| Deploy
enterprise-wide data protection/storage management, rather than
departmental storage management |
Implement
storage management software to leverage existing IT infrastructure,
which should be capable of seamlessly integrating into newer storage
technologies like NAS and SAN |
Reduce
cost of ownership by implementing storage management with a 'lights-out'
and 'hand-off' approach to contain the operational costs |
|
Have an intuitive, user-friendly,
Web-based GUI that is manageable from anywhere |
The storage management software should
support multiple OS (NT, Win2K, Win XP, Linux, Netware and various
flavors of UNIX), applications (different ERPs, Lotus Notes, MS
Exchange) and databases (Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Informix, etc) |
Implement storage
management software in a highly available environment providing
increased accessibility of data, as otherwise, the cost of downtime
is very high |
|
Storage management hardware and
software should be scalable to take care of new technologies such as
NAS, SAN, iSCSI or CAS |
Enterprises need to have efficient
disaster recovery capabilities for data and applications to recover
businesses in the wake of building, managing, and supporting
enterprise customers. Solutions may start from traditional tape
backup to serverless backups to data replications to WAN clustering,
based on recovery from days to minutes, and availability from 0% to
100% |
Always run pilots especially prior to
multi-vendor deployments of storage solutions; in case of SAN
components, various host bus adapter cards may not work together;
for tape devices, persistent binding is a must |
|
Define zones containing the smallest
possible number of components, and use different zone sets for
different system loads, such as the off-hours backup time |
Use dedicated user
IDs for storage network maintenance access, and enforce the use of
strong passwords, either by policy or by configuration |
Identify all the interfaces of the
storage network; create a separate infrastructure for the out-of-the
band management and control terminal interfaces to the storage
network |
|
Use separate credentials for
infrastructure configuration functions |
Implement a storage
management solution for high performance, including streaming of
multiple streams of data to backup devices |
Always cross check hardware and
software with the compatibility guides on the public Websites; read
various other guides like the disaster-recovery guide and the
performance-tuning guide |
|
Get fundamentals of storage
optimization, compliance, and protection right before contemplating
any sort of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) vision. Plans
should be put in place to evolve to a utility storage solution over
the next five years |
Install software and
firmware on storage network components only from authorized sources,
but never do so when a device is connected to a production storage
network |
Configure storage devices, wherever
possible, to not accept firmware upgrades via the storage network
interfaces |
|
Use all available LAN security tools,
eg VLANs, IPsec, etc restricting access to infrastructure
configuration functions |
multitude
of threats. Regulatory requirements mean that the ability to recover data
easily, and in a presentable format, is more of an imperative. It is becoming
increasingly important to develop a business view of data, which is translated
into the type of storage that the data resides on. This tiered approach to
storage can bring significant benefits.
