Crosspoint Solutions Storage and Data Management Consulting Framework
Even during the height of the economic downturn, storage continued to be a signifiant volumes.
Most organisations will see data volumes growing in excess of 60% a year**.Ensuring that your data is stored, protected and available in line with your business requirements is about more than simply adding additional storage capacity. It requires a through understanding of how data is created, classified, stored, accessed and ultimately destroyed, through anumber of lenses:
• The length of time that data needs to be stored
• The speed at which it needs to be accessed
• The frequency of access
• The level of protection required
Only once these factors are understood, can you move towards an optimised, secure and scalable storage and data management environment. Very tangible consequences exist for organisations that fail to properly manage their data. An inability to prove compliance, increased risk, reduced employee productivity and escalating costs to name a few. Effective data management enables an organisation to ensure high availability, greater agility and security of information.
All data is not created equal Different types of organisational data are subject to different regulatory, archiving and availability requirements. For this reason, no single off-the-shelf approach exists to satisfy all organisational needs. Crosspoint Solutions believes in a customised, systematic approach to an organisation’s often chaotic and unstructured data stores.
Data management can be a costly process over its lifetime and data often needs to be managed throughout its useful life. A structured approach to data management shoul look at the storage, utilisation, maintenance and ultimately the destruction of data and covers the areas of:
Tiered storage
Tiered storage is core to an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. The value of tiered storage is the ability to tiethe cost of the storage to the value of the data. Your most important data will be stored on the highest cost, best performing storage to ensure access to mission critical data. Likewise, aging, or infrequently accessed data can be stored on lower performing, lower cost storage platforms.
Crosspint Solutions will help you to define a services catalogue to classify your data and prioritise tiers of storage.
Data retention
Data retention is about more than storing archived data on the lowest cost-permegabyte
hardware platform. Data retention needs to address the process of eliminating redundant copies of data to increase storage utilisation. Significant cost savings can be achieved by not copying multiple copies of data to backup. In addition to the cost benefits of an archive tier, many organisations benefit from the legal and regulatory compliance improvements inherent in a comprehensive archive strategy. Crosspoint Solutions will help you understand the profile of your data – how frequently it is accessed, type, size and age –this will give you the visibility to move your data between tiers based on the business criticality of the data.
Data destruction
Data destruction is another key element to ILM. The information lifecycle is incomplete until you can guarantee that the data under your control has ended its life and been destroyed, reclaiming the underlying storage assets for re-use. Company data destruction policy must be defined, and be in forced to limit your requirements to locate and retrieve specific information in the event of legal discovery.
Crosspint Solutions can help you define processes, architectures, and data retention
procedures to ensure that information expires when, and only when, policy dictates, saving you legal cost, as well as incremental storage costs. Dealing with the challenge of storage and data management Crosspoint Solutions storage and data management solutions and services optimise the storage, retrieval, backup and recovery of data to ensure performance, availability, business continuity, compliance and the rapid delivery of information to the business.
A complete ILM strategy often requires the integration of various point solutions and an
investment in time and people.
Dealing with the challenge of storage and data management
Crosspoint Solutions storage and data management solutions and services optimise
the storage, retrieval, backup and recovery of data to ensure performance, availability, business continuity, compliance and the rapid delivery of information to the business.
A complete ILM strategy often requires the integration of various point solutions and an
investment in time and people.
Challenge 1
Keeping information protected, compliant and available in line with businesses expectations – for example, end-ofmonth payroll processing may need to be uniquel protected and available for long periods of time; online transaction processing databases may have especially high-performance transaction and I/O processing requirements. Understanding the unique requirements of your business and providing the optimu storage resources for key applications requires ongoing capacity planning, resource deployment, utilisation management and cost containment.
Crosspoint Solutions Storage Assessment will help you understand how to reduce the time, effort and resources required to manage your storage environment, while improving service delivery to the business.
Challenge 2
Unstructured backup, storage and archiving data stores make it difficult to categorise data based on value and importance in turn driving up costs, adding complexity and risk. As data has differing levels of value to the business, you need to treat data differently to effectively meet business requirements.
Our Data Profiler Assessment is a nonintrusive assessment service that classifies existing data and enables you to proactively manage your storage environment through best practice recommendations. Added visibility puts businesses in control of how they utilise their storage capabilities, and gives clarity on what measures can be taken to maximise their technology investment.
Challenge 3
Multiple copies of the same data residing on numerous data stores causing increased demand on limited storage capacity and resources – many organisations will see as much as 50% of the data that they are storing is a duplicate.
Crosspoint Solutions Data Minimisation Assessment takes the information generated by the Data Profiler Assessment and tests it against 70 industry metrics. From this it generates a report that will help analyse your organisation’s data storage cost profile providing a TCO and ROI analysis for the various data management options.
Challenge 4
Loss of critical data is an information officer’s worst nightmare. Data is critical to keep your organisation running and if data is lost due to a disaster such as a flood or fire, there is no getting it back without a backup and recovery solution. Ensuring critical data is adequately protected, and reporting these metrics to the business is a key storage function. Accomplishint this, while minimising the cost of data protection is an enormous challenge. Our Backup and Recovery Assessment will help you understand how to reduce risks, analysis ROI to justify future investments, improve service level agreements and improve the efficiency of administrators.
Challenge 5
As the business and market changes,IT needs to respond to organisational needs. A lack of understanding of thecurrent state of your existing data centre infrastructure and no clear roadmap for data centre infrastructure to support future initiatives will Crosspoint Solutions Data Centre Maturity Assessment is designed to determinethe current state of your data centre infrastructure and operations – to help bring about clarity and consensus on where your infrastructure really is in terms of development, performance operational
practices and strategic execution – as well as devising a roadmap for future aspirations.
Storage budgets will increase by an average of 25% over the next 24 months to keep up with exploding data volumes.