Information Advantage

Where to Store Your Stuff: Garage, Basement or Offsite Unit?

Chris Turnley — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:26:47 +0000

Take a look around your house – I mean really look. The chances are good that you can’t believe what is still lying around and what you’ve accumulated during the years. But that’s generally how it goes. It’s not until you’re forced to deal with an issue that you develop a strategy of attack. It’s why spring cleaning is such a big deal. Life, however, has a way of changing your focus.

My family recently moved from Chicago into a new house out in the Seattle Area. We were very excited, as this house had a basement and a three-car garage, which are rare in the Seattle area. It wasn’t until we began our move that we realized just how much stuff we had. It is amazing when you actually have to move, and carry your stuff, how much more discerning you are about what stays and what goes. All of a sudden your trash-can trigger finger gets itchy.

Some items that we needed in Chicago – or at least thought we needed – would no longer have value once we hit the Pacific Northwest. Take my snow plow, for example. It still has value, but it’s nowhere near as needed in Seattle as it was in Chicago.

So we have to make a decision, do we keep it just in case or do we free up the room and sell or give it away. This is just one of hundreds of such decisions we’ll have to make as we continue the move.

We found that out quickly because our Seattle basement started filling up rather quickly once we began unpacking trucks and boxes. And we need that space. You see, in Seattle, it rains occasionally, and we have three young boys. They will need the room downstairs to play on those rare occasions (wink, wink) when the skies open up.

Our precious three-car garage also quickly became a zero-car garage once it got filled with all our stuff. That’s forced us to double our efforts to prioritize which boxes need to go in what rooms, as well as what we’ll need to access often and what can be stowed in the basement for long-term storage.

What we’ve come up with is that the garage will be reserved for sports equipment and yard tools, leaving us with a two-car garage. Still, we have a bunch of items with value that we no longer need regular access to and more decisions to make:

Do we get rid the stuff permanently or do we house it in a separate unit?
How do we dispose of what we no longer find valuable?
If we store it, do we build another room in the house (which is expensive)? Do we get a storage unit or do we relegate the garage to one car?
If we get a storage unit, where do we find one that is accessible and safe?

Decisions, decisions …

Interestingly enough, there are plenty of enterprises that share my family’s current situation. While they may not be moving halfway across the country, they are finding that data volumes are increasingly exponentially and they are being faced with difficult data management questions.

Data Growth continues to increase. While companies are investing in big data strategies, some are already past Big Data (terabytes) and have moved into the era of colossal content (petabytes to exabytes).

This current data growth rate means that data no longer doubles every couple years, but will grow well over 40 times in a 10-year period. And it means that the storage industry needs to provide solutions that are radically more effective and efficient than what is offered at the current time.

We say things like a 40 percent growth and the IT industry does not even flinch anymore. We are used to it and know that the worst is yet to come. We need to contrast this with the data that IT budgets are scheduled to grow only 2.5 to 3 percent during the same time period. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that we need to do something differently.

Companies now have to make the same decisions that my wife and I had to make during our cross-country move the past year. They include:

1. What goes in the house? – Tier 1

Our new Seattle home is the most expensive piece of real estate that we’ve owned, and it needs to be treated as such. Likewise, this space needs to be reserved for data that is vital to the company and is accessed often. It is the access that determines the need for Tier 1 of a data management program.

More and more companies are recognizing the need for analytics and business intelligence solutions. Data is a key differentiator and an extreme competitive advantage or value creation. Again, it is the access that determines this need. If you can’t separate this data, you will end up spending way too much on your infrastructure or performance will suffer. Store too much of this data and you will be considered a “data hoarder.”

2. When should data be moved to the basement? – Tier 2

This addresses information or possessions that you don’t want in the garage. But, at the same time, you don’t want to turn valuable real estate into a storage cabinet.

You also don’t need your outside stuff in the basement, so all gas cans, trash cans and the like are placed outside. This is like your Tier 2 data storage space, it is still expensive but you can begin to see that tiering data is similar to organizing the stuff in our lives. If we cram too much stuff in a living area, it is not longer able to serve its primary purpose.

3. So what goes in the garage?

This is where things get even more interesting. Again, if we shove too much into the garage, the room is unable to serve its primary purpose.

