Sessions in detail

Track 3: Data Retention and Retrieval

Call it regulatory compliance, legal vigilance, good disk management or just plain common sense -- regardless of your company’s motivation, a sound system for retaining and disposing of data is one of the modern requirements of storage management.

Developing a consistent, repeatable and practical set of data retention policies is the first step in the process. Tools such as data classification applications can help automate the process of sorting through the reams of structured and unstructured data to determine its appropriate disposition. While storage managers may consider this a business unit function, as keepers of company’s data they are very much in the mix. And, as such, they need to know about the legal implications, the types of systems best suited for retained data and how encryption can help ensure that data is kept intact in its original form.

Building a Service-oriented Data Protection Strategy

Presented by Jon Toigo, CEO and Managing Principal, Toigo Partners International, and Chairman of the Data Management Institute

Data protection is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. Different data protection methods, ranging from WAN-based data replication and clustering to tape backup and restore, are available to provide the data recovery capability that a business process or application requires. Matching data protection service levels to business requirements is not only a rational approach, but also a cost effective one.

The challenge, however, to service level-based data protection provisioning is the multiplicity of data protection methods that must be monitored and managed. How can we integrate tape backup and disk to disk replication services under a common monitoring umbrella, simplifying the management role? How can we facilitate the on-going testing of recovery scenarios – through a combination of simulated and real time testing – to ensure that service levels can be met even as the volume of data being protected changes? How can we wrangle third party hardware- and software-based data protection schemes into a coherent facility for centralized monitoring and management? Toigo sets out the challenge and examines potential solutions.