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EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STO MGMT I LEARNED FROM MOM
By John Cloyd

The beleaguered IT Manager should add "stretching the budget" and following his mother's advise to his job description. While the Washington economists may confidently prognosticate about the growing economy, that growth has yet to trickle down into the budgets of many data processing centers. Most managers of technology are coping with growing storage demand and stagnate or shrinking personnel and budget resources.

It is easy to be a technology genius in an era of unlimited budgets. Successfully supporting your company's business goals during times of intense competition, cost cutting and resource scarcity separates the average technical manager from the true business leader. As luck would have it, sage advice on how to effectively manage this dilemma is available from an unlikely source -- your mother. It turns out that when she sent you into the world, she equipped you with life rules that can be applied to your storage challenges. One reminder before you embark on your quest to recover disk space. "Make a backup." Murphy's Law is alive and well in IT; taking the time to make a backup tape at the beginning of this exercise may save you a world of grief later.

"Do the right thing," your mother always told you, and she was right. For the storage manager this means making sure you have those things on your storage systems that you ought to have, and making sure you don't have those things on your storage systems that you shouldn't. As IT professionals, we are all too often concerned only with making sure we have enough space, but we don't critically look at what we are being asked to store. In times of scarce resources we can no longer afford the luxury of not critically evaluating what is on our disks.

Easy targets for recovering storage are the user directories of employees no longer with the company. Log files, .TMP and .BAK files grow on disks like weeds, find them and dig them out. Projects that are no longer active also are potentially lucrative areas to free up old disk space. CAD drawings, design specs and project notes for the Gee-Whiz 9000 that your company introduced in December of 1994 probably don't still need to be on the disk. Many employees backup their laptops and desktops to the corporate servers. Get rid of all but the most current copy. Do a search on your corporate servers for extra copies of different versions of Windows operating systems (Taskmgr.exe is a good file to check for). Get rid of the ones that have been erroneously copied up to a server as part of a workstation backup. Ditto for extra copies of productivity tools like word processors, spreadsheets and database tools. If you need to reinstall these products you will probably want to reinstall them from a CD instead of the network backup.

"Don't keep things that aren't yours." Multimedia files are some of the largest files found on computers today. They also often belong to somebody else. In addition to taking up valuable space on your server, they may expose your company to legal liability. (Does the company really need the entire Grateful Dead MP3 collection on a server? What is the company liability?). Look for MP3, JPG, AVI, WMV and others. (For a fairly complete list of multimedia files, open the Windows Media Player, go to "File", "Open" and open the file types).

"Clean up." Here is where some heavy lifting may need to be done, but the payoffs can be spectacular. The most obvious candidate for a thorough spring-cleaning is your email system. Encourage users to get rid of emails that are no longer needed. Remember to run the utility that comes with your mail system to reorganize your mail databases; merely deleting the messages usually won't actually reclaim the space from the disk. MRP and ERP systems can also be a source of disk space for the resource-constrained IT Manager. Most MRP and ERP systems carry both summary and detailed transaction data for inventory movement and financial transactions. Companies typically need the detailed transaction data only for a relatively short period of time ranging from a few quarters to a couple of years. After that time, the summary data usually will suffice. Check to see if your company has ever deleted or archived the transaction data from your financial and inventory management systems. If not, consult with the appropriate authority in your company and propose that scheduled deletion or archiving of the detailed transaction data start ASAP.

"Share." Your mother also taught you to share; this lesson also can be applied to frugal storage management. Many IT shops use a single tape per server or per application backed up. Although this makes for a convenient method of managing tapes, it also results in tapes that are often mostly empty space. Most backup programs and autoloading tape libraries will span backup sets across multiple tapes automatically. Putting more backup sessions and more servers onto a single tape will decrease the number of tapes that must be purchased and the time spent administering the tapes. If you have already deleted old files and multimedia files that shouldn't have been on your servers, you may find that your backups run faster.

"Tidy up." Some files must be maintained on your servers even though they have not been accessed for years. While you may need to keep them, take advantage of the disk compression tools built into today's operating systems. Applying disk compression at either the drive level or directory level can yield significant amounts of space. Depending on the type of file, you may see space reductions of up to 50 percent.

Your Mother's advice only goes so far. Most of these practices are simply common sense; they can be effective short-term tactics to recover significant amounts of disk space. Unfortunately, these tactics break down in the face of hundreds of servers and terabytes of data, just from the shear amount of work required to apply these practices across hundreds of disks. Large shops are recognizing that although disks are inexpensive, the people and processes required to operate them are not.

Help for the large shop is arriving in the form of new tools that automatically inventory disks and prepare reports that advise storage administrators on the appropriate actions to take. The most capable of these Storage Resource Management (SRM) products, like the open-platform Overland Storage Resource Manager Enterprise Edition, allow storage administrators to establish policies that the SRM products then implement automatically across the entire enterprise regardless of the storage device. Disk grooming, file compression, file deletion, file backup, out of space warnings and disk consumption forecasts are all prepared automatically across a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. Companies using these products have avoided hundreds of thousands of dollars in new storage purchases simply by making better use of the storage they already own.

Effective storage management requires re-visiting the basics of good management, knowing what assets you have, making sure they are used appropriately, and moving effectively and efficiently to optimize assets that aren't used for their best purpose. Technology managers who take the lead in managing IT assets can help stretch scarce resource dollars for their companies, improving the companies chances of success and improving their own career prospects.

And all of this just by following the advice you got from your Mother...

About the Author

John Cloyd (who still listens to his mother) is vice president and general manager, Storage Management Business Unit, for Overland Storage. He can be reached at jcloyd@overlandstorage.com.