Companies do this all the time by turning their backup strategy into their archive strategy. You need a separate backup strategy, which is becoming more disk-based, and an Archive Strategy, where tape is more reliable and more cost-effective. This distinction is vital as people are missing more backup windows by trying to shove too much data into the backup strategy, or they are putting archives at risk by keeping them online or on a media that does not support the retention policy.

While the garage should act like your backup tool, the space cannot serve as your archive, as well. You can go with a basement backup and a garage archive or a garage backup and an offsite archive. Combining these is too expensive and too cluttered. Remember, you have to find it when you need it.

4. What about the leftovers? – Tier 3

So we are left with data that we need to keep for legal reasons, but aren’t sure if we are going to want to use later or we think has value in the future. This should ring a bell for all of you baseball card collectors out there.

Estimates are that about 50 percent of all data will end up here, in Tier 3. There are a number of reasons for this, from the potential value of the data and legal holds to the fact that no one wants to deal with it. As a result, companies need to make vital decisions surrounding this data with economic and risk impacts in mind. They include:

What are you going to archive and what needs to be destroyed?
How do you securely destroy your data?
What technology will you use to archive?
Will you do this in-house or outsource the process?

These decisions are similar to those that my family and I had to make around a storage unit. Will the stuff be safe and can we access when it is necessary? With many of the improvements in tape technology during the past 10 years, the technology has emerged as exceptionally viable for archiving. New tape has a 30-year lifespan and linear tape file system technology allows it to write like a disk, while it is portable and can be taken offline.

As Fred Moore states, “Tape drives and tape media now have a higher [backup exec retrieve] and longer useful life than disk products, making them better suited for the long-term data retention requirements demanded by fixed content, compliance and archive applications. For a specific amount of data transmitted, tape now has a marked reliability advantage over disk – a surprise for many.”

At Iron Mountain, we work with clients all over the globe to make sure they have a solid backup and archive strategy and that whatever you decide, we make sure the data is secure, safe and accessible to support the business’ need to find and access the information when needed. I guess you could say we secure both the garage and the storage unit.

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Money in the Bank, Data in the Archive

Chris Turnley — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:51:47 +0000

I learned a lot from my grandfather growing up. He was a businessman and I always respected how he seemed to know everyone. No matter where we went throughout our city, he would always dole out advice in small sayings, making them easier to remember. I still recall many of them to this day.

One of these sayings was that a business man should always have a little cash in his pocket. My grandfather called it “walking around money.”   And he was right for the most part. If you have enough for those just-in-case situations, it seems to come in handy. Have too little, however, you may not be able to deal with an emergency. Carry around too much and it seems bulky, flashy or irresponsible, as you will end up spending your cash too quickly.

Even worse, carrying around all your cash only makes for a prime target for muggers and increases the risk that it will be lost.

In organizations today, we need to look at data management in the same way. We need to be able to access the data we need when we need it. But we also need to be able to restore the right amount of information in case of an emergency.  While 40 percent growth in our money would present opportunities, the actual 40 percent growth in our data presents amazing challenges. We have to move the data out of our pockets more quickly and get it to the bank, because the size or number of pockets in our pants may not be enough.  For the rest of the money I don’t need instant access to, I put it in the bank or invest it. The bank will provide me good access and security for my cash and will prevent me from carrying all of my money around town. It would be bulky, unsafe and inefficient. Money doesn’t lose value in the bank, but my access to becomes just a little more limited.

Unfortunately, many organizations today are stuck carrying all their data around in their infrastructure that was only designed for instant access when such a capability is not needed or even desired.

On a practical level, this looks like keeping all your data on disk with its high management costs and lack of portability. What’s more disk still uses power while it’s online. At best, this is inefficient. At the worst, it is down-right dangerous as organizations are exposing their systems to be overburdened and their data to corruption because it’s always online.  Organizations will have to start understanding how much disk based storage they need for backup and recovery and planning an environment where the on-site/online storage (Tiers 1 and 2) can support growth. Then we must go back to thinking like we do with our personal finances, and decide what to put in the bank for the long term.

