Information Lifecycle Management · Information Lifecycle Management and Storage Version 1.1 CINTRA...

Best Practice Guide

1 Information Lifecycle Management and Storage Version 1.1 © CINTRA 2016www.cintra.com

Information Lifecycle Managment

Supercharge your business by taking control of your information managementCloud computing

Do more with your data

Information Lifecycle Management

Combine Information Lifecycle Management with tiered storage architecture to unleash better customer experiences, cost savings and greater business agility.

Best Practice Guide

Information Lifecycle Managment Supercharge your business by taking control of your information management

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Best Practice Guide

Contents

01 Foreword

02 Why your business is (probably) drowning in a data deluge

06 Information Lifecycle Management: Harness the power of your data

07 Tiered storage architecture demystified

10 Oracle-on-Oracle: how you can benefit

Best Practice Guide



Supercharge your business by taking control of your information management

There’s a problem, though. Most business’s IT architectures simply aren’t set up to handle this data deluge in a sustainable way. Continuing in the same vein will lead to ballooning costs, deteriorating customer experiences and ever-longer times to get new products to market.

So what do you do? How do you turn information into an asset that adds value, as opposed to something that drags you down?

The answer is to take control of all the data in your business through a comprehensive Information Lifecycle Management plan, covering accessibility, retention, protection, security and disaster recovery requirements of your data.

This should be complemented by an architecture containing different types of storage, to ensure information resides in the most appropriate and cost-effective location. The combination will ensure you understand

the business value of the information in your organization and have it available when it’s needed, without breaking the bank.

Information Lifecycle Management is therefore a strategic part of your organization’s governance and management policies.

This guide looks in depth at why the status quo isn’t sustainable, explains how to improve your Information Lifecycle Management in achievable steps and looks at how this enables you to exploit tiered storage architecture. As part of this, we’ll explain some of the additional benefits Oracle database customers can enjoy by using Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances in their architecture.

Foreword

Connected devices, digital services, social media, other Big Data and regulators’ requirements are fueling an incredible rise in the amount of information in your business. This represents an amazing opportunity for you to better understand the market and your customers, and develop improved products and services that enable you to thrive.

David Speirs, Founder Catalyst Business Solutions and Gartner Executive Partner Associate

With over 30 years’ of delivering international IT programs for Seagram, Menzies Distribution, Price Waterhouse, Babcock and The Scotsman. Speirs provides strategic advice to Public and Private organizations undergoing digital transformation programs.



Supercharge your business by taking control of your information managementBest Practice Guide

Why your business is (probably) drowning in a data deluge

In the age of Big Data and the Internet of Things, information is the asset that can unlock new revenue opportunities and cost savings for your business. Your information is a true goldmine, but to achieve any benefits, you need the tools and processes in place to manage it and extract value from it. And managing information is something few organizations do as well as they could, which ultimately costs them money and customers.

If this applies to you, you’re not alone. We’ve seen large and small businesses facing similar challenges around sustainability of their information management in an age of connected devices and data-driven digital services. Do any of the following sound familiar?

Your data is either on expensive storage or inaccessible archives

You’ve invested in a high-performance enterprise storage area network (SAN), which has become a general-purpose home for all your data, regardless of what it’s needed for. This means your frequently used transactional data resides on the same storage – or even in the same primary database – as your less-frequently accessed reporting data, and even-less-frequently used backups and data you keep long-term for regulatory purposes.

In the same way you wouldn’t store Christmas decorations that get used once a year in the middle of the lounge you use every day, it’s poor use of your prime IT real estate to use it for low-priority or infrequently accessed data. Doing so is expensive and will significantly

Are you facing a constant battle to control or take advantage of your business information? You’re not alone.

Abdul Sheikh, Chief Technology Officer, Cintra Corporation

Co-founder and CTO of multi-award winning Cintra Corporation – a global Oracle Platinum partner and Enterprise Architecture specialist operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia.


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degrade application, database and backup performance. This means you won’t be able to deliver good customer experiences or be as agile a business as you’d like.

