14/2006)

The introduction of RAID technology has been a boon that made the use of open systems storage for a wide range of business applications (including mission-critical) practical. To continue to harp on a subject that has been discussed previously, RAID is great, but only one failure can safely be tolerated. Enterprises run a risk during the time that it takes to rebuild an array after a disk failure. That risk is having a much longer downtime than can be tolerated with today

ITworld.com, Storage Strategies