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Documented Storage Policy and ILM
LG Electronics Private Limited has a documented storage
policy and uses ILM-specific strategies in its network. It has a growing business
spread over a number of nationwide locations, and its IT infrastructure includes
business-critical applications such as an internal ERP system and Lotus Notes.
To maintain a sense of order and control in its growing storage infrastructure,
the company created and adopted a documented storage policy. The CIO also introduced
ILM-specific aspects in the policy to get better value from the system.
The Storage Architecture
The company deployed StorEdge 6320 boxes from Sun Microsystems to meet current
and future storage requirements. This is a scalable mid-range SAN storage, which
has an adaptable, modular architecture, and can be upgraded.
"The system has features like multi-volume capability, single view, and
system-wide management utility. And with 73 GB/10K FC-AL drives we can scale
up to 10.2 TB for our current ERP and future data warehousing needs," says
Arindam Bose, DGM, IT.
For storage volume management, the company uses Veritas Volume Manager, which
provides online storage management capabilities. It protects against disk and
hardware failures, and offers the flexibility to extend existing hardware capabilities.
Sun StorEdge Enterprise Backup software provides the means for backup, archive,
and disaster recovery. It offers features such as high-speed parallelism, automated
media management combined with Sun StorEdge L20 Autoloader, flexible usage of
robotics, and full bulk access via removable magazines. "This gives us
the flexibility to build a data continuance environment," says Bose.
ILM-specific Strategy
LG believes that ILM will help the company in the near and long run. "Our
technical team is into constant innovation and we have implemented certain aspects
of ILM depending on our growing data requirements. For example, a newly created
piece of data would sit on the server's primary storage array. And as the data
ages, we move it to secondary storage," said Bose.
Policies
LG has a documented storage policy, which is reviewed from time to time to manage
data growth from creation through retirement. "Our policy encompasses storage
strategies instead of narrow approaches, which includes storage, retention,
management and retrieval," explains Bose.
He believes that without a proper storage policy, companies face an extremely
high risk of losing valuable data, which could result in unprecedented business
loss. After all, information availability is now an important factor for companies.
"Recovery policies should be tested at regular intervals so that an information
crash-proof mechanism is updated and available all the time," feels Bose.
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Sagar Sule, Vice President, Technical & Operations,
Cyquator, believes that ILM provides a practical methodology for aligning
storage costs with business priorities.
"ILM solves key problems such as ineffective storage
utilization, the costs of managing storage and the ability to manage storage
growth surrounding data replication, disaster recovery/business continuance,
and backup," he says.
The company adheres to the following strategies in
the storage architecture:
- Backups are taken in Daily Incremental Weekly Full (DIWF) manner
on DLTs.
- Full backups are taken monthly on DLTs and maintained offsite.
- Full backups are maintained as per specified norms (sometimes for
7 years).
- Tapes are labeled as per internal classification standards for ease
of access.
- Restoration of full backups is done on similar test setups.
- In case of storage on NAS devices, appropriate date-wise versioning
is done.
- User desktop backups are maintained on the NAS box.
Common mistakes
Sule feels that companies make a number of mistakes
when they set about to create an appropriate storage strategy, such as
the following:
- Storage management is made to primarily depend on data age and its
access frequency.
- 'Backup to tape' means offloading aged data from primary resources
to tape.
- Only high-level classification of data is made available.
- There is a large dependence on manual activities.
- Recovery processes are not given due importance.
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Soutiman Das Gupta can be reached at soutimand@networkmagazineindia.com
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