Managed Online Backup - Information Lifecycle Management

Ever-growing volumes of data – where typically 70% of data becomes inactive within 30 days of creation - are typically stored on expensive disk systems. The impact of this never-ending growth in disk systems includes waste of expensive IT resources, increased cost of IT delivery and operational inefficiency.

These day-to-day issues are compounded by the ever-growing burden of storing and retrieving data for audit requirements and compliance to statutory and corporate regulations.

To address these growing issues, organisations should understand that information has a lifecycle from creation to deletion and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solutions can be implemented to exploit and manage it.

The Information Lifecycle

Email and file server information during its lifecycle will have varying levels of business and day-to-day operational importance.

As information ages through its lifecycle its data storage, management and search and retrieval requirements often change:

• Newly created and actively updated information is typically stored on expensive disk systems where capacity, performance, availability and efficient utilisation are key criteria.
• As information ages and the level of user access to it declines, moving aged information from expensive disk systems to lower cost archive storage can introduce significant operational benefits and cost savings.
• ILM archiving solutions have different requirements and management criteria to disk systems. Typically these are higher capacity and lower cost storage, automated policy based retention and deletion policies and ease of management.
• Archived information, whilst rarely accessed, must still be easily accessible when required. This could be either for ad-hoc business purposes, business intelligence or in response to audit or regulatory requests. Ease of use, powerful search functionality and speed of retrieval are important requirements for an ILM solution.
  

Our Solutions

Tiver ILM solutions are modular solutions designed to meet an organisation’s ILM requirements. The solutions consist of a number of elements: business requirements and data analysis consultancy, ILM applications, archive storage solutions and archive availability solutions.

The overall ILM solution will be designed and delivered by our consultants with training and ongoing support as required.

Solution Delivery

The ILM solutions can be delivered in a variety of models to address varying business, operational and geographical requirements. The principal elements of the solutions are:

• Analysis of data growth, usage and age characteristics combined with business consultancy to identify scope of potential operational savings and key areas of business risk.
• Implementation of an appropriate ILM application that enables the creation of polices which will copy inactive or other specified email and file server data to the archive storage and subsequently deletion of the original copy from primary storage.
  Continual analysis, reporting and search and retrieve functionality are also provided by the ILM application.
• The volume of data to be managed, geographic locations and wide area network capacity will determine the number of ILM application servers required.
• Archived email and file server data is stored on a storage system that can be deployed either locally on the organisation’s location or remotely in one of our data centres. A choice of storage platforms is available depending on the organisation’s business requirements and these include Direct Attached Storage, Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Content Address Storage (CAS) systems.
• To ensure business continuity in the event of hardware or software error, accidental or malicious data deletion or site disasters the Tiver ILM solution can be designed to include an automated data availability solution for the archive data and associated ILM application. Depending on the organisation’s availability requirements this could be an onsite backup solution, automated offsite backup solution or an offsite data replication solution.