Driving change...
I spent almost 6 months on-site at Nationwide Building Society's head office in Swindon, working on a strategic re-development of the Storage and Backup systems across the two existing and the planned third Datacentres. The remit for the project was simple, reduce server count, decrease tape usage and improve resilience...
As is often the case with such projects, a lot more was added into the mix before we reached the end, however at the finish I had managed to establish a data cleansing philosophy, a server consolidation program and a more intelligent backup and disaster recovery strategy thereby saving both disk and tape capacity and reducing the server count significantly.
Many of the challenges and pitfalls of this project are actually common to many similar large clients, and reflect the difficulties to be associated with large organisations, especially those that have grown through acquisitions. The principles associated with good data management are often overlooked in the struggle to provide a degree of integration between disparate data and systems. One of the commonest issues is that appropriate data management, typically at the record level, is either not established or ceases to happen due to systems integration demands. Very often this means that two or three years down the line, there are duplicated datasets for which no archival or purging process exists. It is not uncommon to find all of this redundant, and in some cases irrelevant, data, nevertheless being backed up on a regular basis.
Key lesson.
Management of data throughout its life cycle plays a significant part in the costs associated with any system, you should therefore plan for archiving, purging and eventual removal from the very start of a project in line with Information Lifecycle Management best practice.