Unstructured, yet essential

Don't overlook audio clips, Word documents and other desktop data when plotting your new data center storage strategy.

At Genesys Health System, CIO Dave Holland thought he had his storage problems licked. He would ditch cumbersome, costly departmental storage in favor of a next-generation enterprise architecture that would give him a big-picture view while using storage resources more wisely. Information life-cycle management (ILM) tools, for moving data from one storage tier to the next based on business value, featured prominently in his plan. He envisioned a day when all company data would move automatically, based on certain "enterprise parameters," from a high-end EMC Symmetrix system to midlevel storage such as IBM's FastT system and then to optical disk for the long term.

While the plan worked well for database-resident, structured data, Holland soon realized that it failed to account for the unstructured files critical to daily operations at the Flint, Mich.,company. These included electronic patient charts, and digital images such as X-rays and MRIs. "When we got started with this whole project, we really didn't think of unstructured data. We really didn't understand its value," Holland says.

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From content to storage management Rising to the challenge Total storage picture Content management partners

At Genesys Health System, CIO Dave Holland thought he had his storage problems licked. He would ditch cumbersome, costly departmental storage in favor of a next-generation enterprise architecture that would give him a big-picture view while using storage resources more wisely. Information life-cycle management (ILM) tools, for moving data from one storage tier to the next based on business value, featured prominently in his plan. He envisioned a day when all company data would move automatically, based on certain "enterprise parameters," from a high-end EMC Symmetrix system to midlevel storage such as IBM's FastT system and then to optical disk for the long term.

While the plan worked well for database-resident, structured data, Holland soon realized that it failed to account for the unstructured files critical to daily operations at the Flint, Mich.,company. These included electronic patient charts, and digital images such as X-rays and MRIs. "When we got started with this whole project, we really didn't think of unstructured data. We really didn't understand its value," Holland says.

Spending time with physicians as they did their work brought the issue into focus. "I realized how much they looked at paper and how driven they were by those paper documents," he says, referring to the patient charts that are then scanned and turned into electronic files. "I also realized how impossible it would be for me to convert all that data from unstructured content to structured content in order to make it available. So I said, 'I've got to figure out a way to deal with unstructured data today because it's how they work, and I can't ignore that.' "

From content to storage management

Corporations everywhere are finding that unstructured content - data that traditionally has been managed by content managers, not the storage administrator - is ballooning. Today, about 80% of a company's content is unstructured - such as Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, digital images and audio clips, Enterprise Storage Group says. New federal regulations that mandate better access to corporate data are forcing the storage management issue.

"Content management systems employ databases to sort and order, provide access control, and search files, PowerPoints, documents, PDFs, whatever is in that system. But as you begin to get into issues of compliance, you need to think about things in a life-cycle manner," William Hurley, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Application Group, says.

Geoffrey Bock, a senior consultant with Patricia Seybold Group, agrees. "As long as enterprise content management [ECM] systems were departmental in nature and were not necessarily concerned about maintaining the corporate memory of a company for many years to come, storage was not really an issue," he says. "Now that we're building [enterprise] content repositories, which are multiple terabytes in capacity, and now that we have to organize and store this content in a meaningful way, storage is becoming more of an issue."