In the face of budget constraints, information growth, increased complexity and compliance issues, SMBs need a new strategy which will enable them to address these information-related challenges across all their applications.

Traditionally, organizations have adopted a silo approach to resolving storage issues such as the need to add capacity while improving utilization, shrinking backup windows and data protection. ?They build up the infrastructure to solve the needs of one application,? observed Suresh Nair, director, Commercial Sector, EMC Singapore. ?But you have to bring these benefits to other applications to ensure that you have information in the right place, and at the right time.?

That, in essence, is information lifecycle management (ILM) ? a strategy to ensure that a company has its information in the right place, at the right time, and for the right price. According to Nair, the four steps SMBs need to take to achieve the benefits of ILM are:

1) Discover what you have

Beyond discovering what information assets a company has, this also involves assessing the value of the data, moving it to the most efficient space and proactively managing the environment.

The business benefits of this are that the SMB can now make informed storage decisions and reclaim what they are not using, said Nair. It also provides a firm basis on which to plan consolidation, which is the next step.

2) Consolidate with networked storage

According to Nair, the direct attached storage environment is both costly and complex, involving ?stove pies of processing with islands of information?. There are too many tools and different points of control, and backup is difficult, he said. Networked storage, in contrast, delivers compelling cost and business benefits by addressing these issues resulting in better utilization, improved operational efficiencies and better management and control.

3) Tier your storage

The total cost of ownership can be further reduced by leveraging less expensive technologies such as ATA drives. ?Keep production information on high performance fibre channel drives, and move, for example, month-old information or test and development data onto the ATA environment.?

EMC has also introduced a new iSCSI platform for the mid-tier, which enables the creation of SANs over IP.

But there will be tradeoffs, he cautioned. ?There is a tremendous performance difference between the IP world and the FC SAN world. Businesses have to decide what is critical to them.?

But if they do this right, tiering the storage will result in improved service levels, better asset utilization and reduced costs, said Nair.

4) Gain control

With tiered storage in place, the SMB can begin to leverage on bundled offerings to gain control over processes such as backup and recovery, Exchange migration and recovery, archiving and compliance, and disaster recovery. For example, EMC?s Express Solution for Backup and Recovery enables LAN- or SAN-based backup to ATA drives or to tape libraries from ADIC, and provides capabilities such as instantaneous restart with SnapView, automated replication with Replication Manager/SE, accelerated recovery with Legato Networker, and tape emulation with the Clariion disk library.

Another example is the Express Solution for Archiving, which features proactive data movement using EmailXtender, DiskXtender, DatabaseXtender and VisualSRM, array-based archiving with ATA technology and a purpose-built platform for compliance and archival using EMC?s Centera.