The Container - A collection of Assets

Users never have just one Information Asset.  The next concept that needs to be introduced is the idea of a container.  (Yea, concepts are boring but hang with me for a minute) A container is a collection of information assets with the same business context.  The general idea of a business context is the point at which an asset is within its designated life cycle. 

Extending our contract example from a previous post, a container could hold all the active contracts, another could hold those that have been closed, while yet another can hold those that have been rejected. 

OK, this is all well and good but why set things up this way?  Why organize around the lifecycle of the assets?  The key reason is that the management of the information, how it should be stored, backed up, protected, secured, etc., are all based on the business context, aka, where the assets are within the lifelcycle.  Keeping assets together makes it much easier to setup and manage the various attributes of the information. 

For example, active contracts could benefit from fast storage.  Rejected contracts can be kept for 6 months on very cheap storage and then deleted.  Customers may want to access their active contracts via a web portal.  The list could go on but the power of the "container" is the ability to specify, implement, and maintain various aspects of the information asset.  By setting these up on a container, these configurations don't need to be setup on every file.  They can be setup on collections of assets.  Note that these collections can hold hundreds of thousands of files, depending on the activity of the asset.

The idea of a container is the cornerstone of solving the storage management portion of the unstructured data problem.  The idea for this came from the shipping industry...

Prior to about 1956, the loading and unloading of ships was a very manual operation.  Old movies and photos show longshoreman moving cargo nets full of dry goods and odd-shaped packages.  It could take weeks to unload and reload a ship.  An enterprising guy named Malcom McLean figured out that if you put things into standardized shipping containers, then move these containers on ships, trains, and trucks, the productivity of the shipping industry would be vastly improved.   Keeping track of a shipping container is much easier and less costly than tracking every item that could be in the container.

The same goes for storage.   "Putting all the assets in a container" makes managing that entire collection much easier.  There will be much more about this but the concept of managing data this way has a huge impact on the cost, complexity and value of storage management.