Think of this type of archiving as taking cash out of your pocket and taking this data out of your tier 1 and 2 systems. Essentially, you’re shifting a high-cost infrastructure into one that better fits the nature of how and when you want to access your data.  The bank or investment institution plays a major role in the long-term security and care of our money. But as the last couple years have taught us, there is risk everywhere with our money and we must scrutinize where to put it in order to get the desired results and to minimize risk.

Long-term data archiving is the same way. You need a strategy that gets your data offline and onto a medium that can last for however long you need. LTO tapes with recent technology advancements are perhaps the best choice. At Iron Mountain, we pride ourselves to protect the bank and make sure data is more secure than anywhere else, as all long term data strategies have uncertainty. We work with our clients to minimize these issues and make sure your long-term data archive strategy pays off for you and that information is available when needed down the road.

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RELATED CONTENT

Designing Your Data Storage Wardrobe

Chris Turnley — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:51:06 +0000

When I was young, my siblings and I would categorize my relatives into three groups. There were the relatives we saw quite often who were heavily involved in our lives, those we would see only at holidays and lastly, the relatives that would pop out of the woodwork from time to time.

My family was quite diverse. One commonality was that all three groups would buy us the dreaded holiday present – clothing. However, that is where the similarities ended. You see, what they bought us varied hugely.

The relatives we saw frequently purchased clothes that matched our style and size. The “Holiday” relatives bought clothes that were usually close, but a little off, in both style and size. And the “Woodwork” relatives got us Miami Vice jackets (in 1995 mind you), parachute pants and neon tank tops. You get my point.

I am sure you are asking yourself, what in the world does this have to do with my data backup strategies?

We are all in the middle of a data growth spurt and, if not careful, we are going to be outfitted in a data wardrobe that neither fits us in size or style. So, if your data strategy has you looking like this (image on the right), there’s no one to blame but your self.

IDC estimates that the “data universe will grow 44 times between 2009 and 2020.” One thing I have learned is that all estimates tend to underestimate data growth. It’s like buying groceries for a five-year-old and one day he starts to eat like a 16-year-old football player. If you do not budget for this, your users will go outside of your home and provision their own storage in the cloud.

As if the size of the growth wasn’t trouble enough, due to regulations, laws, codes and discovery, your data is also growing in complexity. So now, it is not just about storing the data, it is about needing to access it in a useable way. Suffice to say, your five-year-old just came home and has one day moved from simple math to trigonometry. If your system cannot handle the complexity, you are in trouble.

Let’s tie this back to my relatives and see how we could better engage them to make better data wardrobe decisions.

The “Intimately-Engaged” Relatives

For those who work in IT, you need to remember that you work for the business. The business needs of data have dramatically changed and the organization is depending on you to help make these decisions. These are business problems with technology solutions. This group needs to realize that all three groups affect the strategy.

The “Holiday” Relatives

These are executives who will need to set direction, but may only check quarterly progress. They need to be informed, proactively on progress and challenges. They do not like to be surprised and do not care about why it won’t work. Make sure you lay out the challenges around data storage, backup and processing. If the data is growing 10 times, they don’t care. They care that it will shut down the system.

The “Woodwork” Relatives

Many times, these are the business owners, labs, projects that spring up seemingly overnight and need 10 TB one day and 100 TB the next day. These are usually great revenue opportunities for the business, but put a unique strain on the business as IT is not meant to stretch this much economically. Make sure you understand what this group’s goals and timelines are. This will help you plan if internal or the cloud is the right strategy.

Here are some questions I have used over the years to help bring groups together and make the strategy more cohesive as you plan your data storage wardrobe.

Who should be on the Backup Fashion Design Team?
Who is influencing your Data wardrobe?
Are they informed? What kind of “relative” are they?
What big changes do you expect in your backup strategies? (1-3 years)
What fits well in your existing infrastructure?
If you had to use the Cloud, what should go there?

How do you currently store and secure your backup data?

How do you currently store and secure your backup data?

Do you have questions about data backup and recovery? Read additional Information Advantage blogs on this subject, or contact Iron Mountain’s Data Backup and Recovery team. You’ll be connected with a knowledgeable product and services specialist who can address your specific challenges.

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