Storage I/O solutions, in considering cost-effectiveness and best practices, address primary storage data footprint reduction (DFR) as well as support for data protection and recovery (DPR). DFR implementation allows more data to be stored in a smaller footprint and includes archiving email, databases, and file systems, real-time data compression, storage tiering, and thin provisioning. The tools and best practices policies of DPR include daily backup and restore, business continuity, disaster recovery, and meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) archiving requirements, recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

        The IT departments of MBEs are faced with supporting enterprise growth while simultaneously maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) and managing budgetary constraints. Data must be protected from various internal and external threats and disaster recovery and restoration capabilities must be effectively enhanced. Additionally, reliability and accessibility of data must constantly be improved.

        Innovation and optimization, focusing on the source of DPR challenges and the performance of DPR and DFR technologies will help enterprise and MBE IT departments meet the challenges and demands of data storage, data protection and recovery, and RTOs and RPOs in a cost-effective and timely manner.

• •Real-time compression leverages performance rates and response times and enables more data to be stored in a more dense data footprint.
• •DFR techniques can be re-focused from downstream storage to complementary active and online reference data primary storage optimization, while maintaining and improving performance.
• •More effectively utilizing primary storage resources such as cache and premium tier 0 storage—another use of real-time compression, can accomplish expansion of the current data footprint.

        Any innovative changes must be seamless and transparent while providing interoperability with the various IVS storage products while co-existing with current DR techniques.

        The IT professional can produce real ROI results for the company through innovation and optimization initiatives that maximize and enhance DFR and DPR practices while reducing the costs to manage the resources necessary.