Survival of the Most Adaptive
Survival of the Most Adaptive
February 16, 2007: Bob Davis, CA’s senior vice president and general manager, storage management, visited Australia to speak at CA’s 2007 Expo at the Sydney Convention Centre.
After engaging the audience with some light banter about watching the Sydney Swans in the grand final (which they lost by one point), he admitted to being considered the “dump truck” of IT by peers due to the uninspiring nature of storage. “Everyone wants to be in security or applications management,” he said to a 300 strong audience.
In defence of storage he believes the game has changed significantly over the last few years with storage now being about information, not just infrastructure.
“Has anyone read the book The World is Flat,/i> ?” asked Davis. Unfortunately it only proved that the world is still round since the book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is obviously yet to have an impact here. Davis forged ahead, explaining that the basic tenet behind this book is that the evolution of technology and communication has had the effect of making the world smaller, opening up new opportunities for low-cost labour countries and forcing developed countries to “run faster” just to maintain their positions in the globe.
“Those that didn’t adapt to change have failed,” says Davis, pointing out that since 2000 ten of the Fortune 500 are now extinct.
A few years ago, continued Davis, the storage business was talked about in terms of managing servers and arrays or designing SANs whereas today the question is not about backup but rather recovery. The classic case is eBay, which Davis reminded the audience lost US$32 million in just 4 hours when its servers crashed.
There is always the hot site option to mirror applications and data, but Davis asked the audience what should you do when replicating all your data is not an option?
The answer he gave was that we need to evaluate different types of data and give it context. “It is very important that the over all storage strategy takes account of information and data, but data without context is very difficult to manage. So at CA we looked at customer data and noticed that 74 percent of all systems contained duplicated and personal files and photos.”
With shrinking backup windows posing a problem for many businesses, his advice to analyse the data held on corporate servers is wise. He says shrinking backup windows gave rise to vendors offering faster backup, which has worked for some time, but since data growth has outpaced the technology response, this paradigm is being driven to extinction.
“More information has been created in this century than in the entire history of mankind creating information,” he said. “Each year digital data doubles so if you treat data as infrastructure and boxes, you won’t survive. Now we have to be information focussed.”
Davis says putting data within a context will let users determine how important for business that data is which enables you to set access rights, retention schedules and also determine what is really critical for a business to recover immediately. In the case of eBay, financial systems would have been vital to recover immediately, but personnel records would not have been critical. “Therefore you must be able to treat data with respect to the business,” he said.
The question of data storage now also necessitates the involvement of more people in the organisation. The CIO, legal and compliance officers have different needs and therefore the attempt to manage data as part of a monolithic structure will not suffice today’s organisations.