It’s a fact of life: If you’re in business, chances are you’re amassing data at a rate never-before experienced. While data has become about as crucial as air and water, managing the preponderance of data on IBM AIX can pose myriad challenges. How do you keep your data growth in check while still tapping all of its attributes?
There are a lot of reasons why data becomes so unruly and so cumbersome. First and foremost, there is just so much more of it today than even a year ago, and there will be exponentially more of it tomorrow. With an estimated 40 percent growth of data per year, it’s no wonder IT managers have their hands full managing so much information. In the IBM AIX environment, data grows merely because it exists. Duplication for data protection results in more data, which in turn creates additional data. Software development methodologies also contribute to the growth of data. Regulatory requirements and stipulations to hold on to old data only contribute to the mountains of data. Managing all of this data can cost big dollars in man-hours, hardware maintenance, and tracking.
Fortunately there are concrete steps you can take to manage data growth efficiently and effectively; the benefits can be immeasurable.
Thin provisioning helps to manage data on IBM AIX by using a native Logical Volume Manager, or LVM to allow systems to write to storage when hard drive space runs out. It keeps file systems from crashing, even if it’s been filled up with data. Thin provisioning also presents devices to the operating system as if they contained both used space as well as empty space. While only the used space is stored on the backend an empty disk on an AIX server doesn’t reduce the total storage available. So, thin provisioning saves storage space by creating a buffer of free disk space on the backend. This also keeps storage costs to a minimum.
Deduplication compresses data by removing duplicate copies, saving space, and saving IT management dollars.
Data archiving uses business rules to pinpoint and move inactive data to separate storage devices for long-term retention and retrieval. This data is indexed, has search capabilities, yet it is segregated to avoid any impact on performance. Archiving enhances performance while meeting requirements to retain older data.
Storage consolidation A lot of on-board storage in siloed environments is never used.
Storage consolidation increases performance and reducing administrative complexity and costs by centralizing storage resources and administration for SAN units. Consolidation allows organizations to reduce the quantity and kinds of storage media utilized, in addition to the skill sets needed to manage storage.
Storage virtualization groups physical storage from several arrays into a single storage pool managed from a central console. This builds on prior investments in siloed storage and consolidated storage. This method doesn’t actually reduce storage but allows IT managers to quickly and efficiently manage storage issues across the network, including backup, recovery, and archiving. Management is significantly simplified on the backend, particularly on IBM AIX environments.
There are still other ways to efficiently and effectively manage your data growth, and do so without breaking the bank. A representative from Data Storage Corp. can show you how to make the most of data storage while keeping your business data running flawlessly. Our next blog covers some alternative methods of keeping data growth in check. Checkout our next blog which covers some alternative methods of keeping data growth in check
