However, the high cost of these technologies limit uptake by smaller companies. Incremental investment in a scaleable solution - along with a clearer understanding of the benefits of Storage Resource Management (SRM), Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is expected to assist SMEs to ease complexity and build well-structured storage architectures that will enable growth.
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Explains Jose Coelho, technology centre manager at DCC: "Rather than take a gargantuan and possibly premature leap to enterprise storage and information management solutions, a needs analysis can highlight ‘smart alternatives that will boost efficiency and management capabilities within a storage environment that more closely matches a company's immediate needs and requirements.
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"Companies have a tendency to just increase storage capacity, without calculating the soft cost of labour and the business cost of downtime," notes Coelho. "To increase manageability, users should first consolidate their storage into a central storage device. Once they can see what they already have in terms of capacity and stored data, storage expansion, automation and control become easier."
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SRM, HSM and ILM can briefly be defined as follows:
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Storage Resource Management (SRM) optimises the efficiency and speed of available storage capacity, networks, drives. It applies management best practices to data storage, collection, back-up and recovery, as well as performance analysis and storage virtualisation. Provisioning, forecasting, maintenance and user authentication, security and network expansion are all enabled with the implementation of these solutions, which generally include a software and hardware component.
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Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is policy based management of file backup and archiving using different storage media - eg, Raid, optical, tape. Each storage media has a different cost and retrieval speed and storage can be automated to optimise available capacity and meet retrieval requirements on non-critical information. With the implementation of HSM, migration of information from one storage format to another is transparent, as is retrieval.
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Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a policy-based approach to managing the flow of data, from creation to initial storage and, ultimately, deletion. It assists in the creation of tiers of information according to specified policies. These could automate migration to different media according to criticality of stored information. ILM includes user practices and allows for more complex storage criteria than age and access requirements, such as unique customer number.
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Of these solutions, the most accessible to the SME is SRM. "Rather than throw another R50 000 at storage to increase capacity, an investment of approximately R100 000 will buy a company an SRM solution that will allow it to optimise existing capacity and boost performance through better management of the storage infrastructure," advises Raul Del Fabbro, storage division manager at DCC.Ê

"Users who are unsure of how to proceed can view storage management solutions in action in real time at DCC's technology labs," says Del Fabbro. "Our resellers are also able to provide on-site evaluations and advise companies which solutions would be most beneficial for them. Smart decisions taken now could provide considerable future advantage."
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