So you want to know how to prepare your current environment for the future? First thing, it is very important to have a baseline of your current performance. A baseline is a performance reference point that should include current activity in your environment along with the performance of your servers. The capture of and analysis of this performance data should be an ongoing process so you can monitor trends in both resource utilization and user activity based on the comparison of your baseline data and current data. With this information in hand you’ll be able to see how your system resources (CPU, memory, disk, network, etc.) scale with your user activity.
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We often talk about system or network security and best practices for those types of technologies. Obviously, they are important; otherwise we wouldn’t talk about them. But, all in all, what are we protecting with those types of technology? That’s right, the data. Too often, we spend a lot of time on building a big perimeter wall, and not enough time putting a lock on the filing cabinet.
Data security is very important, and needs the attention that other forms of security get. Here are some basic fundamentals in Data Security:
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It might seem obvious, but those with less data have arguably simpler storage requirements. Perhaps not so obvious is how many different areas can be impacted as data grows. Backup storage, backup duration, restoration, inter server network connectivity, DR plans, system disk I/O performance, and (of course) your primary storage. More often than not, a review of one’s data reveals things that can be archived or deleted. Some examples:
- E-commerce sites might look to save space by archiving older orders or discontinued products.
- Data reporting/analysis systems might be able to archive or delete the raw data that the reports or analysis are built from.
- Those affected by regulatory compliance should understand their requirements for keeping logs or other items “online” versus “available”. In many cases, only the most recent items need to be kept online. Older items can be archived.
Case study
A popular number crunching website used to try and keep everything online. This caused their database to grow until performance suffered and backups became unwieldy. Their database alone topped out at 300GB! INetU was asked to assist with tuning their database and scaling their backups. INetU found that over 75% of the data within the database was not regularly accessed – especially older than 3 months.
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Shopped for storage lately? There’s a seemingly endless list of options, from full-blown enterprise level high-performance SAN/NAS units to big cheap disks in simple enclosures that connect directly to one computer via USB or eSATA and even cloud storage. How do you choose the right one for your storage needs?
When faced with this dilemma, I always ask myself these five questions:
- How many people need to access the data simultaneously?
- How large is the data?
- What is the impact of the data being lost or corrupted?
- How long do I need to keep the data?
- Where do I need to access the data from?
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