One of the storage management challenges we see every day in customer data centers is there are too many copies of data in circulation. Ironically its this fact that built much of the value and motivation behind data deduplication. It should not be this way. Why should you get to a last copy of data?
One of the downsides to inexpensive capacity is that storage practices don't have to be as strict. You can store hundreds of versions of the same or similar data and suffer limited hard cost impact. Deduplication further enhances the affordability of capacity making this practice more forgivable from a expense standpoint.
Of course the data is not just stored multiple times on the file server, versions of it exist on laptops, thumb drives, tape media, replicated disk and a host of other "just in case" storage locations. Ironically it seems, especially as this data ages, having this many copies of the same piece of data make it no easier to find nor any faster to recover, it just means there are that many more places to look for the data.
Ideally a best practice would be that as data ages there are less copies of it and the final copy moves to a known good location, potentially a disk archive solution and is replicated to a disk archive at a disaster recovery site. This means that part of the policy will be to have inactive data moved to an archive much sooner. Disk archive as we discuss in our article on Archiving Basics enables a much more aggressive migration policy because the recall of data happens with almost no noticeable performance impact on the user. In addition the backup application will need to be set to tape media age-out and be retired much sooner.
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Source: informationweek.com
By: George Crump
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