Web Operations

Chapter 14. Storage

Anoop Nagwani

ONE OF THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW AS A STORAGE PROFESSIONAL is that data is your single most important, irreplaceable business asset. Your data may consist of piles of financial transactions that flow through your trading systems, the source code repository that your company uses to build its killer app, the photos, videos, and email messages of hundreds of millions of users, or the state of the Internet's virtual farms and mafias. No matter what industry you find yourself in, your users and your company have entrusted you as the guardian of this precious asset.

These days, the ability to access data effectively and instantly is almost certainly the lifeline of your business. It's how your business satisfies the demands for its products, makes money, pays its employees, and gives value to its shareholders. The loss of this data could very well cause your business to go off the air completely in the worst case, or tarnish its brand in the best case. Whether your data lives in the cloud, in your company's datacenters, or some combination thereof, it is your respect for this data, your mastery of storage concepts, your attention to detail—and at times your natural paranoia—that will help you ensure that a sound data infrastructure is in place, that information keeps flowing, and that your business continues to operate.

Data Asset Inventory

The first thing you should do when you start a new storage job is to make sure you know where all your data is. Usually, ...