And then, just when it’s most inconvenient, your primary storage will reach capacity, leading to opportunity cost and frustration. At this point, three things tend to happen:

1. Data gets moved to less accessible archive storage, regardless of when or how it might need to be used. As a result, you may not have information to hand when your business asks for it, leading to missed opportunities

2. Worse, users delete information without considering its value or whether there’s a regulatory requirement to keep it. The result? Wasted time trying to restore data, missed business opportunities or compliance headaches

3. You have to increase the capacity of your prime storage, which is expensive and time-consuming for your IT department. And in the data-driven world, this is a cost you’re going to face again and again. Moreover, if you carry on like this, your IT team will spend more and more of its time just keeping the lights on, rather than genuinely adding value

You can’t derive the insights you want from your data

You’re collecting lots of information about how your products and services are used, from real-time social media reactions to data about user journeys on your website. But you haven’t got the means to affordably or systematically delve into this goldmine to draw out insights that could drive better decision-making across your business.

if you’re storing all your data in your main transactional database, this won’t be tuned to the needs of your Business Intelligence teams, so running queries on it will not be practical for them or for your customers.

It takes time to get new products and services to market

Once you have a great idea for a new service or product, you need the agility to develop and test it as quickly as possible, using an environment that mirrors your live production one. But do you find it takes a long time to have these environments set up or refreshed with the latest data from your production systems, or that they impact on the performance of your live services?

As a result, are your development teams using environments based on old copies of your important data, because creating new ones regularly isn’t an option? Do issues arise at go-live because the test environments aren’t representative of your production areas?

In the age of Big Data and the Internet of Things, information is the asset that can unlock new revenue opportunities and cost savings for your business

Needing to do more with less

Everyone is seeing their budgets frozen or reduced, including your IT department. And yet they’re facing an ever-bigger task to service the business’s requirement to store, manage and access increasing quantities of data. Something will have to give if you’re to avoid running into trouble.

Legacy infrastructure and sub-standard virtualization

You’ve got a lot of legacy infrastructure and perhaps haven’t been able to realize your goal of full virtualization, meaning that you’re actively managing (and licensing) two types of environment, neither of which is being used to its full potential or delivering the business value it’s capable of. Continuing to operate in this way is an operational and financial drain on your IT department and further hampers its ability to deliver value to your business.

So what’s the answer?

With digital services and the Internet of Things funneling a greater volume and variety of information into your business than ever before, these challenges around storing it sustainably will come increasingly into focus. The result will be growing strain on your infrastructure, systems and people, which will reduce your agility and increase risk.

The good news is that you can take steps to alleviate these problems. The key is to put in place an Information Lifecycle Management strategy and plan, complemented by tiered storage architecture. These will help tackle the issues highlighted above and more. We’ll look at what this involves and how you can get started in the next piece.

Regulation is becoming stricter

Regulators across many sectors are becoming increasingly demanding, in terms of what information you keep and how long for. This means you need to be more careful than ever when looking after your data, so that you can produce it when required.

To ensure they comply, many organizations are keeping long-term data on their primary storage, simply to ensure it’s accessible if needed. Just think what this is costing today – and how this cost will increase forever.

Why your business is (probably) drowning in a data deluge (continued)

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Information Lifecycle Management: Harness the power of your data

Manage your information to thrive in the age of digital transformation and the Internet of Things

Every organization, however big or small, relies on data and information. You need these assets to develop new products, offer high-quality customer service and comply with regulations. This means you must be able to store, manage and protect information, so that it’s there to support your business as soon as it’s required.

Information Lifecycle Management

The way to do this is by putting in place a comprehensive Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy and approach. ILM is there to look after any information that passes through your organization, from the moment it’s created or received through storage and use to remediation. It governs things like how, where and by whom data can be used, information security, compliance, availability requirements and data lineage. It affects your whole organization and everyone who works for you, and is something you

need to do on an ongoing basis.

