Since late August when I posted part 2 of our document management research, I’ve learned a lot about products and tools. Or maybe I should say, I've learned a lot of new questions!
In late September, I attended the Atlanta SharePoint User Group meeting. The main topic was SharePoint backup and recovery, which really means it was all about storage management. NetApp and AvePoint were key vendors of interest. Very interesting solutions, but very large price tags (at least that's my expectation)
Then we had the Fall Church IT Roundtable in Kansas City. There was a lot of discussion of storage, and data, and managing it, but I didn't hear any great new answers. (I'd love to find out there were some!)
Earlier this month, Optimus Systems hosted an event on Storage Management featuring info from IBM and Data Domain (the people who did the great bumper sticker). Once again, interesting stuff, but a long way from cheap/easy/obvious. (By the way, the folks at Optimus were nice enough to make all the presentations available on-line, here.)
Just a few days later, our IBM nonprofit representative set up an on-site discussion of storage. It was just an introductory meeting, and frankly, didn't add a lot to the mix, other than pointing out that there's a lot we still don't know.
Then the next day, I had a nice breakfast meeting with another ministry, then lunch with another vendor (details will have to come another time) who is looking to do some storage management and disaster recovery for churches. More questions, and perhaps one or two more answers.
Still...there is just so much I don't know! What I think I'm learning is that any discussion of backup strategy should also include a discussion of an archive strategy, and you should factor in a storage strategy, and data retention policies, and of course disaster recovery and business continuity. There are probably other pieces of this inter-related strategy that come to play as well. If you want to do the right thing with any piece, all the other pieces impact you.
I've heard a new (to me, at least) term several times of late, ILM, Information Lifcycle Management. I also picked up a new quote to go with it:
“We are drowning in a sea of information. No one knows the value, how long it should be kept, or what the risk of keeping or getting rid of it is.”
– J.P. Morgan
The related concept I like was hearing about "classes" of data, and the different business rules that could be applied. Tied to this was the value of different classes of data over time. Here's a clip from one of the slides that shows how different types of data vary in value over time. (I'm not sure if this is meant to be real value, or just an example):
Once you have these classes of data, then you can begin to apply business rules to the data.
So...what do we actually do with these data classes and rules? How can we make them work for us? Is there a first step that helps lead to the rest?
It seems to me there are four major "layers" to the solution.
- The Application, or maybe even user, layer. How does the user interact with the applications that ultimately store and retrieve data?
- The Business layer, which deals with each organization's storage rules
- The Storage layer, the real hardware, SANs, JBODs, and maybe other hardware or software that helps with duplicate elimination and high availability
- The Backup Layer, which may be tape, an appliance, or some other way to be able to recover from simple file loss or full disaster. Could this be an off-site location with a lot of disk space, and NO tape?
Did you notice that I didn't even mention storage virtualizataion (yet)?
I've got more research to do, and more vendors to hear from. I think this is going to be a long process.
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