I have asked many IT mangers this question: “What is the rate of change of your companies data” Most cannot answer this question. Surprisingly, some big companies with larger IT shops don’t even know this, but it isn’t really on the minds of the small business with limited IT staff.

Why is this number so important? First off, if you are considering implementing any kind of ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) program, you will need to know this. Mainly, the rate of change of your data tells you how much storage you are currently using and how and where it is growing. If you are considering using a remote backup strategy for your remote offices, and want to replicate the data back to a central spot, your rate of change of data is critical. If you have a lot of data, and the data changes too frequently you might not have the CPU cycles to process or the network bandwidth to transfer all of that data. Even with a replication program that transfers ONLY differential byte-level data. More on this in another blog I am working on.

I was talking to an IT manager just the other day, who mentioned a fairly simple way to track this data. His shop keeps a log on this information, by recording the number of bytes backed up on both full backups and incremental/differential backups, by department. They are then able to generate a percentage of data growth, trended over time.

Seeing these trends overtime can clue you into “abnormal areas” of data growth and should cause you to investigate.
Remember not all data has to be backed up all the time.

This is one of the key points to an effective ILM strategy

SR

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 and is filed under Storage Management, Advisor - Steve Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.