A critical strand of your ILM strategy must be around Big Data. With so much potentially valuable unstructured data available to analyze, you need a plan for how to store it and make it available. At present, it can’t simply sit alongside your transactional or structured reporting data; this would have too great an impact on

your customer experience, business agility and finances. Big Data requires special treatment.

Categorize your data

A central pillar of ILM, which will help you overcome some of the issues we discussed in the previous article, is to categorize your data according to business value. At the top level, you’ll have everything critical to your day-to-day running: transactional data in databases that you’re constantly writing to. This needs to be tuned for optimal customer experience, so must be lean and highly available. You can use appropriate levels of compression according to the lineage of the data.

Then there’s the data you report from (both regularly and, below it, occasional-use and Big Data). This is much more static and you’re typically reading from rather than writing to it. While you can apply some compression to this data, performance

needs to be tuned to enable your business intelligence analysts to get answers to queries as quickly as possible.

Below this, you should have another tier that rarely gets read from or written to: data you’re required to keep for compliance purposes, perhaps. While this still needs to be available, performance is less important, so you can apply much greater compression.


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The main purpose of categorizing your information is to enable you to take advantage of tiered storage architecture, with each level tuned to the specific performance required from the type of information it holds.

Reference architectures

For each category of data, your enterprise architecture teams should put together reference lifecycle architectures that guide how information of that category is handled throughout its life. These ensure you’re consistent in your approach and that data is given the care and attention it requires, based on its value to your business.

Partitioning your databases

Even with best-of-breed modern hardware and software, database and application performance can degrade as your databases grow, leading to poor customer experiences. At the same time, making backups and clone environments for development and testing becomes more time-consuming and takes up more space. It’s therefore vital you keep your main production database as lean as possible by systematically moving selected data to archive databases and online archive storage.

To do this, you need to partition your databases. This enables you to easily move chunks of data out of your production database without affecting its performance. Periodically trimming an unpartitioned database will have such an impact on the

customer experience that you’ll end up needing to do it at times when usage is lowest, such as the middle of the night. And for global, 24-hour businesses, there may never be a ‘right’ time to do this. Partitioning frees you from these problems.

People and responsibilities

ILM is the responsibility of everyone who works for you, and should be driven by a multi-disciplined team with representatives from your IT, security, compliance and legal departments, as well as key information owners from across your business.

Implementing it successfully may also require role changes and closer collaboration between teams. For example, the role of database administrator (DBA) needs to become more a database architect, with responsibility for the server and storage a database runs on, as well as the database itself. This is because there will be a need to facilitate the movement of data between storage tiers at appropriate times: a single database may be divided. Other organizations are opting to add a layer of architects to complement their DBAs. These architects have responsibility for infrastructure as well as the compliance and management of data.

Similarly, your application teams must fully understand the data their applications are creating and consuming, and its ILM requirements. This could be achieved through closer and more formal collaboration between your application and database

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Information Lifecycle Management: Harness the power of your data (continued)

teams, or by setting up a dedicated ‘Application DBA’ function.

And as you start to take advantage of tiered storage architecture within the context of ILM, administering it will typically become the responsibility of the DBA rather than your storage administrators, who’ll be freed up to focus on the top-level, high-performance hardware. Handing the DBAs control and automating the process of setting up test and development environments will give you greater agility. If this needed to go via the storage administrators every time, you slow the process down and add unnecessary overhead.

Furthermore, because your ILM strategy could involve storing certain data beyond the boundaries of your business (such as in the cloud), you need a dedicated security officer or team to oversee and implement

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Information Lifecycle Management: Harness the power of your data (continued)

appropriate information assurance.

ILM is a wide-ranging area that will ultimately apply to (and benefit) every part of your business. But to implement it across the board in one go would be impossible. Instead, combine the outcomes of your initial assessment with your immediate business requirements. Are there particular pain points that are limiting your agility, profitability or customer experience? Has your auditor identified areas for improvement? With this knowledge, you can make an informed decision on where to take your ILM up a notch.

