Putting information storage in its place: we're generating digital data at a record clip. Is there a digital closet big enough to store it all? - Tech Trends from Deloitte & Touche

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2002 by Naresh Lakhanpal

Early Remedies

Storage vendors and IT departments have been inching toward storage consolidation for the last several years. Today's storage service providers (SSP) could be considered forerunners of tomorrow's information plants, but on a smaller scale. SSPs provide storage capacity and management services to companies whose servers are overloaded.

Enterprises are also implementing technologies like Network Accessed Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SANs) to consolidate centralized data storage and streamline file access on their networks. With NAS in place, files that used to reside on multiple servers--and in the process, take up valuable space and processing power--an be removed from the servers and be served up by the NAS.

A SAN eases the load on a company's local area networks (LANs). Functions like data backups or data warehouse loading can be done during the workday without compromising the LAN's performance, because the data movement during backups and data warehouse loads occurs on the SAN's own backup network. According to ITCentrix, a single storage administrator can typically manage approximately 200 gigabytes of data. With a SAN solution, which simplifies the administrator's tasks, a single administrator can manage in excess of 3.2 terabytes of data, or 16 times more data.

And finally, the time-honored act of making daily incremental tape backups is in the midst of being streamlined. To ensure that a company's computer system can be rebuilt after a disaster, such as an earthquake or the recent terrorist attacks on the United States, most large enterprises supplement their daily backup. The traditional method has been to back up the entire system onto magnetic tape once a week, and then ship the backup tapes, via truck, to an offsite silo located hundreds of miles away. A major limitation of this process is that it can take several days for the tapes to be shipped back and the system put back online.

EMC and IBM have developed their own proprietary technologies to circumvent the arduous process of tape backup and shipping. EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and IBM's Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) automate the remote duplication of an enterprise system at regular intervals, on an ongoing basis. "If the main data center in Seattle goes down, the backup data center in New York will come online and act as the primary location," explains Roy Mathew, a senior consultant with Deloitte Consulting. "The end user isn't aware of it because the recovery could happen in a matter of seconds."

What's the biggest challenge in implementing these disaster recovery (DR) systems? "Convincing CIOs and CEOs that a small, unplanned outage can severely impact market position and response time, and that upgrading their DR solution should be at the top of their priority list," says Mathew.

As new technologies for managing our ever-mushrooming mass of digital data continue to be unveiled, it's likely that data storage priority lists will be under scrutiny for some time to come.