Too many storage companies, cloud vendors, service providers, etc. tout the idea of 99.999% uptime. (Please adjust the number of "9"s to match your favorite vendor). It is a good idea to have storage availability at a high level. We all have probably experienced the horror of not having access to your data. Can you say "abort, retry, ignore?".
However, everyone knows a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So, what is the weak link with unstructured data? The storage people tend to forget that it is the business users that are the start of the chain. They go through the file system, which in turn goes to actual storage of some kind. These business users want to ensure their business data is always available.
That last sentence provides a key insight in to this uptime or availability metric. They want their business data always available, not just their storage system. These, unfortunately, are two different things.
Because the permissions are not set on unstructured data when stored on a file server (see previous blog posting on why that is so difficult), it is absolutely trivial to have that data disappear. As one customer put it, "I'm one mouse click away from data loss." It is very easy to simply drag-and-drop critical files out into oblivion without noticing it. Unless a person notices this, can repair it, or fire up restore before backup overwrites its media and destroys the last good copy of the file, it is pretty much gone. What needs to happen is the information must be protected at all points in the chain before it makes much sense to pay for yet another "9".
Is it really that reassuring that storage can, 99.999% of the time tell you your data is gone?
No comments:
Post a Comment