Conventional wisdom suggests that a multi-vendor strategy for storage is the way to avoid becoming overly dependent on a single vendor and also to encourage sufficient competitive pressure to secure favourable pricing. But recently, I've begun to wonder if, in some cases, the pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite direction. Have the hoped-for multi-vendor cost savings truly materialized? Are some organizations actually penalizing themselves by attempting to be too vendor agnostic? Can a happy medium exist?
The most successful companies are those that have been able to reinvent themselves and adapt to changing user demands and competitive landscapes. In IT, it is equally important to question and reevaluate why we do the things we do. Often, practices have been adopted at a tactical level to address a particular need with little consideration for other related requirements. Over time, this approach can lead to a hodge-podge of solutions that may partially overlap but lack unified direction or management.
Providing protection and ensuring timely recoverability of databases has always represented a unique challenge for IT. Unlike file system data, databases usually appear to backup applications as large monolithic containers, and as data volumes have increased, so has the problem.
The New York Times recently published an article on Panasonic's attempt to push its higher-margin plasma sets over LCD technology despite the fact that it makes and sells both. Regardless of particular technical merits, LCD is rapidly becoming the dominant flat-screen TV technology, and, in fact, the technical distinctions of one technology versus the other diminish with each new product generation. But, as "the world's largest plasma seller," it is not surprising that Panasonic is trying to defend its turf.
Imagine this scenario: In Worldwide Corp., a global conglomerate, backups are performed on a nightly basis. At some point during the nightly cycle, backup administrators ensure that all data is written to tape. In addition, a large percentage of servers at Worldwide Corp. also replicate data to remote facilities using a variety of methods. Likewise, split-mirror and snapshot functionality are employed extensively throughout the organization. These functions are managed by systems and storage administrators independently and, in some cases, without the knowledge of backup administrators.
Worldwide Corp. also has database administrators who, like all good DBAs, are extremely risk-averse. As a result, since disk space is plentiful, unbeknownst to either backup or storage administrators, the DBAs routinely dump copies of their databases to disk, ensuring that several recent versions are always at hand and can be recovered quickly in the event of a hardware failure or data corruption.
Much has been written here and elsewhere about the need to manage and control the ever-expanding mountains of data. Arguably the area within IT that has made the most progress in this effort is e-mail archiving.
In the backup world today, the conventional wisdom is that disk is fast and tape is slow. While it is usually true that introducing disk into the backup storage chain increases performance, it is not always quite so simple. Architecture and engineering design considerations must still be applied to ensure that the introduction of disk actually meets the desired goals.
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the postgame interviews after a professional baseball or football event to see how many sports cliches a single athlete can weave into a single interview, such as, "We take it one game at a time," "It was a team effort," "Ya gotta give the other guys a lot of credit," and, my personal favorite (usually heard after a loss), "We just need to stick to the fundamentals." Like most cliches, of course, each carries a measure of truth, and in particular, it is easy to run into problems if you ignore the basics.
During a recent discussion about data management and storage, the basic question arose about policies: who sets them and how?
Moore's Law states that computing power, as measured by the density of microcomponents per square inch on an integrated circuit, will double every 18 months. Another way of looking at this is that the cost of a given level of compute power will decline by 50 percent in that period.
Years ago, when IT folk and vendors still bandied about the term MIPS, an over-repeated witticism of the time was that the acronym actually stood for "meaningless indication of processor speed."
Is a storage environment at 70 percent utilization being better managed than one where the utilization level is 30 percent?
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." -- Michael Corleone, The Godfather: Part III
Aligning the cost of managing data with its business value is at the crux of initiatives like information life-cycle management (ILM) and tiered storage.