“Penny Wise and Pound Foolish” is one of my favorite lines. My top personal motto in life is, “It’s the cheap man that pays the most”. Time and time again, I have seen so many people opting to save a few mere “pennies” while paying a monumental price in the long term. Whatever it is and whatever the reason, doing due diligence and going the extra mile for good and objective research can help in making wise choices, particularly when it comes to technology. Technology changes so fast and sometimes nullifying current technologies, it is important to understand the “how” and the “why”, not just the “here” and “now”. Today, I am going to talk about a topic that has been talked about over and over again, “Data Management” with the current state of technology.

The New Data Management Landscape
Although I have been writing about this topic for many years, this blog addresses some of the new challenges most IT managers face. With the proliferation of data from IoT, Big Data, Data Warehousing, etc. in relation to data security and the dynamic implications of governance and compliance, there are far too many variables in play to effectively and efficiently “Manage” data. Implementing a business mandate can have far-reaching implications on data management. Questions like; What is the balance between storing data vs securing data? What is the cost involved going too far one way vs. the other respectively? How can I communicate to management these implications and cost factors?

False Security: The Bits and Bytes vs. ROIs and TCOs
One of the biggest challenges in IT is communicating to the people who “signs the checks” the need to spend money (in most cases, more money) for technology. The need to spend the money to effectively and successfully implement the mandates put forth by management. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task, only mastered by a few in the industry, often highly regarded professionals and living in the consulting field. Guys who are good at understanding the “Bits and Bytes” are usually illiterate at the business side of things. The business side understands the “Return of Investments” (ROI) and “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO) language and couldn’t care less what a “Bit or Byte” is. The end result: many systems out there are poorly managed and their management having no idea about it. The disconnect is real and companies do business as usual everyday until a crisis arise.
IT managers, directors and CIOs/CTOs need to be acutely aware of the current systems and technologies at the same time remain on the cutting edge of new technologies to perform the current, day-to-day operations as well as supporting all of the new business initiatives. The companies that do well to mitigate this gap are the ones that have good IT management and good communications with the business side of the company. This is also directly related to how much is spent on IT. It is a costly infrastructure, but these are the systems that can meet the demands of management and compliance.

The IT Tightrope
Understanding current and new technologies is key to an effective data management strategy. Money spent on technology may be rendered unusable or worse, hinders the use of new technology needed to meet the demands of business. It is a constant balancing act because a solution today can be tomorrow’s problem.

Data Deduplication
Data deduplication is a mature technology and has been an effective way to tame the data beast. It is basically, in a nutshell, an algorithm that scans data for duplication. So when it sees duplication in data, it will not re-write that data, but put a metadata in its place. In other word, the metadata is basically saying, “I got this data over there, so don’t rewrite it”. This happens over the entire volume(s) and is a great way to save storage capacity. But with data security at the top of most company’s minds, data encryption is the weapon of choice today. Even if it is not, compliance mandates from governing agencies for forcing the hand to implement encryption. But how does encryption impact data management? Encryption is basically taking data and randomizing it with an encryption key. Data deduplication is made more difficult with encryption. This is a high-level generalization and there are solutions out there, but considerations must be made when making encryption decisions. Additionally, encryption adds complexity to data management. Without proper management of encryption keys can render data unusable.

Data Compression
Back in the day of DOS, Norton Utilities had a great toolbox of utilities. One of them was to compress data. I personally did not do it as it was risky at best. It wasn’t a chance I wanted to take. Beside, my data was copied to either 5.25” or 3.5” floppies. Later, Windows came in with compression on volumes. Not one to venture into that territory. I had enough challenges just to run Windows normally. I have heard and seen horror stories with compressed volumes. From unrecoverable data to sluggish and unpredictable performance. The word on the street was that it just wasn’t fully baked feature and was a “use at own risk” kinda tool. Backup software also offered compression for backups, but backups were hard enough to do without compression, adding compression to backups just wasn’t done… period.
Aside from using the PKZip application, compression had a bad rap until hardware compression. Hardware compression is basically an offload of the compression process to a dedicated embedded chipset. This was magic because there was no resource cost to the host CPU. Similar to high-end gaming video cards. These video cards are (GPU) Graphics Processing Units to offload the high-definition and extreme texture renderings at high refresh rates. Hardware compression became mainstream. Compression technology went mostly unnoticed until recently. Compression is cool again and made popular as a feature of data on SSDs. Some IT directors that I talked to drank the “Cool-Aid” on compression for SSDs. It only made sense when SSDs were small in capacity and expensive. Now that SSDs are breaking the 10TB per drive mark and cheaper per GB than spinning disk. Compression on SSDs are not so cool anymore. It’s going the way of the “mullet” hairstyle, and we all know where that went… nowhere. Adding compression to SSDs is another layer of complexity that can be removed. Better yet, don’t buy into the gimmick for compression on SSD’s, rather look at the overall merits of the system and the support of the company that is offering the storage. What good is a storage system if the company is not going to be around?

What is your data worth?
With so many breaches in security happening, seemingly every other week, it is alarming to me that we still want to use computers for anything. Some of the businesses affected by hackers I am a customer of. I have about 3 different complimentary subscriptions to fraud prevention services because of these breaches. I just read an article of a medical facility in California was hit with ransomware. With the demands of payment in the millions via bitcoin, the business went back to pen and paper to operate. What’s your data worth to you? With all of these advances in data storage management and the ever changing requirements from legal and governing agencies, an intimate knowledge of the business and data infrastructure is required to properly manage data. Not just to keep the data and to protect it from hackers but also from natural disasters.