Storage management has become a key factor in meeting overall business objectives. At the most basic level, storage management is about making copies of data to secondary storage. The number, format, and location of these copies is dictated by business needs. The first goal of storage management is to ensure that as a corporate asset, data is protected in multiple, secure copies, and will never be lost. The second goal is to strategically place data copies on specific types of media, in specific formats, and at specific locations to ensure optimal accessibility under a variety of scenarios. The third goal is to optimize the overall cost of storing data by constantly tuning the number of copies and where they reside, as their access and retention requirements change over time. Most IT organizations now realize that a variety of distinct storage management services are needed to simultaneously address the following business needs:

• Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery
• Data Protection and Long-term Retention
• Compliance
• Cost Controls

The specific technologies optimized to address these business needs include: backup, replication, active archiving, transparent archiving, and application archiving. BridgeHead provides all of these key services integrated into a single storage management platform called HT ISM.

Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery.
More and more, applications are expected to survive or quickly resume operation with rapid access to data even when there is a disaster, significant equipment failure, or some form of primary data loss or corruption.

Frequent point-in-time replication of data images to secondary storage has become a mainstay of the business continuance and disaster recovery strategy. Automated replication can ensure that a very recent copy of data in a consistent state is available and can be brought on line immediately, without the time-consuming data transfer step or loss of recent modifications that occur with recovery from backups. However, since this involves expensive disk and does not use removable media for off-site storage, replication typically complements routine backup procedures rather than replacing them.

Routine backups are a cornerstone of business continuance. Backup provides the most cost-effective mechanism for maintaining multiple generations of point-in-time volume images, as well as the management of saved files across many generations for selective data recovery. Routine backups maintained across a sufficient number of generations provides the greatest level of protection against data corruption.

Finally, multi-copy archiving software also plays an important role in disaster recovery by complementing replication and mirroring strategies with a more cost-effective approach for making static data available in a disaster, or when the primary storage fails. When static files are protected through archiving to multiple copies stored at different locations, routine file backups can be significantly streamlined to exclude static data and focus resources primarily on active data.

Obviously, a robust business continuance policy necessitates the use of replication, backup, and archiving services. BridgeHead’s HT ISM provides these services with a unique level of integration to minimize the operational and infrastructure costs of good storage management.

Data Protection and Long-term Retention.
Data is a corporate asset. While the degree to which data must be kept available may diminish over time, not having access to historical data can be a serious liability in the event of legal action. The IT organization must ensure that, even over time, data is not lost or mishandled.

Backup is used to routinely protect data, saving copies of data on inexpensive, removable media that are usually moved to a remote vault, safe from disaster or mishandling. The file journaling in the backup software provides a means of tracking different generations and versions of files, and should be able to structure backup generations and retentions so that as data changes over time, particular versions can be easily identified and automatically and quickly retrieved.

Archiving, however, is the most efficient tool for long-term retention of static data. Archiving offers a number of advantages over backup for the long-term granule access of files. Whereas backup must by necessity store and structure its savesets to optimize high-volume recovery, archiving optimizes granular access and retention management. One of its advantages from a basic data protection viewpoint, is the ability to create multiple copies of data archives on any combination of different media. For instance, archived data can be placed simultaneously on inexpensive disk repositories for rapid access, and on removable tape or optical disk for deep storage in a vault. Archiving systems also manage migration of copies over long periods of time to newer media. Multiple copies on multiple media with built-in migration options helps ensure recoverability over long periods of time – even when media is outdated or has exceeded its lifecycle.

Ensuring that copies of data exist on secure media is half the data protection battle. The other half is ensuring that the media the data resides on cannot be stolen or inappropriately accessed. For removable media, robust, automated media management is a critical requirement. A robust data protection system requires enterprise media management to track all media volumes, assign them to policybased management for control of movement and accessibility throughout the organization.

BridgeHead’s HT Backup, HT Data Repository and HT OpenMedia products combine to provide the complete data protection strategy for all data throughput in the distributed, heterogeneous enterprise.


Compliance.
More and more, laws and regulations force organizations to maintain very long-term copies of data. While archive copies must be safely and securely stored for long periods of time, compliance now involves much more than writing data to a removable volume for storage in the vault. While archived data must still be highly secure, it is also expected to be rapidly accessible. Furthermore, access to the data must be strictly controlled with full audit trails and legal proof that the archive could not have been modified. While many organizations have relied on backup software to track historical data, specialized archiving software is, in truth, required to create suitable copies on multiple media types, track them through their retention periods, and monitor their access. Specialized media such as WORM, tape, optical, or the Centerra CAS system is also used to ensure that once written, the archive copy could not have been modified. Compliance archiving software meets these needs. It enables rules-based copying of data to compliant media, manages the retention cycles for this data, and performs a range of critical media management functions to control movement of removable media, manage media maintenance schedules, and oversee periodic media migrations when applicable.

BridgeHead’s HT Data Repository is a robust archiving technology for ensuring that a specific number of archive copies are created on compliant media and retained in accordance with regulations. It relies on our HT OpenMedia media management system to fully automate, monitor, and audit compliant handling of removable media. It can be used in conjunction with HT FileStore to fully automate file selection and submission to the archive, and manage the eventual removal of online instances based on data lifecycle management rules.

Cost Controls.
The massive growth in the quantity and complexity of data has increased the cost of storage infrastructure. A variety of new and effective storage technologies and storage management products are now available to help organizations comply with service level and regulatory requirements. Unfortunately, there is an enormous and often unrealistic cost to deploying storage infrastructure without minding the following principles:

• The cost of raw storage is a fraction of the total cost of ownership. While raw storage costs have decreased, the cost of managing any storage medium to ensure data availability, security, and retention is significant. The most effective cost-cutting techniques include minimizing the amount of storage capacity to be deployed and actively seeking the most effective storage management systems possible.
• Multi-media storage strategy. Different media types are optimal for storing different categories of data. The entire HT ISM services suite lets you integrate different types of media into a single, commonly managed system.
• The majority of data need not be stored online. Up to 80% of most online data has not been accessed in the last 90 days, and at least 60% of it will not be required in the future. This data not only consumes raw storage, it also puts significant overhead on the infrastructure, increasing the size and expense of backups, network utilization, and other maintenance procedures. HT FileStore and HT Data Repository provide a major cost savings through automated file analysis, archiving, and migration of unaccessed data to secondary storage.
• Automated data lifecycle management. The access, security, and retention requirements for any given data set changes over time. HT FileStore reduces costs by automatically and regularly re-evaluating where copies of data should reside and migrating them to more efficient locations.
• Media management is the key to making “cheap” media affordable. Many view tape as more expensive to deploy than disk. This is likely true only when the tape (or any other removable medium) and the automated libraries that handle it are not efficiently managed. HT OpenMedia media management avoids this pitfall and ensures that removable media capacity is fully utilized, and that media handling is as automated and reliable as possible. It discourages inefficient media access that can greatly shorten the life expectancy of media and devices. It also reduces the operational costs of rotating volumes on- and off-site through automated scheduling and reporting.
• Consolidated storage management. Many IT organizations spend too much on secondary storage by deploying the media and device technology on an application by application basis. The consolidated secondary storage infrastructure provided by HT OpenMedia allows organizations to invest in secondary storage device and media technologies on their cost/performance attributes, with the expectation that the cost can be defrayed across the needs of all applications.

BridgeHead Software delivers technology that addresses these storage management needs, and we will continue to design leading-edge systems to address new values as the industry continues to develop.