Data Lifecycles: Managing Data for Strategic Advantage

Description

Businesses now rely almost entirely on applications and databases, causing data and storage needs to increase at astounding rates. It is therefore imperative for a company to optimize and simplify the complexity of managing its data resources.

Plenty of storage products are now available, however the challenge remains for companies to proactively manage their storage assets and align the resources to the various departments, divisions, geographical locations and business processes to achieve improved efficiency and profitability.  Data Lifecycles identifies ways to incorporate an intelligent service platform to manage and map the storage of data. The authors give an overview of the latest trends and technologies in storage networking and cover critical issues such as world-wide compliance.

Data Lifecycles:

• Provides a single-source guide to data and storage methodologies, processes, technologies and compliance issues.
• Addresses the need of an encompassing intelligent data and storage management platform for modern businesses.
• Gives an overview of the latest data technologies and concepts such as utility computing and information lifecycle management.
• Clearly defines and describes lifecycle management and strategies to ensure growth of critical business data.
• Shows how to dramatically reduce the total cost of storage ownership and provide rapid return on investment.
• Enables customers to make decisions directed toward the purchase of storage tools and storage management solutions.

This text is an ideal introduction to modern data lifecycle management for network managers, system administrators, storage/system architects, network managers, information management directors as well as CIO/CTOs and their teams, senior IT managers and decision makers, and database administrators.

 

Table of Contents

Preface.

Who should read this book.

Purpose of this book.

1 Introducing Utility Computing.

1.1 Real problems and real solutions.

1.1.1 Real issues identified–regulation, legislation and the law.

1.1.2 More regulation, legislation and the law.

1.1.3 Current storage growth.

1.2 New storage management.

1.2.1 What are the things organisations need to consider?

1.2.2 What does data lifecycle management mean?

1.2.3 Why is IT lifecycle management important?

1.2.4 Goals of data lifecycle management.

2 The Changing IT Imperative.

2.1 Introduction to utility computing.

2.2 General market highlights.

2.2.1 Current storage growth.

2.2.2 Enterprises for which DLM is critical.

2.3 Real challenges and opportunities.

2.3.1 Real issues identified.

2.3.2 Data compliance.

2.3.3 Case study in ineffective storage reporting.

2.4 Summary.

3 Being Compliant.

3.1 So what are the regulations?

3.2 Financial services companies.

3.2.1 Crime in the finance sector.

3.3 Telecommunications companies.

3.4 Utilities companies.

3.5 Public authorities and government.

3.6 Managing data for compliance is just a specialised form of data management.

3.7 Just plain junk data!

3.8 The bottom line–what is mandated?

3.8.1 Record retention and retrieval.

3.8.2 Auditable process.

3.8.3 Reporting in real time.

3.8.4 Integrating data management from desktop to data centre to offsite vault.

3.8.5 Challenge–the data dilemma.

4 Data Taxonomy.

4.1 A new data management consciousness level.

4.1.1 De-mystifying data classification.

4.1.2 Defining data classification.

4.1.3 Classification objectives.

4.1.4 Various approaches to data classification.

4.2 Data personification.

4.2.1 Business infrastructure mapping analysis.

4.3 Classification model and framework.

4.4 Customer reporting.

4.4.1 Summary reports.

4.4.2 Detailed reports.

4.4.3 Summary graphs.

4.5 Summary.

5 Email Retention.

5.1 Email management to achieve compliance.

5.2 What is archiving?

5.2.1 Email archiving requirements.

5.3 How should organisations manage their email records?

5.4 Email retention policies are for life–not just for Christmas.

5.5 How companies can gain competitive advantage using compliance.

5.5.1 Compliance makes good business sense.

5.6 What laws govern email retention?

5.6.1 How long do we have to keep email records?

5.7 Write once, secure against tampering.

5.8 Storage recommendations for email.

5.9 Conclusion.

6 Security.

6.1 Alerting organisations to threats.

6.1.1 Vulnerability identified and early warnings.

6.1.2 Early awareness of vulnerabilities and threats in the wild.

6.1.3 Listening posts.

6.2 Protecting data and IT systems.

6.2.1 Threats blocked using vulnerability signatures to prevent propagation.

6.2.2 Preventing and detecting attacks.

6.2.3 Managing security in a data centre.

6.2.4 Monitoring and identification of systems versus vulnerabilities and policies.

6.2.5 Responding to threats and replicating across the infrastructure.

6.2.6 Patches and updates implemented across infrastructure.

6.2.7 Keeping information secure and available.

6.3 Conclusions.

Reference.

7 Data Lifecycles and Tiered Storage Architectures.

7.1 Tiered storage defined.

7.1.1 Serial ATA background.

7.1.2 Serial ATA overview.

7.1.3 Serial ATA reliability.

7.1.4 Bit error rate (BER).

7.1.5 Mean time before failure (MTBF).

7.1.6 Failure rate breakdown.

7.1.7 No free lunch.

7.2 RAID review.

7.2.1 RAID 5 review.

7.2.2 RAID 6 overview.

7.3 Tape-based solutions.

7.3.1 Virtual tape library primer.

7.4 Recoverability of data: you get what you pay for.

7.5 Conclusion.

Bibliography.

Recommended Reading.

8 Continuous Data Protection (CDP).

8.1 Introduction.

8.2 CDP data-taps.

8.2.1 Application data-tap.

8.2.2 File system data-tap.

8.2.3 Volume data-tap.

8.3 CDP operations.

8.3.1 CDP store.

8.3.2 CDP Stakeholders.

8.4 Conclusion.

9 What is the Cost of an IT Outage?

9.1 Failure is not an option.

9.1.1 Tangible costs.

9.1.2 Intangible costs.

9.2 Finding the elusive ROI.

9.3 Building a robust and resilient infrastructure.

9.3.1 Five interrelated steps to building a resilient infrastructure.

9.3.2 Disaster recovery concepts and technologies.

9.3.3 Disaster tolerance.

9.4 Conclusion–Analysing business impact.

9.4.1 Identifying critical functions.

10 Business Impact.

10.1 Business impact.

10.1.1 Business impact analysis.

10.1.2 Cost versus adoption.

10.1.3 Service level agreements and quality of storage service.

10.2 The paradigm shift in the way IT does business.

10.2.1 Aligning business with IT.

10.2.2 Software consistency and agnostic support.

10.3 The Holy Grail: standard software platform.

10.3.1 Business technology reporting and billing.

10.3.2 Smart storage resource management.

10.3.3 Data forecasting and trending.

10.3.4 Policy-based Administration.

10.4 Summary.

Bibliography.

11 Integration.

11.1 Understanding compliance requirements.

11.1.1 Automating data lifecycle management.

11.1.2 Content searching.

11.2 Understanding hardware and its constructions.

11.2.1 Current storage technologies.

11.2.2 Disk-based storage strategies.

11.3 Understanding user expectations.

11.3.1 Organising data.

11.4 Knowing the capabilities of your data management tools.

11.4.1 Virtualisation of storage, servers and applications.

11.4.2 Product technology and business management functionality.

11.5 Solution integration–business data and workflow applications.

11.5.1 Standard management and reporting platform.

11.5.2 Meeting business objectives and operational information (Figure 11.7).

11.6 A ten-point plan to successful DLM, ILM and TLM strategy.

11.7 Conclusion.

References.

Index.