Welcome to Information Lifecycle Management
Everyday at RADirect, we speak with storage and IT administrators about their struggles to plan, deploy and protect their data. Almost everyone is still thinking about data: data archiving, data redundancy, and of course, data restoration.
The good news is, if you are using a disk to disk backup architecture, you now have more options. Today there are two basic topologies that define disk-based digital archiving.
The first (and most familiar) option is to deploy a RAID storage system at your primary facility and a second RAID storage system in a DR facility and duplicate/replicate the data between the two. This can be a software or hardware-based solution (we often recommend a V-Switch/GDR scenario). Here, it’s important that you take snapshots, allowing you some restoration points. You should also have a solid plan for how to restore data from your DR facility in case of an expected or unexpected event.
While the above scenario is well accepted and will fit many applications, there is now a more comprehensive and intuitive way to achieve the same result - using an information lifecycle management (ILM) appliance.
ILM appliances, typically based on CAS (content addressable storage), are changing the storage paradigm, introducing a completely different way of thinking about data backup. The focus really is shifting to information lifecycle management.
Because we are now managing information, not just bits and bytes, all of the following are critical:
• Restoration – Your information should be accessible every time, all the time, in an online archive. And available for reacquisition in full file format.
• Retention/Disposition – You need to be able to set retention policies to handle the information, and adjust them as the value of your information changes over time.
• Authenticity and Integrity – All of your information should be accurate, self-audited and secured.
• Regulatory Compliance – The solution should enable compliance with all major regulatory requirements (HIPAA, SOX, etc.).
• WORM – Support for “Write Once Read Many”, so that storage waste is minimized.
• Searchability – You can search for information when you need it, and instantly restore if you need to.
Nexsan’s Assureon ILM appliance can handle all of these requirements and then some. So thinking about information and its inherent value (and lifecycle) is no longer a technology or feasibility question - It’s a question of user adaptation. Are you ready to manage information, not data? I’d love to hear your feedback.
P.S. If you are using tape libraries or DVDs for your backup, recovery and archiving applications, you are two steps behind. I’ll talk about this more in one of my next postings.