Enjoying the benefits of ILM with tiered storage architecture

Once you have your data categorized, your databases suitably partitioned and your ILM procedures in place for the selected area of your business, you can start to take advantage of tiered storage architecture. Used correctly, this can save you money, help deliver better customer experiences and create the agility you so desire. It’s this we look at in the next piece.

The age of Big Data and the Internet of Things, information is the asset that can unlock new revenue opportunities and cost savings for your business. Your information is a true goldmine, but to achieve any benefits, you need the tools and processes in place

to manage it and extract value from it. And managing information is something few organizations do as well as they could, which ultimately costs them money and customers.

If this applies to you, you’re not alone. We’ve seen large and small businesses facing similar challenges around sustainability of their information management in an age of connected devices and data-driven digital services. Do any of the following sound familiar?

ILM is a wide-ranging area that will ultimately apply to (and benefit) every part of your business. To implement it in one go would be impossible. Instead, combine the outcomes of your assessment with your immediate business requirements

Getting started or improving your Information Lifecycle Management

You’ll probably have some ILM procedures in operation already. These can form the basis of any improvements you make. To identify where you’d benefit most from ILM enhancements, start by assessing your current situation, asking questions such as:

• What is your enterprise data quality strategy?

• What is your Master Data Management strategy?

• How does your data currently map to industry-standard canonical data models/design patterns?

• How do you handle data discovery for structured and unstructured data analysis?

• How do you assign business value to legacy data?

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Tiered storage architecture demystified

Understand tiered storage architecture and why your business needs it

Enjoying the benefits of ILM with tiered storage architecture

At home, we store things based on how often we use them: cutlery and crockery we need every day goes in the prime kitchen cupboards where they’re easily got at. The vacuum cleaner, which we may use once a week, goes in the under-stairs cupboard – not prime storage space but still easily accessible. Big suitcases, which we use a couple of times a year, go in the attic, where getting them out involves a bit more effort and time.

The data in your business should be treated in exactly the same way. There’s little point in keeping information you rarely need on expensive, high-performance flash storage. However, if your only other option is to archive onto tape, access is too cumbersome. This is why a multi-tiered storage architecture is so valuable, because it gives you a greater number of options, enabling you to select the most appropriate, based on cost and performance requirements.


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Tiered storage architecture demystified (continued)

Broadly speaking, enterprise data storage architecture can be divided into four tiers:

Your prime real estateThe top tier of storage is where you keep your critical, active data that involves lots of write operations. This information needs to be instantly available, so high performance and low latency are essential. Your flash-based storage area network (SAN) would sit in this category and could be complemented by in-memory technology.

Less cost, more capacityThe second level of storage is for data that still needs to be readily available but where you can trade off a little performance for much lower costs. As a result, you get access to affordable, high-capacity storage. Tier two, which typically takes the form of network-attached storage (NAS), has a range of use cases, each of which enables you to implement varying degrees of compression. This is where you’d store the less active data in your database infrastructure, for reporting, data warehousing and decision-support systems. It can also be home to your non-production environments, such as test and development, or even certain backups.

Big DataWhile your frequently used reporting data should reside on tier-two storage, you’re likely to have ad hoc requirements to seek insights from your wider dataset, including unstructured data. You may not want to ask these questions very often, or you may not know how useful the answers will be, so you need a low-cost platform that keeps large volumes and varieties of historical data available in a way you can analyze when required. Currently, tier three is likely to be distributed, Big Data storage. However, emerging solutions are bringing down the cost of storing and analyzing Big Data at tier two level. This trend could eventually elevate this type of information onto your tier two storage platform, rather than requiring its own, dedicated tier.

ArchivesSome data has to be kept, even though you’re rarely going to access it. Performance and even availability aren’t important, so you can minimize the cost of keeping this data by using archive storage, such as tape or archive cloud, with full compression. If you’re happy storing your data beyond the boundaries of your organization, cloud typically offers lower administrative overheads, faster restores and greater reliability than tape.

