Storage is one of the most costly elements of IT. The
wealth of information that businesses produce and need to save is
continually growing, and with it, the storage needs and associated
costs.
These storage needs can be notoriously difficult to manage, and
never more so than when the IT department has the task of managing
storage for businesses that are distributed on a national or
international basis.
According to research company Nemertes, on average, 90% of
employees work away from headquarters. Most of these employees are
working in distributed offices, whether they be retail stores, bank
branches, or even satellite classrooms.
An important consideration is how to cost-effectively back up
data that resides on desktops and servers within branch offices,
which can be tens or hundreds of miles from head office.
One option is to consolidate data into a main storage facility,
so that as much information as possible can be backed up from a
central data store. This can be achieved through the use of leased
storage or extra servers at headquarters.
Another approach is network attached storage, where
single-function servers sit on the network and provide storage
space that is accessible to the rest of the organisation and
optimised for that purpose.
In the branch office environment, IT directors also need to
support staff who may not have the technical skills needed to keep
the branch office IT up and running.
Server consolidation at a central location is gathering support
as a solution to this problem. According to analyst firm Gartner,
93% of enterprises either have or are planning a server
consolidation project.
Hamish MacArthur, chief executive at analyst firm MacArthur
Stroud, said, "Users need to consider whether they want to run a
central or distributed storage infrastructure."
Although businesses prefer to manage everything centrally, in
practice it is difficult to achieve in a branch office due to the
scale of the operation, Stroud said. The challenge, he said, is
that back-up and recovery procedures can fail.
Gordon Young, managing director, Europe, at networking supplier
NetDevices, said, "As there are often no staff with specialist
skills at the branch office, being able to manage IT remotely
without experiencing downtime is one of the key aspects that
network operations managers are considering, and storage is no
exception."
Many firms have implemented clustering, storage management and
replication technologies as a defence against downtime caused by
server and application failures, site outages, human error and
other events that can threaten business operations.
These technologies are an essential element to managing branch
storage, especially in the event of a failure. The combination of
virtualisation and clustering automates the process of bringing up
storage, servers and applications, and clients can be redirected to
a secondary site in the event of a problem.
Guy Bunker, chief scientist at IT security supplier Symantec,
said, "Replicating and clustering technologies provide the highest
level of availability for critical applications by ensuring power
is applied where it is needed."
Bunker suggested that by deploying clustering technology users
could monitor the health of applications and physical hardware.
This technology is able to automatically take corrective action
should either fail.
He said, "If applications are placed under cluster control, the
entire process of bringing up an application and data is simplified
by automatically bringing up the storage and application, then
redirecting users to the correct network address.
This reduces the chance for human error in the event of an
outage and provides an automated approach to storage, server and
application availability."
Essential storage is no longer confined to database archives and
business documentation. In many organisations Microsoft's Exchange
Server is at the heart of the business, and everything from the
server database to mailboxes, messages and user settings must be
stored, backed up and retrievable to the remote offices. The
majority of data on servers can be older than 90 days, and may
never be accessed again, but most back-up effort is focused there,
while much current and vital business information is stored in .pst
files.
Not surprisingly, a number of products target the back-up of
Exchange Server data. When assessing which products to choose it is
worth considering whether they will require the installation of a
separate Exchange 2003 server. Symantec's Backup Exec 10, is aimed
at providing protection for Exchange Server data in branch offices
while the application is online.
Along with other similar products, it provides full,
incremental, or differential back-up and restores, embedded
objects, attributes and all Outlook components.
A major concern of IT professionals is the weight of traffic
that flies around the network when storing data at locations other
than branch offices. Many products address this by allowing
source-level compressing at the client end.
Incremental back-ups alleviate the heavy traffic during a
typical back-up window, and they are particularly important when
many of the users are mobile and may not be connected to the
network at times when a full back-up is implemented.
Most of the major suppliers incorporate some form of replication
or remote mirroring function in their storage products, so users
have no reason not to be replicating business data back to a
central point.
However, Martin Davies, managing technical consultant at IT
services company Morse, said, "The most challenging thing for
businesses is striking a balance between keeping applications
accessible by hosting and backing up locally and easing branch
office data management through centralisation."
Davies said companies are embracing the combination of central
and local data management. They are adopting some of the concepts
of a serverless office and using thin client technology to host and
back up business-critical applications centrally.
He said, "Companies are also balancing out the risk of the Lan
going down, preventing users from being able to work, by keeping
Office applications such as Microsoft Word hosted locally but
backed up centrally to make the data easier to manage."
Problems with back-up can arise when the member of staff
responsible goes on holiday and no one takes over, or tapes are not
taken offsite, or the same tapes are used day after day. To be of
use in a disaster recovery situation, the tape must be stored
offsite. However, this is not practical for everyday file
recovery.
If the only copy of the data is sitting on a shelf in a
warehouse, in a full system restore an engineer has to come from
head office and have access to that tape. This is obviously
impractical for simple file recoveries that occur on a regular
basis.
Ed Jones, director of back-up specialist Thinking Safe, said,
"We have seen a large number of companies migrate to disc-based
back-up and archive who have Dat, DLT and LTO tapes in their
archive.
Their challenge is they do not have any mechanism that can be
used to read the archive if it is needed. This set of problems is
then multiplied by the number of sites."
Experts believe the way forward is disc-to-disc back-up. Jones
said, "It is more reliable - 100% of data is restored in a
disaster recovery, which is more than the generally accepted 75% to
80% with tape. It is more cost effective - our customers have cut
their costs by up to 60%. And it supports remote offices much
better, with automation, central control and no single point of
failure."
Companies are searching for multifunction appliances which have
the resilience and management capability to make their branch
office IT simpler. They want to easily link storage capacity into
this framework as it is more flexible than traditional
approaches.
Taking a single unified approach to branch office storage
management means IT staff no longer need to make long trips to the
branch office to fix the simplest problems.
Managing storage in the Windows environment
Microsoft is aware that the management of storage around
organisations is an increasing challenge, and release two of
Windows Server 2003 R2 has incorporated features that directly
relate to the branch office environment. These include centralised
file replication and printer management technology, built-in Unix
interoperability and Active Directory Federation Services.
The Distributed File System (DFS) has been rewritten and,
together with advanced compression technologies such as Remote
Differential Compression (RDC), should improve branch office
replication and the server's overall performance.
There are also new integrated storage management tools including
File Server Resource Manager (FSRM), which provides reporting on
the storage environment, and Storage Manager for Sans.
Amir Shaked, chief executive of storage supplier DiskSites,
said, "For branch office back-up, the most notable feature is the
improved File Replication Service (FRS2), which improves
replication abilities by efficiently transferring differences since
last replication. In a branch office environment this could help in
copying all the branch office data daily to the central site where
back-up for tapes is usually applied."
Microsoft has also released Windows Storage Server 2003, an
operating system designed with network attached storage technology
to manage these storage devices. A network attached storage device
built with Windows Storage Server 2003 is designed to perform
without requiring a monitor, keyboard or mouse, and is remotely
configured and managed through a web interface.
Other products from Microsoft include Data Protection Manager
(DPM) and Microsoft Operations Manager (Mom).
DPM is a member of the Windows Server System family and will be
separately licensed and sold as a server application product. It
runs on top of the Windows Server 2003 operating system. DPM
watches file shares and when a new file is created or changed it
takes a snapshot.
Mom watches systems across the network and monitors their status
and performance. It provides information on different devices and
Mom monitoring packs are provided for various application
components such as Exchange Server and SQL Server. It comes
preconfigured to differentiate between serious alerts and minor
performance glitches, and supports non-Microsoft hardware.