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It should all end in tiers
SNS Europe talks to Thorsten Freitag, F5’s Vice President, EMEA, about the compelling business case for end users to implement smarter data management, via an intelligent storage tiering policy. After all, the alternative is to continually throw unlimited amounts of money at trying to solve the problem of file storage growth!
SNS: File data is growing in every company, but just how big a problem is this right now?
TF: The majority of our customers experience Compound Annual Growth Rates of 60% and more (some as many as 120%). This constant growth fuels constant expenditure on storage and supporting infrastructure, like backup. The biggest issue faced by our customers is their inability to deal with the source of the problem: gaining visibility to what is making up their data volumes, and being able to manage it in an automated fashion. Typically, 80% of the data within a company infrastructure hasn’t been accessed or modified during the last 90 days, yet is still subjected to the same aggressive backup regime and costly disaster recovery processes.
SNS: And, presumably, as we embrace the Digital Age, the problem will become much worse in a short space of time?
TF: File sizes are continually growing, and the use of NAS or file server technology is widely accepted as the fastest growing storage sector.
The
move towards higher definition images exponentially increases
SUMMER 10 WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
video file sizes and application files such as CAS.
SNS: Furthermore, data retention regulations show no sign of easing-up, let alone companies’ own data management policies?
TF: Absolutely. There are two drivers that we see within the market currently. Firstly, more companies are trying to store more data online rather than relying on tape based archive data.
Secondly, end users are faced with the need to retain data for seven, 10 or as many as 99 years, depending on regulatory or legislation demands affecting them.
SNS: The requirement for companies to retain more and more data can lead to greater expense – if not addressed intelligently?
TF: Exactly. Companies that choose not to address the problem with an intelligent data management solution only have two choices :- 1. Continually buy more storage from their storage vendor, which results in constant CAPEX requests, and also drives up operational cost and complexity with their backup infrastructure.
2. Manually move data around their storage infrastructure. This is very labour intensive and results in significant periods of downtime. Data that is manually relocated has to be recovered for applications to re-use it or users to access it. Intelligent file virtualisation ensures that files can be kept online for longer, stored in a more cost efficient manner.
All
of the data management processes are automated.
SNS: And then there are the various technical issues that beset the IT department swamped with ever more data?
TF: Addressing the source of the issue is the only way to manage exponential growth of data. There are a number of good technologies in the market place that limit the quantity of data that is backed up on a daily basis, but they are still bound by one major limitation: the fact that they have to treat all data equally.
They have to scan every file, every day to understand whether it has to be backed up. Enterprises are thus faced with the necessity to continually upgrade backup libraries to attempt to remain within their backup windows. F5’s approach is to present the
THORSTEN FREITAG
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