RL Information

Consulting LLC

People Process Technology

Organization Integration

Effective Storage and Data

Management
Utilizing IT Service Management
White Paper

Prepared by:
Rick Leopoldi
August 4, 2009

Copyright 2009 RL Information Consulting LLC. All rights reserved.

Duplication of this document or extraction of content is strictly forbidden.

EFFECTIVE DATA MANAGEMENT

This paper discusses the processes and methods to define, characterize, and orient
data within the storage technology hierarchy. In addition, it addresses various and
necessary data usage and profile characteristics to effectively manage data and
storage with an IT service management perspective.

Introduction
Managing physical and logical storage devices is a necessary part of storage
management. That is, understanding the performance, capacity, and utilization of
storage devices is critical to any storage management effort. However within a
larger scope of IT service management, it is not the only part. Managing the data
that resides on the storage devices is an essential part of an ITSM effective data
and storage management effort. Data management implies an understanding of
the data usage requirements, characteristics and life cycle and employing them to
manage data on physical and logical storage devices.
Analyzing 3 separate areas of data can accomplish this; data definition, data usage
life cycle, and data profile characteristics. Once completed, a more effective ITSM
data and storage management effort can be achieved allowing a more definitive
understanding of where data can be placed physically and logically within the
storage technology hierarchy.

Data Definition Process

This initial data definition process provides a high-level overview to characterize
data and determine usage requirements by mapping it to organizational views.
Corporate Data
Typically, corporate indicates data that is vital to the corporation such as data that
is used for establishing and managing corporate policies (i.e., Human Resource
data) or data that has to be highly secure for reasons of trade or national secrecy.
In most organizations there is typically several such databases such as the
corporate books of account, maybe the database the client is using for employee
policy management or trade secret files. A common thread in evaluating data in
this category will be the "tightness" or "security" type rules of access associated
with the data.
Public Data
This is reference data of use to the whole community that has increased value if it
is current and correct. Examples would be legal documents, government
regulations, technical reference data, document template data and so on. If the
databases are large, and/or volatile, this data would typically reside on a NAS or
SAN.

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EMAIL databases would also fall into this category, allowing a wide community to
access it. In addition, there is usually a need for some security at the individual or
group level even though the whole database is still "Public". A shared
Repository/Dictionary would be another example of "Public" data.
Divisional "Corporate" Data
This is data that is vital to the corporation but accessed and used by a smaller
divisional community within the organization. This data could be files and/or
databases that support corporate business functions and have corporate data
characteristics such as restricted access requirements for human resource
information, payroll, security, and trade secrecy.
Departmental Data
This is data that is of interest to a more localized community, literally a department,
or maybe a geographical region such as a regional office. The data, at least in
summary form, may well be part of a feeder system to databases required at the
organizations business unit level or a corporate wide database, but in its detailed
form it can typically reside on a departmental system.
Private Data
This is data that is private and/or personal to an individual, or a small
homogeneous group of individuals. It may consist of working files that are a
preamble to supplying data to departmental or corporate databases, but at the
"working" stage are private. Security needs are typically less. The data may be
downloaded copies of departmental or corporate data, where direct updates to the
original file are not being done.
As with departmental data, there may be other factors that cause private data to
be located on departmental shared LAN or possibly a NAS or SAN but this is
atypical.
It is natural to associate private data type with workstations and this is an area
where the platform overlap may occur. Typically, when LANs behave as
departmental systems, there may be issues of security or transaction rates that can
impact placing this data on a department shared LAN, NAS or SAN.
The process for deciding where a given database should reside should begin with
this initial data requirement and characterization analysis. This is a recommended
process for managing data to a lesser number of standard platforms.

Data Usage Lifecycle

Throughout the useful life of any particular piece of data (i.e., file, dataset, or
database), data usage characteristics such as data activity, performance, capacity,

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recently reference information, aging and backup requirements, and migration

requirements are critical in understanding the nature of the data and how it is
being used. Understanding these usage characteristics indicate the lifecycle
attributes and are a necessary step to determine how to best manage the data
given its particular requirements and usage characteristics. These make up a
significant portion of a data profile.