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Multitiered storage architecture is so valuable,

because it gives you a greater number of options, enabling you to select the most appropriate, based on cost and performance

requirements

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Tiered storage architecture demystified (continued)

Moreover, if you use any Oracle databases or applications, these can be configured to work with Oracle Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances to deliver even greater benefits

Active management

Like with all ILM activities, tiered storage architecture needs to be actively managed. This will help maintain the benefits it can deliver. We’ll come to these shortly.

While the management activity needs to be overseen by people, much can be automated, including the movement of data between storage tiers at appropriate times. You should set up business-driven rules that control this and review them periodically to ensure they’re optimized to meet your requirements.

The advantages of tiering

By continually distributing your data across a range of storage hardware as part of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) plan, you’ll be able to create a sustainable and high-performing architecture that truly supports – rather than hampers – your business. Here are some of the key benefits of tiering:

Keep cost under control

Continually adding storage to your tier one hardware is expensive and will become unsustainable in the data deluge being brought on by the Internet of Things. By systematically moving lower-priority data onto appropriate cheaper, lower-tier storage, you’ll vastly slow the need to expand your expensive prime real estate, resulting in a more sustainable cost model.

Better customer experiences

By moving old data out of your tier-one database onto other storage, you’ll maintain or even enhance performance of your critical applications and services. As a result, you’ll be able to offer consistently high-quality experiences to your customers and staff.

Similarly, you can improve the experience for those in your business who occasionally need to access older data by keeping this on more available archive storage rather than offline tape.

Greater agility

When set up and maintained in the right way, tiered storage architecture can help you get new products and services to market more quickly. A leaner production database makes creating development environments faster, while having access to large amounts of lower-tier storage enables you to set up multiple development and test environments without having to justify the use of tier one capacity.

More efficient business users

ILM and tiered storage architecture together put more power in the hands of your business users. Instead of the IT department dictating what data gets archived (without necessarily understanding how that data is used), the business users can identify what is most important to their activities and categorize it.

This will ensure it automatically resides on the correct level of storage to enable them to do their jobs as efficiently as possible.

As a consequence, if any of your teams has service level agreements (SLAs) to meet, well-managed tiered storage architecture can make it easier for them to achieve these.

Magnifying these benefits

Provided you design and deliver your tiered data storage architecture as part of a wider ILM strategy, it can make a real difference to your business on so many levels.

Moreover, if you use any Oracle databases or applications, these can be configured to work with Oracle Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances to deliver even greater benefits. In our final article, we’ll look specifically at Oracle’s storage and explain how it can help you get more value from your existing Oracle investments.

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Oracle-on-Oracle: how you can benefit



Discover how using Oracle Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances with your Oracle databases and applications can drive even greater value

The benefits to your business of categorizing data and storing different grades on different tiers of hardware are many. Greater efficiency and agility, more sustainable costs and better customer experiences are just a few of the ways an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy and approach, combined with tiered storage architecture, can make a noticeable difference.

What’s more, if you already use Oracle databases and applications, you can magnify these benefits by using them with Oracle’s own Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances and configuring the environment to support your business’s unique requirements.

In doing so, you’ll be creating an enterprise IT stack where your critical hardware and software comes from the same vendor and is engineered to work together. Oracle is the only enterprise IT vendor that offers this all-encompassing ecosystem approach. We’ll look at some of the benefits of this below, and note that some of the features we touch on require licenses.

Oracle’s storage ecosystem

Oracle offers a range of Storage Appliances and services, each tailored to a specific purpose. We’ve grouped the main ones together, to help you understand where they

fit and what you might use them for:

The benefits of Oracle-on-Oracle

Easy to integrate

Because Oracle hardware and cloud services are engineered to work with Oracle software and databases, integration is typically much faster and simpler than with non-Oracle storage. As an example, we’ve seen deployments of ZFS with Oracle database completed in around a fifth of the time it can take to integrate other vendors’ storage with the same databases.

Your databases and backups take up less space

While you can achieve Oracle database compression levels of two or three times on most storage platforms, Oracle hardware enables you to further reduce the storage footprint of your databases and backups. This is thanks to Hybrid Columnar Compression, which can reduce the size of your active data by up to 12x, and your static data by as much as 50x.

