I’m presenting at OHECC this year (2013).  For those who attended my presentation, feel free to download the following documents:

1.  Presentation in PDF format ( BIG!!! 6 Mb)

2. Assessment Executive Summary (446 Kb)

3.  Assessment White Paper (505 Kb)

4.  Assessment Sample Report (2Mb)

If you need my contact info, here is my vcard.

Consolidating your IT resources is usually a key factor in lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO), as well as simplifying the IT environment, which is as complex as it gets. But consolidation for consolidation's sake might not be the best idea. Each IT infrastructure is different and careful analysis is a must to compare consolidation's advantages with total costs, including equipment and personnel costs. The other factor that needs to be considered is the rate of data growth and how it will impact your present and proposed budgets.

Conventional wisdom calls for incorporation of storage area network (SAN) consolidation, network-attached storage (NAS) consolidation, consolidation of tiered resources, and server consolidation. Critical applications aggregated into a SAN can improve service levels, but with a cost trade-off in terms of capital expense and human resource investments. Additionally, what kind of operational performance do your less-critical but still-important applications require?

If you invest in a costly connectivity strategy or already have one on board, these important applications will be lower in your pecking order and suffer a lower return on investment. Implementing a SAN based on iSCSI might improve the ROI picture for those applications. If your NAS devices are spread through countless departments or business units, consolidating them and other general purpose file servers should improve productivity.

Server consolidation certainly makes sense; aggregating applications onto a smaller number of higher-performance hardware with fatter pipes. Naturally, you need to have your data paths well in mind and make sure the consolidation fits into your disaster recovery plan. But storage consolidation, into SAN, NAS, or both, requires a before-and-after type of analysis. And most importantly, you must calculate where your management software leverages. Hardware is just so much metal unless your server and storage management software contribute to the TCO improvement you envision by consolidating resources.

Is your data fully centralized in one physical location? If it is, your operation is the exception rather than the rule. Much of a business' data, sometimes up to three quarters of it, will be found at remote sites, a remote office, branch office, or home office. This is even more apparent if you consider the spate of merger and acquisition activity in the business environment. Sign a contract and presto, a new pool of remote data to be managed somehow.

These islands of data in your operation are horribly vulnerable in a number of ways. Too often, the remote office personnel are not trained IT types and have no real consciousness of the business or the legal consequences involved in handling data. Additionally, sending backup tapes run the risk of miscarrying and the penalties are high. In 2005, Bank of America, Citibank, and Marriott Corp. suffered embarrassment and a measure of financial liability from lost tapes that exposed customer's data to misuse.

The tip: Consider recentralizing the control of these digital assets by transferring data over a WAN. There are numerous intelligent software products appearing to manage remote backup and WAN-based transfer. Working from the data center gives control of that remote data to in-house IT staff. Making sure that data is encrypted will protect the enterprise from identity theft and other malicious attacks.

Another tip: If the first tip is not practical and remote backup is still your best option, select a software package that emphasizes ease of use, a comfortable GUI and easy installation. Remote offices in the insurance industry, for example, are run by insurance professionals, not IT experts. In the same way, expecting doctors, nurses, administrative assistants, or other executives should not be assumed to be IT-handy. These personnel assets need solutions that they can easily and reliably work with. The alternative is a risk that is less and less capable of justification

It is commonplace for many outside of the professional handlers of storage to consider backup and archiving the same thing. Little could be further from the truth. They are distinct technology practices with sharply differing requirements.

The payoff of each technology is also different. As organizations slowly come to archiving, cost reduction, improved performance, and verifiable compliance with regulatory laws become achievable business goals.

Archiving can mean several things, but for the purposes of this summary, it describes the process of consolidating and migrating data from a primary online storage medium (such as Fibre Channel disk arrays or enterprise SATA arrays) to less costly nearline or offline storage media. In some cases, archiving emphasizes data longevity and authenticity, especially for emails, instant message texts, document files, and other semi-structured or unstructured data.

Under any definition, archiving assumes comparatively fast file level access to data; archiving also assumes a robust search and retrieval software. Ultimately, it is a large, well-indexed repository that permits users to search and access it. However, archives are routinely identified with less frequently used data. Therefore, the search and access is not expected to be accessed frequently.

Archiving, then, is fundamentally different from backup, which involves making point-in-time copies of data to protect against routine hardware failures or catastrophic data loss. Backup typically reaches not only transactional or operational data, but operating systems and applications packages as well. The life expectancy of backup volumes is only a matter of days as a rule, at which point they are replace by new, incremental or differential volumes.

The contrast between the handling of archived data and backed-up data is significantly different. In backup, the IT staffer is really imaging or copying data. In an archive, the data is actually being moved, perhaps leaving a stub file or an index reference behind. So although the data looks like it is on tier-one disk, it is actually elsewhere on less expensive, longer term media.

In part because of the confusion between backup and archiving, some users tend to use archiving only in a niche in their environments and take less advantage of it than they should. Some observers believe that people let their data sit around, either that or delete it outright. Organizations should establish a tier of storage, less expensive, with "good enough" recovery performance. This is not backup.

