What does data management include?

Data management covers the systems and processes an organisation deploys to manage the creation, back-up and recovery, archival (with security) and removal of enterprise data. Data management, at the most fundamental level, is the consolidation of information in a way that is easy to manage, retrieve and maintain. Data here refers to not only structured data, or databases, but also semi-structured (home directories) and unstructured data (word or excel files).

What are the current trends in storage solutions globally?

CIOs today are increasingly being called upon to maximise return on investment by improving asset utilisation, increasing operational efficiency and simplifying the deployment of new technologies. In addition, the need to rapidly adapt the infrastructure to changing business requirements, managing information securely and delivering 24*7 service to end users are other key requirements. We see four key trends in storage:

The industry has increasingly seen the convergence of technologies like NAS and SAN; and storage infrastructure today needs to support multiple operating systems like Unix, Windows and Linux.

Evolution Of Storage Management: Traditionally, IT infrastructures were built based on a business problem that was addressed by a particular application. Servers were chosen based on what worked best with the chosen application and storage was chosen based on what worked best with the chosen server. In this model, the storage provisioning was owned by the servers. Today, dedicated storage is moving to a scalable storage infrastructure, that is tiered based on criticality of data — primary, secondary, archival.