Data Management Solutions"Aligning the value of your stored data to the most appropriate cost-effective storage medium that scales with your business."
Poor data management can greatly hinder an organisation's productivity, drain valuable financial and human resources and strain customer relations. Furthermore, key business applications might be rendered unavailable, and confidential proprietary information can be compromised. Having a centralised, automated data protection strategy reduces the risks an IT department faces and ensures continued timely data recovery. In today's businesses, it is common to see data storage utilisation rates of 35-40% of deployed RAW capacity, and no data management policies in force. Maximising the efficiency of your data storage can depend on how flexible your storage technologies are and how you use them. The value of data being stored by your business naturally decreases over time, but while the value of your data drecreases, the cost of storing it are increasing. Of the total amount of data sitting within your IT infrastructure, chances are only 20% of what is being stored actually changes or gets accessed on a regular basis. The remaining 80% is historical information that is kept online on the off-chance that it will be required again at a later stage.
Here are some industry statistics:
Before the advent of centralised data storage in the form of Storage Area Networks, systems administrators used to perform "clean-out" tasks when filesystems and disks became full with directly attached storage, however today with the vast amounts of consolidated storage being managed these tasks tend to be less evident. The trouble with adopting a data management strategy is knowing how the business uses the data being stored. Typically, there is a disconnect here between the IT departments that have the responsiblity of ensuring that systems & storage are available online, and the business units that use the data. IT departments cannot make the call as to whether data can be deleted, moved or even archived without sitting down with the relevant business units to develop a strategic plan for the management of stored data. Unfortunately, more oftehn that not, it is for this precise reason that the perceived short time win is to just buy more additional storage and expand the SAN. While viewed as a "quick-win", this poses some obvious, and some not-so-obvious issues for the business:
At Origina, our approach is different. How may companies actually want to sell you LESS storage, and help you maximise the utilisation of your current storage landscape and make it work better for you? We do this in a number of ways for our customers. Storage Assessment ServiceOur Storage Assessment Service is a quick, yet comprehensive review of your storage landscape. The assessment provides an analysis as to how your storage infrastructure is currently being utilised. This service is invaluable in providing the foundation for further Information Lifecycle Management and data management initiatives, as well as incorporating future storage strategies. Our consultants interpret the data that is produced following a tools based analysis of your storage and create a detailed report that will form the basis of your future storage management strategy. Once you have a better picture of where you are, and what your requirements are, you can then look at what technologies on the market will align with your strategy. The service is vendor agnostic, and does not "tie you in" to do business with Origina. For further information on the Storage Assessment service click here. What are the benefits of the service?The storage assessment service provides the foundation for the following data management strategies:
How do I know if I need this service?If you cannot answer the following questions with 100% accuracy, then this assessment service was designed specifically for you:
Origina also offers customers a follow on service which builds on this assessment to develop an Information Lifecycle Management strategy for the storage of critical company data. Latest Storage Technologies
Our Innovation & Development department keeps up to date on the latest developments in a range of different technology advancements, and this knowledge is used to shape the services and offerings that we deliver for our customers. One such recent partnership following on from this research is with a company called Compellent. The latest in storage technologies brought to market by Compellent, allow for data to progress automatically down storage tiers within your SAN based on criteria such as how old the data is, and how often that data gets used. The movement of data throughout the tiers is completely automatic and transparent to applications and servers and is done at a block level for superior agility. Your Compellent SAN can have multiple storage tiers of different types of tisk. i.e. you could have Tier 0 based on SSD disk for superior I/O, Tier 1 on fast 15k FC disks, and Tier 3 on slower, but higher capacity SATA drives. You hosted data will then be automatically stored on the most cost-effective means of storage, while at the same time delivering the required level of performance for your business, all at a much reduced cost and significantly less footprint. For further details on all the other technology advantages a Compellent SAN can deliver, click here. Why partner with Origina for data management?:
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By using the latest in storage technology, we can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership while at the time driving the typical utilisation from 40% to close to 90%. While storage products alone are not "silver bullets" to the problem, the right ones to have a strategic value as part of an overall data management strategy. 
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