NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP on
STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
01/10/02
Today's focus: How critical is your data?

Dear Wincenty Kaminski,

In this issue:

* Classification levels for your data
* Links related to storage
* Featured reader resource

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Today's focus: How critical is your data?

By Mike Karp

It has been said (by me, in a philosophical moment early in the
morning on New Year's Day) that "life is a series of
accommodations." Never mind what caused that sentiment: at
least in the data center, that is probably a truism.

The second worst of these data center accommodations is
probably the process forced upon us when we realize that
backups are not going to be completed during the prescribed
backup window. We then have to make what often is a no-win
decision: continue with the backup (thus running beyond the
allotted window, and probably degrading performance on
production systems) or stop the backup process when the backup
window closes (leaving what may be business critical data at
risk of being unrecoverable).

The worst scenario, however, occurs when we have to decide just
how fast a recovery we have to be prepared to do on our data.

We talked two weeks ago about understanding the types of data
on our systems, the idea being that with that intelligence we
could do some intelligent decision making prior to going into
the backup. At that point we discussed the usefulness of
flagging some file types (MP3, for example) as not worthy of
being backed up. Hopefully, by identifying such files we would
make a first step toward reducing the sheer volume of backed up
data.

Many enterprises have a method of classifying data not based on
file type, but rather on some other measure. Most useful among
these is a metric that looks at data in terms of its
criticality to business continuance. This ought to be a measure
with a much more useful focus than just knowing about the file
extension.

Broadly speaking (and with apologies to existential psychologist
Abraham Maslow), such a system looks at data on a disk as falling
into one of four categories:

* Mission-critical information (the equivalent of "air" - you
  can't live without it).

* Business-critical information (think of this as "water" - you
  can only go without it for a very short period of time).

* Non-critical information ("food" - you can go without it, but
  not for long).

* "Unclassified data" (probably mostly junk food, but you don't
  really know).

What goes into these classifications will vary between sites,
as will the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). In some cases, the
RTO for mission-critical data may be as long as several
minutes, while in others (particularly those relying on e-
commerce) the situation may be seen as life threatening after a
few seconds.

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To contact Mike Karp:

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates (http://www.enterprisemanagement.com) in Boulder,
Colo., an analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively
on enterprise management. He works out of Portsmouth, N.H., and
Westboro, Mass., and can be reached via e-mail at
mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com
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RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

Archive of the Storage newsletter:
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/stor/index.html
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