Data Management - A Nagging Worry for CTOs
CXO Today July 27, 2007

Data has taken over from the more conventional forms of wealth to become the most closely guarded of all company assets.

Efficient and secure data managemen is a matter of concern for most CTOs. Enterprises have a huge amount of data, which includes customer information, information about the staff, and other information. The problem of data management is somewhat similar to the case of a book lover, who has a huge collection of books but no space in his house. But being an ardent buyer, he can neither stop procuring new books nor can bear to give away or dispose his existing ones.

As companies expand, more and more important data are generated which has to be stored. Data is usually very sensitive and so measures have to be taken to maintain security. Other important factors to be kept in mind are disasters - such as wars, floods, earthquakes, etc. Also, the management of data in itself is a very specialized job, needing trained staff, proper facilities, and fail back measures. CTOs have to take all these things into account while maintaining a data storage center. To avoid unnecessary costs, most find it more convenient and efficient to outsource the management of their data centers to specialized data management firms.

NetMagic - a firm specializing in data management and disaster recovery - is planning to setup data centers across the country like Chennai, Delhi, etc., to add to its existing roster of centers in Mumbai and Bangalore. According to it, the investment in each of these data centers is around US $2.5 million.

According to Sharad Sanghi, MD and CEO of NetMagic, a variety of tools are used to provide advanced monitoring services to customers with failure and pre-failure notification, threshold alarms, and statistical-trend analyses. A Network Operations Center (NOC) comprises support staff, call analysts, and senior technical staff who monitor all critical parameters related to the performance of the network and the servers hosted at the customer's location over dedicated connections to the internet. Helpdesk services, telephone and email support, and service credits extended for any downtime exceeding 15 minutes on NetMagic's network are available for customer's benefit.

Fire prevention and mitigation procedures protect the data center from any possible fire hazards. These include high-sensitivity smoke detectors, high-speed-deployment FM-200 fire suppression gas, periodic fire drills, and escalation mechanisms. FM-200 gas ensures that no damage occurs to the equipment in the event of a discharge. Power supply is also taken care of by installing fail back options like generators in data centers to reduce reliance on local power supply like the NetMagic's Mumbai facility that functioned for 72 hours during the floods on 26/7/05.

Another measure taken to restore data is creating a duplicate or "mirror" of original data at another geographically distant center, in case it gets destroyed in a natural disaster. Both are updated simultaneously so that in case of a disaster at one center, data is available at the other. Seagate, for example, at one time maintained around 12 data centers at different locations.

Remote data management doesn't claim to be the best solution, but it's probably the most optimum one available at present, especially for mission critical industries like railways, airlines, banks, defence organizations, etc.

This article in its complete form appeared in the July 2007 issue of CXO Today. It also appeared on the periodical's online portal on the following URL. Click the following link to read the archived article in its full form as it was published.