Data Management Challenges
Multi-Tier Storage Management Approach
Features & Benefits

The Data Archival and Management Challenge

Uncontrollable data growth, increased data availability requirements and higher levels of accountability to key business stakeholders are some of the growing data management challenges facing businesses today. These challenges have wide ranging implications on businesses capital and operating costs, operational efficiency and on business risk.

As a result business owners, senior management, CIO’s and IT managers are having to question and rethink their data management strategies in a number of key areas:

Primary Data & Storage growth management
The protection and recovery of business data for improved business continuity (including DR, backup and high availability).
Historical data archival and records management for Legal and Compliance requirements

Identify & Classify

One of the key challenges in managing corporate data is deciding on how to classify data and determining the appropriate protection policy for each data type. The first stage in the Global Storage Multi-Tier Storage Management service is to provide organisations an assessment of their data storage environment by identifying their business data assets, rate of storage growth and classifying their data according to type, age and value to the organisation.

Once the data has been segmented in this way, Global Storage will work with organisations to determine the best management strategy for each data type.

Implement & Manage

Following the identification and project definition workshops, Global Storage will deliver and implement the appropriate data protection service required for each tier of data. This allows us to protect, recover and archive the right data at the right time for the optimum cost, accessibility and security.

Ongoing management and monitoring of these services is provided by our 24/7 Network Operations Centre using tried and tested processes and best practice methodologies.

The overall effect of our Multi-Tier Storage Management Service is that our customers backup less, archive more and secure their mission critical corporate data. It also ensures that data is managed based on the business value it has to the organisation.

Immediate Business Benefits

Organisations implementing a Global Storage Multi-Tier Storage Management strategy see immediate cost, efficiency and risk benefits by:

Controlling growth of data by defining retention policies for different data types and sorting and archiving data that is inactive or required for compliance reasons
Improving system performance by controlling storage growth and reducing the load on the primary environment
Improving data availability and uptime by replicating critical data assets
Reducing the amount of data requiring daily backup, controlling backup windows and improving recovery times
Providing improved business continuity and disaster recovery with faster Recovery Times and more granular Recovery Points
Reducing management and resource costs by improving the operational efficiency of managing data across multiple tiers.
Providing a scalable, capacity on demand solution for all categories of data to meet changing business demands

Multi-tier Data Storage Management Approach

Global Storage assists organisations to identify and manage three key categories of data:

Mission critical data:

Data that is highly critical to maintaining primary business operation, including applications that have a high number of transactions such as finance, payroll, billing, and ERP systems. Even a few hours of downtime or data loss of this type of data can severely impact the business.
EnvironmentReady™ CLR (continuous local and remote) Enterprise Disaster Recovery Service provides real-time replication for the immediate recovery of data volumes, servers, or a complete site recovery.

Business critical data:

Data outside of the critical applications that is required day to day to support business functions such as recent document, file and email data. Recovery of this type of data is usually required within a day or two.
DataReady™ Enterprise Backup Service provides a once a day snap-shot and off-site replication for the rapid online recovery of individual files & emails, full server restores or total data recovery.

Important and Legacy data:

High volume primary file data, inactive data or legacy data which requires protection for standard recovery, records management or compliance reasons.
ArchiveReady™ Enterprise Archival and VaultReady™ On-demand Storage Services provide low cost storage archival, off-site vaulting and powerful eDiscovery search capabilities for long term storage management and optimisation.

Features & Benefits of Global Storage's Multi-Tier Storage Management

CHALLENGE	SOLUTION	BENEFIT
Storage Costs & Data Classification: As a business the costs associated with managing our corporate data have been spiralling out of control. We know that multiple types of data exist in our organisation and need to understand how cost effectively to manage these tiers.	The first stage in the MTSM approach is to identify data assets and storage growth and classify data according to age, type and value to the organisation. By identifying and classifying your data, a strategy can be set for how to manage the data based on the tier of data ie. Mission Critical Data, Business Critical Data and Important/Legacy Data.	This provides you with a MTSM solution that will protect, recover and archive the right data at the right time for the optimum cost. By managing data based on its value to the business, you can reduce operating costs and improve efficiency. Global Storage only charges you for what you use in a true capacity on demand usage system.

System Availability & DR: We have a number of mission critical applications where more than an hour or two of downtime would severely impact the business. How do we ensure that these systems can be recovered no matter what type of failure has occurred?	Continuous local & off-site replication through our EnvironmentReady™ CLR managed service ensures critical systems can be recovered within minutes no matter what type of failure has occurred.	Customers can rest assured that their mission critical systems can be recovered locally and remotely to within minutes of the failure taking place. This provides the business with both High Availability and remote Disaster Recovery capabilities within the one solution.

Data Backup & Reliability: Growth in data is putting pressure on our backup windows and recovering data can be complex, slow and often unreliable.	Global Storage’s MTSM strategy controls the growth of data requiring daily backup by moving historical data to archival storage. DataReady™ Data De-Duplication then ensures the remaining data can be protected as efficiently as possible.	A well designed MTSM strategy reduces the amount of data needing daily backup, improving backup times and ensuring recovery objectives can be met. The GlobalView™ User Web Portal allows customers to easily and reliably find and restore data online

Storage Growth Management: We are always running into primary storage capacity constraints on our SAN and applications such as Exchange, SharePoint and File are becoming difficult to manage because of rapid growth in these systems.	A Global Storage MTSM approach to storage management identifies data that can be moved out of the primary storage environment and archived. ArchiveReady™ & VaultReady™ services ensure important but legacy data is securely replicated off-site for long term records management.	This MTSM approach reduces and controls the size of Exchange, SharePoint & File systems, improving primary storage utilisation & performance, reducing backup times and eliminating problem data types such as PST files from the network.

Operational Efficiency & Risk: We don’t have the resources or systems to implement, manage, monitor or support the range of storage protection capabilities now needed in our environment. As a result the business is exposed to an unacceptable level of risk.	Global Storage’s expertise and best practice processes and methodologies will ensure that the implementation process for MTSM runs smoothly. MTSM services are managed by GlobalView™ Operational Support System which is monitored and supported by Global Storage’s 24x7 Network Operations Centre.	You can concentrate on supporting your end users and your primary business applications while Global Storage takes care of the MTSM services appropriate for your business. Issues are proactively managed and resolved before they impact on the business. This reduces the risk of data loss and downtime to the business.

Oracle Replication Service - EnvironmentReady
Managed Disaster Recovery - EnvironmentReady
Managed Backup - DataReady
Managed Email & File Archive Service - ArchiveReady
Management & Monitoring - GlobalView
Security & Encryption

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