For Jim Hull, vice president of engineering services at MasterCard International, there’s nothing new about information life-cycle management. “You’re just identifying what you need to keep, how many copies, in what form and for how long, for reasons that are driven by the business,” he says.
For Jim Hull, vice president of engineering services at MasterCard International, there’s nothing new about information life-cycle management. “You’re just identifying what you need to keep, how many copies, in what form and for how long, for reasons that are driven by the business,” he says.
In its mainframe environment, MasterCard has used hierarchical storage management (HSM) software for years to move data from one medium to another.
What’s new, Hull says, is the appearance of HSM and ILM tools for the Windows NT and Unix environments. MasterCard is in a good position to take advantage of these tools as they emerge early next year.
“In 2004, there will still be a lot of vaporware, but toward the end of this year, there will be products that do what they say they can do,” Hull predicts. “By 2005, we’ll start seeing companies like MasterCard building on what they have.”
MasterCard houses its 360T bytes of data on a predominantly EMC Symmetrix-based storage-area network (SAN ). About 20T bytes sit on lower-performance Hitachi Data Systems storage servers that are integrated with the SAN. All the data is managed via EMC’s AutoIS and ControlCenter software.
However, Hull plans to implement a three-tier storage architecture. On the first tier, the Symmetrix systems will house business-critical, highly available data, while the second tier will consist of EMC Clariion or equivalents from Hitachi or IBM. “The cost differential between Symmetrix and Clariion is a sixfold difference,” Hull points out. The second tier likely will house data from MasterCard’s test and development environments and perhaps its data warehouse. The third tier will be Clariion-type systems with less-expensive and lower-performing Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drives rather than the more-expensive Fibre Channel drives.
Making the data move
Hull is evaluating EMC/Legato Systems’ DiskXtender, which has the ability to move PowerPoint, Excel and other files off NT servers to lower-cost storage systems using rules that the user sets up. However, Hull is waiting to see whether DiskXtender becomes available for Unix servers. “The last thing I want to do is buy something that works for NT, which represents about 1,000 servers here, and another for our 800 Unix servers,” he says.
MasterCard also is in the process of adding a virtual tape storage system for the NT/Unix environment, which will be compatible with DiskXtender. Already, virtual tape in the mainframe environment has enabled Hull to eliminate nine storage silos.
Hull is approaching his e-mail data separately, using EMC’s Centerra system and EMC/Legato’s EmailXtender. “From a regulatory standpoint, we’re seeing more demand for queries on e-mails about who said what to whom on such-and-such a business deal,” he says. The Centerra system helps with compliance and cuts down on storage costs by storing one copy of messages sent to multiple recipients. “The software allows you to quickly search for all versions of e-mail discussions and gives you the ability to know what was changed by whom and when,” Hull says.
In the future
Hull has yet to explore a database archiving strategy. “We don’t want to just back up and retain all that data,” he says. “One of the major benefits of HSM is it helps you only keep certain things online and push others to off-site storage and move it back if you need it. That’s a whole lot better than having to manage it personally.”
Despite all the footwork MasterCard has done to determine its ILM needs, Hull says the job is never over. “We have a pretty good handle on it today, but business requirements will always evolve,” he says.
For instance, in its mainframe environment, MasterCard used to keep four years of data online, but after analysis, it determined nobody was accessing the data after Year 4. Hull’s group was able to significantly reduce costs by moving Year 4 data to a tape system. “Those are the kinds of things we’ll look at as we get more focused on storage and the management of it to reduce our total cost of ownership,” he says.