Did you ever wonder about the tape media when you were trying to determine your drive performance? If you are like most, your tape media is MP — metal particle. Metal particle tape uses substrate material, the basefilm, which is coated with a durable and flexible Polyurethane-type paint containing, among other things, suspended metal particles. The particles consist of needle-shaped iron, or ferric cores, which have been processed to enhance their magnetic capabilities and chemical stability.

Immediately after coating, they are oriented in the same polar direction by a strong magnetic field while the paint is still in liquid form. This results in high squareness values in the direction of recording, reducing tape noise while increasing output and packing (aerial) density of the particles.

This process yields a coating that is less than 100% active magnetic material. The size and shape of the metal particles and other additives give the polyurethane paint, or coating, the desired magnetic, electrical, and physical characteristics needed to write and read data in a particular format. A backcoat is then applied to the reverse side of the substrate to control friction. Metal particle tape is used with formats such as DLT (digital linear tape) and LTO (linear tape open).

The other type of manufacturing process is metal evaporated. It is used for smaller form factor formats such as AIT (advanced intelligent tape). Unlike conventionally coated tape, metal evaporation takes place in a vacuum chamber. A specially-treated basefilm material is fed around a cooling drum that passes by a shutter area. Cobalt ingots are fed into a crucible and vaporized by a scanning electron beam gun. The ingots are vaporized at approximately 2000°C. The metal vapor is allowed to contact the basefilm and bond molecularly to it at the shutter area. Hence, there is no need for the binder, required to manufacture metal particle tape; the coating is nearly 100% active magnetic material to store the data.

A special oxygen gas is mixed with the vapor at the shutter area. The cooling drum is chilled to approximately -40°C to prevent the basefilm from melting at the shutter area from the intense heat of the vapor. The vapor and gas mixture deposits vertical column-like structures on the basefilm. The incident angle of the these columns, containing oxygen and cobalt, is at an angle consistent with the magnetic field that will emanate from the heads on the helical scanning drum inside the recorder. The shutter, which controls the angle of the columns, coupled with variations in the oxygen-cobalt mixture, determine the overall electromagnetic characteristics of the tape.

Just a bunch of crap you probably already know.

One of the most talked-about areas of data protection is "data de-duplication." Data de-duplication is an emerging technology that might play a major role in a broad range of applications for protecting and retaining data, including backup and recovery, long term archiving, continuous data protection, and secure retention for compliance. It also offers advantages for applications that benefit from efficient data transmission, including remote replication and wide-area network optimization.

The key to de-duplication is to transmit only data that has changed since the last backup called an incremental image. This contrasts with the traditional model of backing up all of the data from every site on a weekly or daily basis, a task that is no longer cost-effective or efficient for many organizations desperate to cut down the amount of information being stored.

Analysts are suggesting that de-duplication will be more and more on the data protection radar screen; for more reasons than one. Not only is it supposed to be an option for reducing redundancy on primary storage, but as an enabler of various WAN features. In terms of backup, goes one step beyond the more traditional file-based incremental backup. Ideally, a de-duped incremental backup is supposed to minimize backup traffic by copying only changed blocks after each full backup. Various approaches can be taken to de-duplication: operation before the data is written to storage, during the process of writing to storage, and even afterwards in some cases. In fact, it is possible to use multiple de-duped incremental backup in a series, a strategy I’ve used  for several years now, allowing the user to keep sector-based changes to their disk.

This technology, on its face, has the potential for being a money saver. But some companies suggest that de-duplication may be more shadow than substance, costing more than it saves and requiring excessive performance hits. Tip: Don't run for the latest, see first how it would fit in your installation. Another tip: If a vendor does not offer this function and is trying to steer you away from it, ask why. This is not bleeding-edge technology; it has a history of successes. Make sure your storage vendor isn't just trying to steer you into products they sell rather than products that solve your requirements.

I have a book on my shelf titled The CIO Survival Guide written by Karl Schubert.  In his book Schubert suggests that "success as a CIO is tied to the ability to translate and demonstrate the information technology world of possibilities into meaningful [business] value creation...". Becoming a better corporate citizen, dedicated to bringing home the business value of IT, may need to adjust existing focus. Here are some items to consider:

• Move storage closer to the business. It's more important than ever.
• Are there access-control policies that need to be written?
• Are there storage security policies that need to be ironed out?
• New reports to be created?
• What is your organization’s situation regarding regulations or litigation?
• Do you have tools that help executives make decisions?

Be more strategic than tactical.  Most companies go through rigorous planning activities early in the fourth quarter, among other end-of-year-distraction. Months later, when the planning assumptions need to be validated, personnel seem too busy. The business can often change in unpredictable ways that demand new storage support. Prudent storage managers should dust off budgets and review the business assumptions behind the plan.

