Data storage growth versus retention regulations

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 by Myke.

In today’s IT world, we have an ever growing trend. Data growth. With the
need to store more and more electronically, companies are running out of room.
In the oil and gas industry we have a huge need for storage space with documents,
maps, charts, readings and so on. So what is a company to do? Do we keep throwing
storage space at it or do we draw the line and create a solid retention policy?
Well, the answer is both actually. With the average cost of SAN storage at
$7000 per TB we can financially let some data keep growing. With a
retention policy, it will need to be razor sharp so it has the ability to cut
through all retention regulations.

At our company we had a 250% increase in storage requirements from December
2006 to December 2007. With this growth, we added iSCSI SAN storage that was
going to handle growth and be run on an existing GB network. We chose LeftHand Networks
because of their ability to expand with ease and the management
interface was very straight forward. On top of the abilities of the solution
their support was top notch and very hands on. With the growth of storage came the second
step, backing up this data. We needed a solution that would allow us to store
data locally on disk and off-site on tape. We also needed a solution that would
keep us in line with any and all retention regulations. The solution we chose
is a combination of Exagrid and CommVault.
The choice of Exagrid and CommVault was inline with our LeftHand
Networks decision. We chose them for their ability
to expand with ease, management interface was straight forward and their support
was first class. We now have a solution that allows our users to store data
as needed for all projects and the IT department can
back up the data using disk-to-disk-to-tape. this now gives us the ability
to restore data for end users straight from disk and any litigation requirements
we run into we have data off-site on tape using the GFS strategy

So with all of this in place, now comes the hardest job of the whole project,
the retention of the data. We have data that is duplicated up to 25 times between
local user hard drives, servers and user home drives. So how do you get rid
of the duplicated data and find the best possible copy? We have decided to
assign groups to each area of data and they are now in charge of consolidating
data and getting it in line with our retention policy. We have also put in
place a data retention policy that our legal department has and all employees
are aware of. The one place that users like to store data at is in their email.
this is a huge area of concern so we have placed a data retention policy on
our Exchange servers as well. Any email that hits the 61 day mark is automatically
deleted. this allows our lawyers and IT department to let anyone know that
asks, we do not keep email older than 60 days.

Okay, so now we have our hardware solution and our company policy in place.
Now we must enforce it and move forward. Data storage is a growing need for
every company but it can and will be taken care of. You will always have a
need to expand storage but you can slow it down with the proper policies.

Bottom line - It does not make financial or legal sense to store information
indefinitely. Disposition is key to managing growing volumes of unstructured
and semi structured data, and the technologies required for a proper disposition
system underpin an efficient information management ecosystem. A solid disposition
policy can reduce the cost of legal discovery.

Off the record - If you and your company are going to say that you have a
retention and disposition policy, you better have it in writing. Along with
having these policies in writing you should have records and documentation
that demonstrates how the policy is implemented.

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