Often companies with several locations and partially centralized IT face the problem, that due to performance reasons, external locations store unstructured data on local file servers, instead of storing data centrally. Based on the strong data growth individual locations have capacity bottlenecks. Thus responsible IT managers have to take site-specific measures, which conflict with a unified IT structure and additionally require very high administrative efforts.
In addition the obligation to fulfill compliance requirements for archiving at external locations is often carried out with locally established methods and approaches. This leads to an uncontrolled growth of archive solutions which can hardly be managed centrally. Thus the resulting insufficient archiving and retention policy breaches can have serious consequences for the responsible managers.
With structure, system and intelligent software against the Big Data Chaos
Companies can remedy this situation by migrating their inactive data from an external to a centralized storage location and by simultaneously maintaining the data access. Thus a reliable automated archiving of relevant data from external locations can be implemented.
PoINT Storage Manager focuses on a three-tiered storage architecture. Existing storage capacities can be used without interrupting ongoing operations. This can be implemented by the so-called agents of PoINT Storage Manager, which control the file server of external locations. Thus the software of PoINT offers a rule-based data management with automated and transparent data migration and archiving as well as migration between the different tiers. The expensive primary storage (external file servers) of the performance tier is offloaded by migrating inactive data - and these are normally up to 80% of the total data volume - of data stored on the more economic secondary storage within the capacity or archive tier (centralized storage).
Therefore external file servers get rid of inactive data, that directly have effects on the back-up processes: They become significantly accelerated by the small data volume. Additionally PoINT Storage Manager generates a standardization of the different storage systems on different locations, thus any further capacity-related extensions are irrelevant. By this software solution users are independent of the storage system manufacturer and are able to change by migration at any time. Thus a unified, transparent archiving for all external locations can be realized and the administration can be significantly simplified.