Business Development, Strategy Alignment and Consulting News from The Business City London -

	10 Questions to ask before
	What are the 10 questions to ask before you implement a data and storage management solution in your distributed, heterogeneous environment? Once the project is complete there is still plenty of work left.
	1. Can the system help to reduce storage administrative costs
	According to a research by Gartner Group, 6€ out of every 10€ in storage costs is spent on administrative labor. By streamlining and automating key data and storage management functions software can eliminate the need to grow your IT staff to handle growing data volumes. In turn the right solution can lower your storage costs by 50% or more.

	2. Can one count on the storage management solution to restore critical data when one needs it most?
	Make sure reliability is engineered into the solution you want to select. Appropriate solutions are comprised of several modules that incorporate built-in redundancy - ensuring the highest availability of critical data property. Fault tolerant, selfhealing services maximize data availability while minimizing the need for human intervention. Restart of backups and prioritization of application and client jobs all help to ensure that data is reliably protected from total loss. Cached indexing can contribute to superior reliability and retrieval time. If magnetic cache is lost the solution should automatically re-cache from backup media.

	3. Can the system scale up to other departments and users?
	There are plenty of data back-up solutions designed for the work group, but you need a solution that can scale throughout the entire enterprise, whether you have 4 racks or a server room full to the top. The solution management should prevent storage server bottlenecks and permit faster access to individual files and logical data elements. No matter how many clients are being protected this should function without hiccups. Indexes being distributed across the network help to protect by being closer situated to the relevant data. The right architecture can support as many tape drives, libraries, and silos as you need. Because it can prevent both logical and physical view of storage resources, administrators can easily assign or reconfigure them accordingly to physical or logical network schemes.

	4. What could be the total cost of ownership (TCO)?
	Lower TCO depends on streamlining processes as well as acquiring a solution that is easy to manage, service and support. New technologies must work hand in hand with our living infrastructure therefor choose a management solution that is adaptable and easy to use. From a single console you could view a map of all clients with the types of applications they are running. During recovery operations, the software should be able to display a consolidated view of all backup data for that client. Grouping, profiles, policies, should be included to make management easier to handle. By simplifying administration, achieving higher reliability, and reducing IT labor to manage the storage of data it will lower the TCO.

	5. How fast can it recover lost data?
	Some solutions can recover large volumes of data very quickly but only at a tremendous cost to the IT resources. Avoid systems that will force you to recover entire databases or directories of data when you're doing a small restore. Watch out for systems that clog the network with a lot of traffic to perform backup and restore functions.

	6. How granular is the solution's restore capability?
	The solutions recovery capabilities should help to handle every contingency from a facility shut down, to a failed decision support system, to a lost file, record, or even an e-mail. Larger restores can be scheduled for periods of low network usage, preventing bottlenecks. If it can't then don't take it. There are solutions on the market which can perform on-line recovery of data down to a folder, sub-folder, or even an individual message. Be it for Microsoft Exchange or other messaging system popular on in today's market.

	7. Can one tailor the solution to one's IT environment and business processes?
	Data management policies can manage everything from a single computer to a widely-distributed enterprise. Configurable architectural components result in extremely robust management. Carefully pre-selected default configurations should provide appropriate data protection on a global basis from the very start. Data requiring more precise storage policies must be segmented from the default settings. A flexible and adaptive deployment will let you tailor a solution's policies to your business needs.

	8. Will it work with storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS)?
	Make sure that the solution supports SAN and NAS as some only offer limited support for them. Some solutions are not NDMP compatible or even require separate SAN solutions to fully achieve their goal.

	9. How easy is it to use?
	Storage resources should be mapped physically or logically or even both. It is important due to today's complexity and rapid growth of data and systems. Easy point and click interfaces make daily work much more easier. Best way to make your decision more stable is by trying it out before you buy. Or even go and have a look at other implementations of the solution. Hear what others have to say about that precise solution.

	10. How do we start after choosing a solution?
	The vast amount of systems and data storage required makes management of those large environments very difficult to take the right decision. Invest in getting the right consultants to help you get the best solution as there is only one chance to protect. Lost data is lost. remember that!