Portal:Storage
From Wikibon
The Wikibon Data Storage Portal contains data storage industry research, articles, expert opinion, case studies, and data storage company profiles.
WikitipMaximizing Information ValueThe following notes respond to the Wikibon Mar 23rd Peer Incite: Should Function Reside in the Infrastructure or Application Stacks As I listened to the conversation and reviewed the data Wikibon collected, it seemed to me that we were framing value maximization. Infrastructure comparisons are certainly a valid way to go, but I think maximizing the value of information to corporations is a more relevant orientation. The value of infrastructure pales in comparison to the actual and opportunity cost of information. One reason to move function to applications is to maximize the value of information in ways that devices in infrastructure or even collections of devices or collections of infrastructure could never achieve. However, if the real goal is maximizing value, then we have to examine the mechanism by which value is added. Business value is driven by utilizing information to increase revenues, lower costs, better manage the competition, and create unique pools of value. Consequently, I came up with the following picture inspired by the Wikibon discussion: Uniquely identifying information One need corporations have is to be able to discover and verify that multiple physical copies of information stored on the corporate network each with different paths and timestamps have, in fact, the same information content. This is essential to enabling an organization to maintain a complete inventory of all its information and the copies or derivatives of that information. A related need is to group and classify this information and track the interrelationships between information items and the information groupings that have been established. For example, information may be grouped to reflect business transaction or specific information management policy. This grouping and classification means that beyond simply determining that information is consistent with policy, you also need to ensure that all the related information is also compliant. One specific, illustrative example is provided by a category called “Customer Order”. All information related to each customer order may have an attribute called “Customer Name” or some other unique identifier that would be helpful for information tracking.
Mike Alvarado
Action Item: Footnotes: |
Featured Case StudyVirtualization Energizes Cal State UniversityJohn Charles is the CIO of California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) and Rich Avila is Director, Server & Network Operations. In late 2007 they were both looking down the barrel of a gun. The total amount of power being used in the data center was 67KVA. The maximum power from the current plant was 75kVA. PG&E had informed them that no more power could be delivered. They would be out of power in less than six months. A new data center was planned, but would not be available for two years. |
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Featured How-To Note |
Storage Virtualization Design and DeploymentA main impediment to storage virtualization is the lack of multiple storage vendor (heterogeneous) support within available virtualization technologies. This inhibits deployment across a data center. The only practical approach is either to implement a single vendor solution across the whole of the data center (practical only for small and some medium size data centers) or to implement virtualization in one or more of the largest storage pools within a data center. |