Fight fires before they start. Storage teams spend much of their time provisioning new capacity, configuring systems, backing up servers and battling hourly crises. These activities are expensive and stress your staff unnecessarily. Rather than tackling these expensive areas on the fly, smart storage managers will follow the lead of sales departments, marketing departments and other business subsets and start the year with a day-long planning session. It takes staff away for a whole day, yes, but prevention is better than cure.

IT managers think that storage automation sounds nice but sounds expensive. What it really sounds like is something requiring a bit of definition. Then perhaps it can be put in a context where decisions can be made.

Storage automation is the ability to assign time-intensive or repetitive storage operations into a prescribed procedure that can be initiated by some event or the command of a storage administrator. Human involvement is either minimal or entirely absent. Hardware and software exist to automate a variety of storage functions, including data migration (such as archiving), copying (such as backup, continuous data protection and the like), capacity management (read virtualization), encryption, and key management and more.

Storage automation is good for routine things that consume time and staffing. Properly leveraged, it can put a dent in overhead costs and reduce the consequences of human error. Do you really need storage automation? That depends on your infrastructure. If your IT operation is small and your employees are well skilled, buying off-the-shelf automation tools may not be required. If your data center is larger and your staff is eternally fighting fires or cleaning up after outages, implementing storage automation will allow your staff to be more productive.

But automation cannot be looked at as a "get out of jail free" card. Monitoring the IT infrastructure is still a must in the data center. Why? Because with all the best technology and the best will in the world, things happen. Mistakes are made and must be corrected. A third party may come in and upset previous policies. The hard fact is that Murphy’s Law obtains in the data center, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, at the worst possible time."

Here are some of the best common sense practices everyone should adhere to:

Make copies of your backups

In the world of paper records, there are often requirements to keep originals in a very secure place due to the unique and often irreplaceable nature of certain documents. But in IT, we deal with electronic records, where copies are as legitimate as the original set of ones and zeros. By keeping duplicates of your backups, one onsite and one offsite, data is protected from loss due to fire or something far more common such as media error. Should one of the copies be lost, it is a simple matter of recreating it from the other copy. It's a simple task with most backup software, and the losses are reduced to the time it takes to recreate the copy and replacement media cost.   Just remember…if you keep backups offsite, they need to be secure.  Just worked with a client that did take tapes offsite. The only problem is that he just leaves it in his briefcase.  DUH !  How secure is that?  Consider a service like Iron Mountain.  After all, they secure offsite locations safely for the US government.  I’ve used them.  They come by in a secure vehicle, pick up your media and provide you with status emails.

Make copies of archives, too

There is a fable making the rounds that suggest that archives don't really need to be duplicated. Archived records no longer class as production data, and we might not need to access it for a long time, if ever. Archived data is probably even more sensitive because of its age, as it is often the only record left; the original record was deleted from the production system and transferred or migrated. Unless data is archived "just in case we ever need it", it should be duplicated and kept in a separate location, especially if it is tied to any compliance or ediscovery requirement.   This will probably affect most of you with messaging media;  email, instant messaging, faxes and voice mail.  You will need a very good excuse not to comply with a court-ordered request for materials.  The day when “don’t have enough time, staff or ability” to comply may bring about a “contempt” charge.

The other myth suggests that duplicating backups is too expensive; indeed, efforts at deduplication are the stuff of technical magazine articles. But if an organization thinks that duplicating backups is too costly, then one must consider how critical the data is. It is necessary to strike a balance between the cost of lost data with the cost of adequately protecting that data. Business logic would then dictate that the lowest cost is likely the way to go. However, here are hidden costs and while estimating the cost of duplicate backups is simple math, calculating losses are far less simple.  Archived data is best kept on a SAN that has been tiered.  You might be tempted to dump it to tape and we all have done that…but I’d rather get a root canal than have to restore archived data from tape media.

One copy of a backup may not be enough.  Unless you have someone on your staff with expertise in backup/recovery, hire a consultant who has lots of experience backing up data…LIKE ME!!!!

Case in point…records retention.  Content on servers has gotten out of control. Users at all levels of the enterprise create, send and store all types of different corporate content throughout a variety of systems within the organization —all of which is subject to legal discovery and regulatory requirements. The USA is a litigious country, and federal, state and local governments are not shy about cranking out new rules and regulations for the storing and availability of many kinds of information. Recently a series of new federal rules on discovery and retention were passed. 

One would think that conventional records management systems would be doing the heavy lifting to address the problem. But the adoption of records management is going too slowly — particularly since records management plays such a vital role in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and other compliance initiatives. Many factors have slowed adoption, such as lack of budget; the time required to enlist and mobilize the stakeholders in legal, compliance, business units and IT; and low awareness of what records management entails.

The alternative, known as retention management, gives organizations many tangible benefits beyond traditional records management, including:

• Prevention of accidental or intentional deletion of information required for litigation or audits
• Automation of retention management based on business rules
• Protection of content from exposure to unauthorized recipients
• An efficient, single-source discovery and lockdown, which reduces major costs
• Protection against harmful and risky information leaks

Just include it with your ever popular change management, release management, asset management and the other components of a well-balanced IT Service Management program.