Additional Data Profile Characteristics

In addition to data usage lifecycle characteristics, the following data characteristics
are necessary to determine an effective data profile.
Security - this refers to the level of security needed to control access to the data.
Response Time - this is not the normal use of response time. In this case, it
indicates the amount of time the user can wait for the data trying to be accessed.
Concurrency - the number of users needing potential concurrent access to the
data
Updating - this gives an indication of the number of data accesses that are for
updating. This may have implications on security needs and concurrency of data
access.
Currency - this refers to the up to date-ness need of the user trying to access
the data.
Commonality - different from concurrency, this is the number of concurrent users
given a certain physical and/or logical grouping. Commonality suggests a measure
of how many groups across the organization need access to the data.
Volatility - somewhat related to Updating, this is a measure of how rapidly the
data changes from day to day.
Frequency of Use - again, somewhat related to other measures like Updating,
Volatility and Concurrency, this is a measurement of the rhythm of access. For
example, is it all day and every day, spasmodic, or infrequent?
Integrity Responsibility - this is basically to do with data ownership, which is
critical to any data management effort. The owner is the organization that
promises to keep the data as good and as current as the other users require. In
this area there is a tendency to put the data near to where that organization
resides, or on the platform that they normally use.

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Management Overhead - this refers to system routines such as reorganization of

data, journaling, migration, backup and recovery, extracts, and archiving.
Cost per Gigabyte - this refers to the cost of storage on a per gigabyte basis, but
more specifically to some targeted, managed cost, not the actual cost. This is done
because some technologies might skew the cost paradigm.
Size typically, large databases will not fit on certain technology platforms. This is
an area where the overlap between platforms can change over time.
Source - this refers to the natural source of the data as determined by the initial
data definition process. That is, is the data corporate, public, divisional corporate,
departmental, or private?

Data Location Process

Presented here is one possible method to determine where data could be placed
within the physical and logical storage technology hierarchy and where data could
reside, physically. This high-level process uses input from the data definition, data
usage lifecycle, and data profile characteristics.
In every organization, there are some databases where there are clear and
compelling reasons why the data is held in one place (not necessarily on a NAS or
SAN but usually). A typical example of an overall hierarchy of data would be:
Nature of Data
Corporate
Public
Divisional Corporate
Departmental
Private

Possible Location
NAS, SAN
Shared LAN, NAS or SAN
Shared LAN, NAS or SAN
Shared LAN or NAS
Workstation, Shared LAN, SAN

Beginning with this initial high-level data definition process, the basic idea is to
determine, for each file, dataset, or database, the data usage characteristics using
the data profile characteristics as a base set of criteria.
The approach is to take criteria such as security, response time, concurrency,
updating, currency, etc. and use some metric to determine whether it is mostly
true for this data, partially true, or not true at all (High, Medium or Low could be
used).
This allows for an organizations unique requirements to qualify and quantify the
importance of the particular file, dataset, or database for each criterion. As an
example:

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1) If any criteria is determined as high, the data should be located on a NAS or

SAN, or
2) If the majority of criteria is determined as high, the data should be located
on a NAS or SAN, or
3) There may be a case for weighting some of the criteria so that some items
are more important than others.
Another possible perspective might be:
1) Common, high usage, lots-of-users file, with a high degree of currency,
would be a NAS or SAN
2) A low update, local data, low-number-of-users file may be on a department
and/or shared LAN
3) A read only, single user file could be on a workstation
The potential benefits of approaching data management in this fashion is that it:
Allows the organization to qualify and quantify the importance (metric High, Medium, Low) of each data profile characteristic and assign a
"relative" priority for what is the most appropriate platform for the data
Allows the organization to determine the benefits and drawbacks of each
platform as it relates to how well that platform satisfies each of the data
profile characteristics
Could be used as a determination of where any given application should
reside because typically the platform on which an application should reside
is best determined by how well the requirements of the data are satisfied by
existing on that platform
It should be noted that once a determination is made where a particular file,
dataset, or database should reside, other data may have to be there too, if they are
closely linked. It is likely that the application most responsible for updating the data
will exist on the same platform, but not necessarily applications that only access it.

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