Paperless office demands advanced data storing options

By ADAM GIFFORD

Prepare to overhaul your storage architecture.

According to storage giant EMC, the volume of data being preserved is growing an average 60 per cent a year - faster than most existing systems can cope with.

The answer is not just in adding more disk or tape libraries. The value of information changes according to how old it is and what sort of applications use it. People must be smarter about the way they manage their data and where they put it.

This is what EMC calls Information Lifecycle Management - maximising the value to be extracted from information while minimising the cost of storing and managing it.

It ties in with other "big ideas" being floated in the industry - the adaptive computing touted by Hewlett Packard, IBM's on-demand strategy, Oracle's grid.

Like them it sees computing, in the case of storage, as a service rather than just a box.The components of Information Lifecycle Management are tiered storage, data classification and policy definition, and data movement.

Tiered storage means more than one physical type of storage, so it could be disk storage of various types for data which needs to be accessible immediately, and tape libraries for the "need to hang on to in case" stuff.

Classifying and applying policies to data as it comes in is no simple task, nor is data movement - shifting data between tiers to meet changing service levels.

Ideally it needs to be done automatically through intelligent software. This is now the focus of a lot of EMC's research effort.

EMC chief executive Joe Tucci told journalists at a briefing at the company's Hopkinton, Massachusetts headquarters last month that while some of it was still smoke and mirrors, utility computing - where customers don't pay for resources until they need them - is a definite trend.

However, he said customers were wary about getting locked into single hardware vendors.

"Our utility computing vision covers network, storage and services. It's the only rational one out there," Tucci said.

Waitakere City Council chief information officer John Johnson said EMC's comments struck a chord with him as he tried to manage demands for using growing amounts of data in new ways.

Waitakere, which has an EMC-based storage area network, is about to review its storage infrastructure.

It has an imaging project to carry more records in electronic rather than paper form, and to make more of its services available over the web.

"As we go electronic, that will eat up storage more, so we need smarter ways of having it and accessing the data from multiple platforms or over the web," Johnson said.

Meta Group analyst Kevin McIsaac said while there was technically nothing new about tiered storage, it was not a matter of rolling out a box.

"There needs to be process and people to make it work. Don't fool yourself EMC will solve the problem," McIsaac said.

"A big part of the problem is people are not managing information. They just put on more storage."

He said few organisations had proper charge-back models allowing them to make IT a catalogue of services.

Storage was only one part of the vision for on-demand or utility computing, which is forcing EMC to widen its offering as infrastructure becomes a commodity.

Over the past year it has bought software firms, including Documentum, which does enterprise content management, Legato, which makes information management, back-up and recovery software and VMware which makes virtual infrastructure software.

This year EMC expects US$1.5 billion of its forecast $8.1 billion in revenue will come from software.

* Adam Gifford travelled to Massachusetts as a guest of EMC.