Many businesses are already using Hybrid Columnar Compression on their Exadata appliances but then have to decompress data to back it up to non-Oracle storage. This isn’t the case if you use ZFS or FS1, meaning you could cut the size of your backups quite considerably (not to mention the time it takes to run them).

• Tier one: Exadata, Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) and FS1 Flash Storage System

• Tier two: ZFS Storage Appliance

• Tier three: Big Data Appliance

• Tier four: Oracle Backup Cloud Services, Oracle Archive Cloud Services and its various tape arrays


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Oracle-on-Oracle: how you can benefit (continued)

Moreover, ZFS enables you to create multiple Oracle database clones for test and development without requiring large amounts of storage or impacting the performance of the production database. We recently set up an environment for a customer where 50 developers each required a clone of the 2TB Oracle production database every morning. Where some platforms would require 100TB (2TB x 50 copies) to accommodate this, ZFS required just 2.2TB. This is thanks to its ‘copy-on-write’ approach, which enables it to create multiple Oracle database clones based on a single copy of the data, with only incremental changes requiring additional space.

Higher speeds Drastically cutting the amount of data being moved around is one way a fully Oracle ecosystem can deliver better performance. Another is the out-of-the-box high-speed InfiniBand connectivity to link your tier-one Exadata with a tier-two ZFS appliance. This will give you up to four times the network bandwidth compared to any other storage platform used with Exadata. As a result, ZFS connected via InfiniBand is the fastest backup solution for Exadata: an entry-level ZFS appliance can back up at 10TB per hour and restore at 9TB per hour, while a top-end ZFS with a full complement of drives can achieve speeds as high as 40TB per hour for backup and 30TB per hour for restore.

Using the InfiniBand spine also enables you to scale your setup vertically and horizontally without affecting database or application performance.

Greater business agility Boosting speed and reducing the size of your Oracle databases and backups combine to deliver greater business agility.

For example, using ZFS to rapidly clone Oracle databases helps you get products and

services to market faster, because you can quickly and inexpensively set up development and test environments that mirror production. In many businesses, doing this would be too time-consuming or disruptive to contemplate, but with ZFS, it can take a matter of seconds to clone a database. The organization above that creates 50 clones of the large production database every day does this in just 10 minutes, as a result of its ‘Oracle-on-Oracle’ approach. Using production clones for development means you’ll encounter fewer issues when products and services move into pre-production and production, thereby speeding up time to market.

Intelligent active management To remain effective, tiered storage architecture needs to be managed actively, and Oracle’s hardware offers a number of options that make this easier for you. For example, FS1, which itself contains multiple tiers of storage, can monitor how data is being used, learn from the usage patterns and move data to different tiers within the appliance to optimize cost and performance.

There’s also the Intelligent Storage Protocol, which works with Oracle database 12c and the ZFS appliance, making the two aware of each other and moving data around automatically to optimize database performance and, by extension, user experience.

Single management portal If you’re using Oracle servers, databases or applications, your IT team will be familiar with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). When you add Oracle storage to the mix, this too can be administered through OEM, thereby streamlining the way your teams work by providing a single window through which to manage things.

THE BIGGER PICTURE These benefits should give you an idea of the additional value you can get by using multiple types of Oracle hardware with your Oracle databases and applications. But as we explained in a previous article, this type of tiered storage architecture needs to be part of an organization-wide ILM strategy that categorizes and manages information based on its value to your business. This will create the conditions where tiered storage architecture can make a genuine difference to you and your customers, both now and in the future.


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Your pathway to successCintra is a multi-award winning Global Oracle Platinum partner and Enterprise Architecture specialist operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Cintra focuses on enterprises undergoing digital transformation strategies in Retail, Financial Services, Gaming and other verticals; becoming a trusted partner for organizations investing in Oracle Business Technology – delivering value by helping architect the digital enterprise.

www.cintra.com

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Supercharge your business by taking control of your information managementBest Practice Guide

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Information Lifecycle Management · Information Lifecycle Management and Storage Version 1.1 CINTRA...

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