Enterprises have noticed an increase in data volumes of up to 60% on a yearly basis. Hardware limitations can also make it more difficult to deal with such volume of data effectively. Proper planning, effective technology and talented staff are required to tackle the issue. The situation becomes even worst due to regulatory compliance and virtualization technology laws.
Effective storage administrators introduce new policies, put into practise helpful tools for resource management, and use financial resources for capacity planning. Before initiating all these jobs, they need to recognise the types of data, relevant applications, storage requirements, and then they need to review all of their policies in order to have an effective storage system in place.
Data administrators work to recognise factors responsible for data growth. Consequently, they will understand all the factors and will be able to answers questions of when, what, why, where and how of data storage. Storage environments are not similar; they differ in their size, requirements and architecture. It is necessary to understand queries, such as “What is driving data growth?”, “What type of tools do you need?”, “What are storage policies and when these were evaluated?”
Visibility and ease of access are the two major driving forces that work behind data storage. When data is visible properly, it helps storage administrators to identify certain problems associated with data storage. Consequently, they select right technologies that are suitable. Moreover, they update technology to check data paths and avoid blockage at certain positions where data growth is maximised.
Storage administrators use capacity planning in order to determine data storage requirements for a limited period of time. They can determine on various kinds of storage, time limit for storage (retention period), data growth projections, and which data must be stored in offline and/or online data repositories. It depends on storage managers to select technology for allocating the right amount of data to given applications. Usually, thin provisioning approach is selected by most storage administrators, as it helps in assigning the exact amount of capacity at the right time.
Capacity planning works in collaboration with reclaiming assets. Administrators need to reclaim, from time to time, underused or unused storage space. Data experts estimate that up to 15 percent more physical storage space can be freed up if unclaimed storage is used properly.
Data disasters are always in mind of storage administrators, therefore, they introduce strategies to strike against unexpected situations. It is the reason why storage management makes it easy to manage disasters. Skilled administrators take automatic snapshots of critical information of business data and design standards for reliable recovery before disasters strike. It is their job to continually monitor backups and simulate recovery scenarios through backed up data. It gives surety that the storage administrators are competent enough to handle disaster conditions.
Due to the presence of cloud data storage, it becomes possible to think about new data storage and delivery techniques. Enterprises that are using cloud computing services have reduced their operational and capital costs. In addition to low cost, they have enhanced flexibility to store and access data. Cloud storage plays a very important role in overcoming storage management challenges. It enables security, control, business resiliency, visibility, and automation of cloud backup and recovery.
