Manage Your Data Innovatively

What innovative ways have you adopted to manage your data intelligently?

Our datacentre is completely virtualised and has diskless blade servers. Our Disaster Recovery (DR) Centre is a replica of our primary site and is built using virtualisation. In addition to virtualising our datacentre & DR centre, we have used virtualisation across the organisation. Our employees are provided with thin clients and they access virtual desktop images hosted in the virtual datacentre. This has helped us consolidate all our data into one unified, centrally managed iSCSI storage system.

Storage virtualisation offers us easy management of our dynamic data requirements and is scalable enough to take care of our future requirements.

Our storage systems offer integrated block-level and file-level data access, intelligent management software and data protection capabilities. Our primary storage is replicated with the secondary storage system at the DR site using replication software. This ensures multipath high availability for business continuity, and intelligent data protection. Integrating the thin client architecture and virtualisation also ensures that our data is completely protected at the end-point level. Also, our storage’s thin provisioning and snapshot features further improve data management to a large extent.

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Having a multi-tier storage architecture and using almost ten business applications; which include ERP, business intelligence, document management and other back office applications, data backup are very critical processes of our IT operations.

What pain-points do CIOs/IT heads have with regard to data consolidation? How can they overcome them?

In today’s digital world, corporate data continues is growing at a double-digit pace. Businesses of every size are coping with challenges arising out of reams of data, distributed across the organisation in many forms.

By consolidating data from different resources and forms, organisations can realise significant benefits in the areas of data management and data availability, while better utilising the data for business growth. However, data consolidation comes with many challenges that CIOs/IT Heads need to face.

The principle- “think globally, act locally,” applies well to the process of consolidating organisational data. One needs to plan for long-term data storage needs while selecting solutions for data consolidation.

Virtualisation and storage consolidation can play an important role in data consolidation. Once storage is consolidated, the groundwork is in place to consolidate the data. Right data management/backup software helps take an integrated approach to data consolidation. Ensuring interoperability between storage systems and choosing platform independent solutions will ease data consolidation.

As an IT Head, keeping updated with technology trends such as deduplication, ECM and data mining is essential to take the right decision for data consolidation. Implementing multi-tier backup methods such as transaction-level incremental backups, database full backup, VM’s image backup, storage & database replication, storage & VM’s snapshot, ensure availability. However it also adds up to the challenges of data consolidation.

To deal with our requirement of data growth, data management and data consolidation, our top priority was to establish a holistic data management strategy. We ensured that our data management strategy included policies for the kind of information that should be stored and what service levels should be applied to different types of information, so as to meet regulatory laws and business demands.

What data security issues do you think CIOs face and what solutions can help them counter these?

Besides implementing traditional security controls such as a firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, VPN, IPS / IDS, application security controls at various levels, we have also implemented a DLP software to address internal & external data security threats.

The adoption of latest technologies such as cloud computing, social networking, smartphones & mobile computing would add new dimensions to data security issues, which in turn would draw the organisation’s attention to take another look at the data security strategy and adopt strong security controls.

We are considering solutions such as IAM, RMS and ILCM. The focus on risks related to data security and privacy is on the rise and we are going to continue to implement security systems and controls to be almost fool-proof.

How do you see storage virtualisation progressing?

Storage virtualisation is gaining traction. As businesses struggle to utilise their stretched-thin conventional storage resources, storage virtualisation will become an increasingly attractive technology. Understanding how to virtualise storage in conjunction with server virtualisation, desktop virtualisation and network virtualisation is very important while considering storage virtualisation.

Storage virtualisation would help organisations to address data management problems in terms of data volume, growth and cost. Storage thin provisioning, Interoperability & integration of different storage systems, and cloud storage are attracting the attention of organisations today. Adoption of Storage Area Networks (SAN) helped us achieve benefits of storage virtualisation.

What trends do you see emerging in the storage space?

Implementing unified iSCSI storage system has benefited us in many ways.

Storage technology has seen evolution in all aspects- ranging from interfaces and transport protocols, to the way the data is served in today’s networked environment. The most commonly used storage and backup systems today are:

1. Tape arrays and libraries
2. Disk Based Backup System
3. Optical and magneto optical disk arrays
4. Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM):
5. Direct Attached Storage (DAS):
6. Network Attached Storage (NAS):
7. Storage Area Network (SAN):
8. iSCSI Storage

Recently, the storage industry has seen some major developments in the field of Tiered Storage, Storage over IP, NAS/SAN Gateways, Storage Resource Management, Storage Virtualisation, and Serial ATA drives.

The ultimate storage solution for most large organisations will probably be a mix of all technologies complementing each other. A central SAN with sufficient storage and backup capabilities will take care of an entire organisation’s storage needs. This SAN could be mirrored across the globe to another site via SoIP protocol to provide the ultimate redundancy. Access to the SAN would be via servers with dedicated FC adapters, pushing data while feeding results to workstations on the LAN. These storage solutions could have data stored centrally via NAS file sharing schema. A NAS gateway to the SAN would provide authenticated access to files via SMB or NFS.