STORAGE: Managing Lifecycles

Today is an exciting time for the telecommunications industry. Carriers are
developing a plethora of new technologies, fanning out into previously
under-served markets, and waging legislative wars to competitive products.
However, they are also facing increasing competition from nontraditional sources
like cable operators, media, and entertainment companies. To capitalize on the
opportunities presented by this rapidly changing environment, service providers
need hefty capital investments and partnerships outside their traditional lines
of business. These competitive pressures, new services, and potential
partnerships present an urgent set of challenges for not only managing, but
profiting from the huge stores of information.

A Rocky Road

Thanks to heavy spending of the telecom boom and the subsequent doldrums of
the dot- com bust, service providers were saddled with heavy debt loads. After
years of cost-cutting and chasing more efficient business methods, most carriers
have significantly reduced their debt. However, these companies continue to rely
heavily on cost-reduction initiatives like outsourced call centers, application
development, maintenance, IT operations, and billing. Meanwhile, carriers are
looking to increase profits by investing in mobile divisions, acquisitions, and
expanding in newer regions. Both cost-cutting initiatives and investment require
high levels of data sharing and management, however, supporting infrastructure
for this has lagged behind expansion.

An ILM strategy allows carriers to map service levels, applications, storage tiers and cost levels according to the current value of information.

Carriers are also making large capital investments to improve basic network
quality to attract new customers and minimize customer churn. Network quality,
while a competitive advantage today, is rapidly becoming the cost of entry,
giving rise to the emergence of the new content-based services. These new
services, which leverage investments in 2.5G and 3G broadband wireless networks,
include content-based services such as ringtones, wallpapers, games, Mobisodes,
IPTV (Internet Protocol TV), location-based services including those based on
GPS, unified messaging, wireless backup and recovery services, and extended
email services. Other developments include converged network and IT
infrastructure, bandwidth improvements and broadband networks like FTTP (fiber
to the premises), as well as maturing standards and delivery technologies for
mobile and IP-based services. These new technologies and services require a
highly secure and cost-effective data management scheme across the entire
organization.

ILM and Telcos

The crucial strategy for meeting these challenges is information lifecycle
management (ILM); the discipline of managing data lifecycles to meet financial,
competitive and regulatory goals. An ILM strategy allows carriers to map service
levels, applications, storage tiers and cost levels according to the current
value of information. ILM works by matching content and storage tiers to
required access and service levels, application type and business continuity
requirements. These policies are cross-referenced with the most cost-effective
methods of meeting those requirements while accounting for the changing value of
data over time.

ILM must account for shifting value across all data volumes, since not all
data changes value at the same rate or in the same way. For example, it's a
false and damaging distinction to proclaim that all data will henceforth be
handled by age. A three-month-old lunch invitation email will never be as
important as a three-month-old engineering diagram for an important new project
and neither may be as important as a six-year-old voicemail that falls under
SEC-mandated retention requirements. And in telecom, the lifecycle of a
regulated CDR may have a far different profile than an MMS image in a message
store.

ILM operates enterprise-wide, which allows the organization to keep
information available across all business domains and operations. The lack of
enterprise-wide ILM is a worrisome concern for carriers who want to add new
services to generate additional revenues, but who find they are relying on a
limited information infrastructure. Lacking an integral method of protecting,
accessing and managing organizational data, the company cannot truly know if it
has the network or IT capacity to add another service. Designing a company-wide
ILM procedure eliminates many of these problems and grants the flexibility and
scalability needed to help grow the business.

ILM allows carriers to benefit in three ways.

• Reduce TCO: One of telecom industry's biggest
  data management challenges with confusing databases and database
  applications. Data is hard to access across systems and applications, and
  often does not maintain integrity during transport. ILM reduces TCO in this
  all-important area by consolidating and optimizing databases and
  applications, and by controlling the costs of storing, protecting and
  accessing data. ILM also reduces the number of manual procedures and
  duplicate hardware across the enterprise, shrinking a carrier's total cost
  of ownership through consolidation and improved data management processes.

Carriers often maintain two discrete computing and storage
infrastructures; one for network and one for IT. The ability to converge the two
infrastructures can potentially save them millions of dollars monthly.
Additionally, the application of ILM to the core FCAPS data that runs the
network across its lifecycle will facilitate this convergence and the
corresponding reduction in TCO.

• Improve competitive advantage: Competitive
  advantage has many components. From a carrier perspective, the following
  components are critical: network quality, customer care, innovative
  value-added services, market-specific service bundles.

• Satisfy regulatory compliance: The
  telecommunications industry must observe detailed FCC data management
  requirements as well as a slew of other government regulations. Requirements
  include extremely accurate and detailed records-keeping, data retention,
  information tracking and the ability to accurately and quickly retrieve data
  by a number of different parameters. Telecom must be especially careful of
  data management because of the large number of FCC-mandated individual
  records it must keep, in addition to strict SEC and other legal measures.
  Complying with these regulations requires carriers to classify data, manage
  it across its lifecycle to comply with retention requirements, observe copy
  procedures, prove the integrity of data, and be able to quickly find and
  retrieve data using multiple search parameters across multiple storage
  targets. The only way to efficiently and cost-effectively meet this
  challenge is with an ILM strategy and technology tools.

ILM and Storage Tiers

ILM's core purpose is enabling an infrastructure that cost-effectively manages
data according to its business value. A crucial approach to ILM is to match
storage targets, protection and availability to that value. The table below
lists some examples of different types of applications and data, and the storage
tiers where they belong.

ILM strategy begins with a systems assessment, including application and data
classification and workflow analysis. Assessments can start in either order:
with critical applications like billing or provisioning, or with crucial
workflows. The next step is to analyze infrastructure gaps to understand where
shortfalls and points of failure exist and to recommend the means to close the
gaps. Next, the ILM analysis defines storage architecture tiers by the level of
availability and protection that is most suitable to the content that's being
managed. The following step is to define data policies for enterprise-wide
information management and to create and fine-tune the policies to govern data
movement into and across storage tiers. The final step is to implement the
tiered consolidation and begin to manage information across the enterprise using
ILM tools, policies and principles.

ILM analysts and technology providers should know how to operate in both IT
and network areas in order to work effectively with telecommunications
companies. ILM's ability to manage data across the entire infrastructure will
allow carriers to begin a significant convergence of the network and IT baseline
infrastructures. This convergence will maintain the highest levels of access
protection and network security, while saving carriers significant capital and
operational expenditures and improving performance. Done correctly, ILM
cost-effectively manages information throughout the enterprise, allowing
telecommunications organizations to improve customer service, create a
profitable competitive advantage, and optimize operational and capital
investments.

Manoj Chugh,
president, EMC India and SAARC