E-mail demand drives Queensland uni to ILM
A longtime user of HP servers, storage and tape arrays, CQU recently took delivery of HP's StorageWorks RISS (Reference Information Storage System), a specialised database-server combination that is a key component of HP's efforts in the burgeoning information lifecycle management (ILM) market.
For CQU, the move to incorporate ILM into its everyday storage management practices is aimed at reducing the consumption of disk space by its 2500 staff members, whose e-mail alone accounts for nearly 1TB of CQU's total 15TB of storage space. Such large storage demands stem from the university's comparatively generous allowance of 500MB of space per staff member (the university's 20,000-plus students get 50MB each).
-It was just getting so complicated to have the large databases that we had to service the number of users we have," said Adrian Yarrow, manager for corporate systems administration with CQU, whose Rockhampton-based IT division services the university's various campuses across Australia and the Asia-Pacific. -The risk of losing University data was starting to become imminent. We wanted a system we could have in place to shunt off the older data, but from the end user's perspective see it as part of the same system."
Yarrow said CQU considered implementing a software-only solution, but found the HP option preferable in terms of longevity. "Some of the other ones we looked at were software-only, but there comes a point when that particular approach would max out," he added. "By employing the grid strategy that HP's working with these days, as you grow the RISS system you're getting extra processing capacity with it. We thought this purchase would be the beginning and not the end of the journey."
RISS works by indexing and moving data between different types of storage - online disk, slower and cheaper 'nearline' disk, and tape - depending on how old it is. Like the several competing e-mail optimisers on the market, it also reduces the size of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes by, for example, replacing multiple copies of large file attachments with a single copy of the attachment that is linked to from any e-mail that references it. That way, a large file that's sent to many people is only stored once.
In an age where e-mail is increasingly used as a catch-all filing cabinet -- and old data unceremoniously deleted, or moved to unmanaged .PST archives, to stay within disk space quotas -- Yarrow said ILM has become necessary to protect end users from themselves.
-It's very difficult to get end users to buy into the idea of ILM," he explained. -They just don't see the big picture; they think there's this endless pit of storage to store things in. [In telling them to keep within storage quotas] you're expecting them to take responsibility for organisational data, but this is too complicated for them to be able to do it effectively. It just never happens. The thing is to solve these things at a technical level so you end up with the level of protection you're comfortable with."
Carefully defined RISS policies, which mirror regulations about the university's statutory data retention requirements, will guide the centralisation and movement of data between storage tiers.
Depending on how well the RISS implementation goes, CQU could potentially use the technology on student mailboxes and reallocate the freed disk space to give its users even larger mailboxes. And while the Exchange mailboxes' sheer size and the relatively easy RISS solution makes them the low-hanging fruit in this project, the technology will eventually be extended to other types of information including video files, general file stores, and eventually other forms of databases - although any changes to the latter require careful business needs assessment.
-We're trying to future-proof our ILM," said Yarrow, -and to introduce a level of convenience for people that also takes care of their archiving needs in one hit."