Data growth still the biggest storage challenge

IMG will store video footage of Olympics on London datacentre SAN

Mark Connelly is senior infrastructure analyst at global sports and entertainment company IMG, which manages sports events, produces broadcast programming and represents corporate clients and stars like Tiger Woods and Venus Williams in over thirty countries.

Ahead of his appearance at an expert panel session, ‘How to get first class storage out of a third class budget’, at the Storage Expo show in London next month, Connelly tells Computing how IMG has upgraded its infrastructure to handle the growing volume of data the company is required to store, secure and manage.

What’s your biggest storage challenge right now?

Trying to control data growth as best we can without straining the business. That is quite a tight line to walk. We can put technology in place to handle most media files, like word documents or powerpoint presentations, but there is some data we need to keep, like television footage, which can be enormous. Managing that in a storage and backup environment is the biggest headache we face.

Do security and compliance requirements cause you any sleepless nights?

Data security is not that big a problem for us, certainly not when it comes to centralised storage on the storage area network (SAN). There are options for encrypting and securing data on hard drives, but that is not necessarily something we require at this stage. It is more about losing USB keys or laptops on a train, but there are standard security techniques and the features embedded in Windows to handle those situations.

IMG is fortunate in that it is not a public company and does not have the same compliance requirements as other organisations, so it can get away with more than most. We do have software that is able to track and record the location of data, though, and that gives us scope for doing so in the future.

How do you handle the tiered storage and archiving processes?

We previously used an HP enterprise storage array (EVA) as a tier one system, but also had tier-three storage as an overflow for archived data. The problem was that this was a manual process. It worked OK, but was inconvenient for users to ask them to clear or archive their data for the next year. Nobody had time to do it, and we were having to chase them up to deal with it, which was a bit of a headache.

Now we have a Compellent system that automatically monitors the level of activity of each file at the block level. We can configure it to archive those files if they are not accessed regularly or move them back into tier-one storage if they start to be used more often.

What storage upgrades have you recently carried out at IMG?

We have implemented a standardised SAN environment in six of our datacentres based on Compellent Storage Center technology and NexSan disk arrays, and consolidated a mixture of backup and archiving applications (ARCServe, EVault, Veritas) down to one, which is Commvault.

Rather than using regional solutions, we now have one global storage infrastructure which is standardised across the organisation. We needed to update our existing storage environment based on HP StorageWorks enterprise virtual array (EVA) as this was coming to the end of its life and could not be expanded further, but we also needed a more flexible architecture that enabled us to chop and change quite a bit as our storage needs evolve.

How many users and what applications does the SAN serve?

We have around 3,000 users globally, and the local capacity requirements vary from around 4TB of Fibre Channel storage in smaller locations, to 30TB of the same elsewhere. We can expand that easily just by adding an enclosure or extra hard disk to the SAN. The applications we host are mainly VMWare ESX Server, as well as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.