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How healthy is your IT infrastructure?
The current wave of data that is hitting organisations threatens to engulf business operations unless the right decisions are made regarding storage. Whether this data resides in a virtualised or cloud environment, or is simply held in-house, it is increasingly important for information to be both accessible and manageable, particularly when you consider the risk of data
seeping out of the corporate network. At present however, accessibility and control is severely hindered by inadequate technologies and slow IT systems, which – if not addressed – could impact an organisation’s bottom line and result in important information becoming lost in an IT minefield. By Spencer Allingham, IT Director, Condusiv Technologies Corporation Europe.
F
rom videos, to photos, to documents, to email; the data trail in most organisations is vast. Keeping track of such information is therefore becoming increasingly difficult. Current buzzwords such as Big Data, virtualisation and cloud computing all point to the complexities associated with accessing the right information, and this situation only gets worse if those technologies are implemented without the right preparation. For instance, if a CEO unexpectedly requests a report which was last accessed five years ago, or a business suddenly needs to prove its historical compliance with certain data privacy laws, access to data needs to be quick and accurate, irrespective of the technology in play.
A further element, often overlooked by organisations, is the impact that different technologies can have on each other. New technology is likely to add complexity to the IT environment, and if the foundations are not strong enough to prevent outages or crashes, data can be lost from the corporate network.
For example, many organisations are now making the transition from traditional physical servers to virtual ones, but they often fail to update other technologies to ensure compatibility with this new type of infrastructure. Windows Server 2008 R2 actually has the built-in disk defragmenter turned off by default and this can lead to unnecessarily slow and unreliable systems, whether physical or virtual. It is better
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to prevent fragmentation from occurring in the first place, as the process of moving files around a volume to defragment them can cause problems with storage technologies such as snapshots, CDP, replication, or deduplication. However, this gets overlooked entirely, all too often. Such inefficiencies within IT systems have become all too accepted in the workplace, and little attention has been paid to ensuring technologies are fully compatible with the environment they are running in.
To combat this, businesses need to properly understand the technology they deploy and resist the temptation of ‘quick-fix’ solutions that in reality solve very little – for example, virtualisation may at first appear an easy way to consolidate and get more out of physical servers, but if the NTFS volumes that support the virtual or physical machines are fragmented, it will remain slow and inefficient.
Handling the data deluge
There are two obstacles to delivering truly accessible data – inadequate systems and poor processes. Too often a ‘rip and replace’ approach is chosen when systems become slow and less responsive. Rather than choosing between purchasing expensive new equipment or continuing to suffer from poor, inefficient systems, IT teams could look to improve the current IT infrastructure. IT systems are only as fast as the slowest component and as
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