Data Management Continuum Guidance
By Dan Morrill
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-10-29
All data follows a lifecycle from initial creation and storage, to protection and retention, and each of these phases has differing and unique requirements. Thus there should be a range of storage devices and processes to address these varying requirements. For example, enterprise devices, while having higher redundancy and performance are not as flexible as mid-range arrays and represent a higher cost per GB of capacity.
Figure 1 - Data management continuum
In order to be able to leverage a tiered storage environment the data for the individual business processes within the environment must be classified in order to understand their storage requirements. Note that within these processes it is necessary to distinguish between production requirements versus those for development and testing. With this classification storage tiers can be assigned by business process and application class such as File/Print, E-mail, database etc. This matrix will make it easier to quickly determine the storage tiers for new solutions as they are requested by the business units.
The 3 basic tiers of storage that we will discuss in the strategy are differentiated as follows:
Table 1 - Storage tiers
These tiers are applied to specific application types and application environments according to the following tiering matrices.
Table 2 - Storage tiering recommendations - Business Critical
Table 3 - Storage tiering recommendations - Mission Critical
Table 4 - Storage tiering recommendations - Business Required
Table 5 - Storage tiering recommendations - Important
Rounding out the ILM strategy, we extend the tiering structure to backup, archive and disaster recovery services. The fully tiered model depicted in the following diagram:
Figure 2 - Tiered information management model
Comments
About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community.