Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Data Management
  •   Control, Deploy and Maintain Data

Details

The amount of data that a business generates and needs to manage is constantly growing. Some data is more valuable than other data and it is very important to be able to identify the business value so that the data can be properly managed throughout its life cycle. The storage resources used to manage this data should properly match the business value of the data. The value of the data can be related to the amount of time it took to produce, what it represents, whether it can be re-created, and whether it must be retained for legal and regulatory purposes.

Low value data that can be easily reproduced might not need to be backed up to offline storage. In other cases, the data might be rarely accessed but might need to be retained for legal reasons. In other cases the data might be critically important and used frequently.

In each of these cases, data alignment issues must be considered to cost effectively store the data while providing the correct level of availability, performance, and risk of data loss all based on the business value of the data. In the case of important but rarely accessed data it might be appropriate to archive the data to offline storage and delete it from online storage to make room for more frequently accessed data. In the case where important data must be available quickly, it likely needs to be stored in online storage as well as protected from data loss by storing it in offline storage. In other cases, regulatory requirements might dictate that data be kept for a certain amount of time and explicit retention controls must be employed to ensure that the end-of-life does not occur prematurely.

IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager can help align costly storage resources with the required business needs of the data in a number of ways. Tivoli Storage Manager supports backup and restore, archive and retrieve, hierarchical storage management (HSM), and regulatory compliance, as well as fine-grained policy that allows an administrator to map different types of data to different types of storage down to the object (such as an individual file) or object type (such as a database) level.

Using tools such as TPC for data, an administrator can identify the types of data that exist in the environment along with the access patterns to that data. Working with people who are responsible for the data and who can provide information on business value, a Tivoli Storage Manager administrator can determine and implement the correct type of protection and policy to reflect the business value.

For example, Tivoli Storage Manager can be configured with a policy that will keep 30 copies of all word documents that originate from a particular set of users on a fast disk on-site and on off-site tape for disaster recovery purposes. Tivoli Storage Manager can be configured to ensure that all data that originates from a group of users is retained for seven years. Tivoli Storage Manager can be configured to archive infrequently used data to offline storage. Tivoli Storage Manager can also be configured to stage data so that it is available on fast disk for a certain amount of time and, if not accessed within a certain amount of time, it will automatically be migrated to slower, more cost-effective tape.

In this way, Tivoli Storage Manager helps to ensure that data is properly aligned with the storage it is located on to minimize risk of loss, to maximize availability, to meet regulatory requirements, to protect against disaster, and to cost effectively manage the location of the data by matching its location to the type of media that best reflects the business value of the data.

For more information you can go to the following location:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/index.jsp?toc=/com.ibm.itstorage.doc/toc.xml

For information on managing the data lifecyle, you can search for:

• "Policy Configuration Scenarios"
• "Managing Storage Pools and Volumes"
• "Using Disaster Recovery Manager"
• HSM

For More Information

For more information about this tool, click on the link for this tool at the top of this page.