First Published in KM World Magazine November 17, 1997

Consolidating Administrative Duties

An approach to making HSM easier for the Network Administrator

Traditionally, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) has always been considered a separate product that sat on top of the network infrastructure along with the rest of the document management application software. You know how it went. The network guys kept on top of the bits and bytes of the infrastructure and the network operating system, while the department dudes did their thing on the document management software and hardware.

Over time we have been seeing a consolidation of these disparate functions into a centralized and cohesive set of managed duties within companies. First we saw the messaging component, or e-mail, act as the backbone for the routing of documents between workgroups. This did away with the need for a separate transport mechanism for routing documents. Then we saw the standard browser become the common interface to various applications including document management. With an inexpensive browser, applications can be rolled out to many users without the pain of installing and configuring each individual piece of software on everyone's desktop - and making sure they all work together without any conflicts.

Now we are seeing the first steps towards centralizing storage management. Depending on whom you ask, you will get different definitions of what makes up storage management. The "imaging" group talks about HSM and jukebox management software when discussing storage management with the sole focus being on the document management system and optical media. The network group talks about backing up data from the file server to tape at night and performing tape rotation.

Traditionally, your tape backup would kick in sometime in the late night after everyone has gone home and write a copy of your important data to an inexpensive 4mm or 8mm DAT or DLT tape. The next morning, the network administrator would change the tape and if a proper tape rotation schedule is in place, take last nights backup to a separate storage area. This process is second nature to any good administrator and not too much thought is given to this process.

HSM had two camps. One is the document management group that had their separate software package that was integrated into their jukebox storage system. A smaller and newer group is the network administrator who is taking advantage of some of the newer features in today's network operating systems such as IntraNetWare 4.11 with its data migration and data compression option. The theory here is that infrequently used data would be compressed and migrated to another volume or storage device. The NOS migration features were introduced to combat the high cost of adding additional magnetic disk drives. Unfortunately, drive prices plummeted and these NOS-based features have not been truly exploited in many of today's networks and non-existent in the native NT environment. Since most of the network file servers deal with smaller data files and not 50K images, the ability to increase storage using magnetic media solves most of their needs.

Computer Associates thinks HSM and backup methodologies should be managed from one central location. CA, after acquiring Cheyenne Software in 1996, is one of the leading LAN-based backup solutions companies with approximately a 64% market share according to company officials. Their ArcServe Data Migration Option for Windows NT is an add-on to the company's flagship ArcServe 6.5 backup software. Now users can manage their daily backups and data migrations from one central location. Some of the benefits of this approach is the elimination of application compatibility as well as eliminating a need for an additional hardware. A separate jukebox or optical drive is not needed to handle both activities, and only one administration PC is required.

According to David Yeager, Product Manager at CA, their Data Migration Option for NT leaves a 1K "stub file" were the file was originally stored that the user sees. All of the original file attributes such as file size and date are retained, so the user is unaware that the file has been migrated to another media or location. The file is retrieved by the user just as they would if no migration was involved. Speed of retrieval is dependent on the media that the file was written too. Data can be moved from magnetic to optical to tape in any order that the administrator sets. Because ArcServe 6.5 supports tape library changers, this allows the Data Migration product to store and retrieve files to these devices as well. Obviously, retrieval speed becomes an issue when using the tape libraries. If a tape or optical platter is not mounted when a request is made, both the user and administrator are notified by the software to load the media.

Some lower-end document management systems cannot simultaneously write files to two platters for disaster recovery purposes and this has always caused problem for administrators. Typically they would copy one platter directly to another optical platter for off-site storage in an after hours process. A product like CA's could be used to copy platters to a less expensive media such as tape. Instead of spending $80 to $150 for each backup optical platter, a $10-20 tape can backup one or more disks. Because of the time consuming process, weekend backup of selected platters would be the only possibility. But this approach is better than losing your data in a fire or a significant investment in a more capable system.

According to CA's Yeager, a mirroring feature will be added to their product sometime in the first quarter of 1998. This will allow a dual write capability, thereby avoiding the long process to copy slower media such as optical and tape.

This latest consolidation of traditionally separate technology components is another good example of the forward thinking our industry must strive towards. We need to pull together the normally disparate technology and administrative groups that have been staking out their protective territorial boundaries. Overlapping systems and duties can only increase the administrative costs to manage the knowledge assets within the corporate walls.

Steve Goodfellow is President of Access Systems Inc., an independent consultant on Knowledge Management and Marketing Strategies. Steve can be reached at (315) 682-1188, fax (315) 682-0865 or via e-mail.