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Although the cost of storage devices has plummeted over the last few years, the cost of managing stored data continues to grow. Unfortunately, an organization’s predilection for creating new data does not abate, and many see data volumes doubling every year to 18 months.

Not only is the cost of managing all this data becoming a major issue, but the speed of reporting against massive data sets is causing headaches too. It is not just about size, but that much of the data is being stored in silos under monolithic applications, which limits how effectively organizations can respond in dynamic business markets.

A further issue revolves around the changing landscape of legal and additional regulatory controls that often require more information to be kept for longer periods of time.

It is important to look at what data is being created, how it is being created and stored and what steps can be taken to provide a more streamlined and manageable environment. There are two major ways to approach the problem: master data management (MDM) and data deduplication.

MDM is a great step toward gaining control over data. The idea behind MDM is to take monolithic applications and ensure that the main information is codified in a standard manner, enabling searches, reporting and business intelligence (BI) to be carried out across multiple data sets at the same time. This involves taking referential data and creating a separate database to hold the information.

A prime example where MDM comes into its own is with customer data. An organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) system will hold a customer’s name, address and other contact details. This data may also be needed by the enterprise resource planning system, if it manages delivery and supply chain issues. More often than not, the two sets of data will be separate from each other, in data fields with different names and may even have different details due to errors or differences in the ways that individuals put information into systems. For example, my details may be in the CRM system as Mr. Clive Longbottom, 1 High St., Reading, RG4 7HS. In the ERP system, it could be C.S. Longbottom, 1 High Street, Reading, Berks. To the human eye, it’s pretty obvious that these two items are the same. To a computer, they look completely different.

MDM aims to create a single reference record for inconsistent data, so I will be known by the same main contact details on all systems. When any system wants to find information about me, it goes to an MDM master data set and picks up my name and contact details.

MDM is not about creating the world’s largest data warehouses; applications still retain their own data sets covering the data that they need. However, the shared information is held in a separate data set, and because this set should be a lot smaller than any of the application data sets themselves, the initial response speeds should be faster.

MDM does not impact data volumes in any major way however - and for this a different approach is needed. Much of the data held within an organization is heavily redundant. For example, most email systems hold physical copies of each message. Therefore, if a 1MB document is sent to 10 people, 10MB of data storage is needed. If 50 percent of recipients save a local copy, an additional 5MB of storage is needed. If minor changes are made to the document and sent back by two people to all recipients, another 20MB of storage is required. If the organization has basic backup procedures in place, then each of the documents will be duplicated to backup disks and tapes. Whether the documents are 98 percent alike or greater is neither here nor there as far as storage systems are concerned - each document is complete in itself and will be held as such on disk.

Let’s look at basic deduplication approaches. If a means of identifying when identical documents are being stored can be put in place, a virtual pointer to a single copy of the document can be created, saving the overhead of storing multiple copies. How about saving the changes when they are made, rather than the whole changed document? Such approaches can drastically reduce storage requirements. Email vaulting solutions from vendors such as Symantec and CA can really help with managing the main cause of this - the overuse of email as a document workflow and review system.

However, deduplication can be taken further. The majority of storage management vendors, such as Symantec, IBM and EMC, now provide capabilities to look at data at a binary code level and identify where blocks of data are identical. These blocks can then be stored as single master records, and only where changes are noticed are they stored - but they are stored as delta changes, rather than new full data records.