Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information in Classic, Virtualized, and Cloud Environments, Second Edition

Chapter 15

Managing the Storage Infrastructure

Key Concepts

Monitoring and Alerts

Management Platform Standards

Chargeback

Information Lifecycle Management

Storage Tiering

Unprecedented growth of information, proliferation of applications, complexity of business processes, and requirements of 24×7 availability of information have put increasingly higher demands on the storage infrastructure.

Managing storage infrastructure efficiently is a key that enables organizations to address these challenges and ensures continuity of business.

Comprehensive storage infrastructure management requires the implementation of intelligent tools and robust processes to meet the required service levels. These tools enable performance tuning, data protection, access control, centralized auditing, and meeting compliance requirements. They also ensure the consolidation and better utilization of existing resources, thereby limiting the need for excessive ongoing investment on infrastructure. The management process defines procedures for efficient handling of various operations, such as incident, problem, and change requests. It is imperative to manage not just the individual components, but also the infrastructure end-to-end due to the components' interdependency.

Storage infrastructure management is also composed of strategies, such as Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) that optimizes the storage investment while meeting the service levels. ILM helps to manage information based on its value to ...