Storage Administration
One of the biggest challenges for businesses to effectively manage data storage is how to store data without taking the exact same information and storing it again and again in different locations on the same servers, hard drives and tape libraries. There have been many attempts to address these redundancies with storage administration being more successful than others.
Some companies in the past have taken the attitude that many data storage and storage administration options were not as important as they should have been. With today's regulatory environment becoming more stringent, the volume of saved data has again exploded and more and more options are being considered to address data storage and storage administration concerns.
The latest answer offered by the data storage field is the technology known as data de-duplication under the direction of storage administration. Also known as "single-instance storage" and "intelligent compression", this advanced data storage administration method takes a piece of data and stores it once. It then refers to this data as often as it is asked by a pointer (or pointers) that replaces the entire string of data. These pointers then refer back to the original string of data. This is especially effective when multiple copies of the same data are being archived. The archiving of only one instance of the data is required with this type of storage administration solution. This reduces storage requirements and back-up times substantially.
If a department wide e-mail attachment, (2 megabytes in size) is distributed to 50 different email accounts and each one must be archived, then instead of saving the attachment 50 times, using effective storage administration techniques saves it once leaving 98 megabytes of storage space for this one attachment. Multiply this over numerous departments and thousands of emails over the course of a year and the savings can be quite substantial. Using the correct storage administration techniques also helps the recovery time objectives improve significantly with the use of data duplication reducing the need for back-up tape libraries. This storage administration technique also lowers most storage space requirements giving companies significant savings in every area of hardware storage procurement needs. Operating at the byte level with storage administration allows for smaller pieces of data to saved, as the unique instances of each block or bit that has been changed are recognized and saved. With efficient storage administration instead of having a whole file saved each time there is a change in a bit of information contained in that file, only the changed information is saved. This is accomplished with Hash algorithms such as SHA-1 or MD5 and these are used to generate unique numbers for blocks of information that has changed. Most effective storage administration applications are used in conjunction with other methods of data reduction. Delta differencing and conventional compression are two such methods. Incorporating this combination can greatly reduce any errors non-redundant systems might be susceptible to. Storage administration is an important part of the entire data system and the types used will be determined by a company's specific needs and storage capabilities.
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