The importance of storage management

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Singapore, vmahmud@yahoo.com

"Why is storage management important for an organization?" was the compelling question during Storage Day in Singapore last Wednesday.

Hosted by Computer Associates, one of the world's largest software companies, the exhibit and seminars focused on one of the fastest growing IT markets: the administration of data storage.

For some, storage means hard drives, servers and other data retention hardware. If you need more space, simply add another disk or network node to spread out the data. This is a popular solution as hardware prices are continuously falling while new products with larger storage space are being introduced.

This is not the most effective way of managing your information, argues Chua Meng Pin, the Computer Associates' divisional senior vice president of the Channel and Storage Business Division for Southeast Asia. By simply adding more storage space, can an organization manage it economically? Can it be backed up and restored? Is the data available to ensure business continuity? Can the capacity and load of the storage be balanced?

He has a point. Organizations need to effectively use their storage hardware to ensure that critical corporate data is constantly backed up, shared and available. But it has to be done efficiently. Meng Pin argues that in some cases e-mail constitutes a significant bulk of storage, yet most of it is probably spam, correspondence from friends and other nonbusiness messages. Should the company back that up too?

Companies with diverse storage systems spread throughout the organization may also have headaches in maintaining their storage systems. Different operating systems, applications, file systems and network environments, such as Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS), can be a handful to manage individually. In addition, businesses need to make sure that their storage systems are not clogged up with personal files of their employees, so they don't have to keep on buying additional hard drives.

This is where the Computer Associates can help.

Their BrightStor brand has a suite of applications that can assist IT managers in effectively managing their storage systems as they do with their networks. These solutions assist management in tackling out-of-control storage growth, escalating operating costs and storage inter-operability among diverse technologies or environments.

The BrightStor Storage Resource Management (SRM), ARCserve Backup, SAN Manager and the all-encompassing BrightStor Portal are just some of the tools that IT managers can use to have a general overview of all their storage units throughout the network, find out their capacity levels, schedule backups, optimize IT resources, etc.

Company data on notebooks can be managed with BrightStor Mobile Backup. Road warriors no longer have to worry about the sanctity of their information should their laptops get stolen, lost or damaged. Once installed, selected data can be automatically backed up while the users are working. More importantly, should they leave the company and erase their hard drives, the data is still safe.

With CA's Portal and SRM solution, managers can effectively administer the use of storage throughout the corporation, despite the differences in hardware and file systems, with a single interface. With their vision of "storage management without boundaries", Computer Associates hopes IT managers can get an overall understanding of their storage systems in order to manage them efficiently.

Full servers can slow down the Local Area Network (LAN), even if you have the world's fastest network. As Meng Pin says, "A three-lane road is a three-lane road, but what causes the traffic jam?" It's about working smartly, not by throwing in more hardware.

IT administrators can, for example, track down the top 10 storage users, i.e., those who use up the bulk of space on a hard drive -- usually from the Internet -- thus allowing them to enforce corporate policy against abuse of company facilities.

Considering the global crackdown on media piracy, businesses may be held liable for the pirated music, software or film found within their networks. Knowing what is in the company storage system is vital to avoid hefty lawsuits.

Computer Associates offers flexible licensing terms for companies of all types, whether they are small or medium enterprises or globally omnipresent multinationals, to allow them to see how Computer Associates' solutions can assist their businesses. This will hopefully entice companies to consider the products of Computer Associates, which has been in the IT business for over 20 years.

In the end, Storage Day highlighted the need to focus on the management of data. Like it or not, all companies today have entered the information economy, which makes client lists, financial results, accounting and billing information as well as vendor proposals, all vital to the continuance of a business. Lose all that, and you may as well hand over the company to your competitor.