Storage and Availability Management

Thin provisioning and data deduplication are strategies for reducing the growth rate and space consumption of new data or finding more efficient ways of storing it. These strategies must be combined with addressing unnecessary data storage in order to fully utilize existing assets. The largest container of unnecessary and obsolete data is unstructured data.

Email is the biggest unstructured information pain point today and a top target for data reduction via archiving. The Radicati Group estimates that the volume of email will increase by 30 percent from 2006 to 2010. Although storage costs continue to fall on a per-unit basis, email is often stored many times in the email server, on the user’s PC, in a Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Notes file, on file servers, saved in SharePoint, and in backups. Because of the excessive storage consumed, the cost of power and cooling is also commensurately higher.

Across all business industries and public sector...