What Is Storage Management?
Storage management encompasses all the processes and technologies used to manage the resources, software, and hardware that make up a data storage system. It involves striking the optimal balance between costs, performance, and capacity while ensuring the availability, resiliency, and security of the data that powers an increasingly digital world.
In this article, we’ll cover the main processes and technologies that are needed to deliver big, fast, and reliable data to your organization.
Common Storage Management Processes
While the exact tools and techniques used to manage data storage will differ between organizations, here’s a list of common storage management processes:
- Provisioning: The process of assigning storage capacity to computers, servers, and other machines.
- Virtualization: The practice of leveraging virtual machines (VMs) to decouple software from hardware operating environments.
- Containerization: A type of virtualization in which fully packaged and portable computing environments are used to decouple software from their operating systems.
- Data compression: A technique used to free up drive space, close memory gaps, reduce retrieval times, and otherwise maximize your storage capacity.
- Data migration: The process of moving data from one storage location to another.
- Data replication: From snapshots to mirroring, data replication involves storing the same data in multiple storage locations for redundancy, resilience, and reliability.
- Disaster recovery: Tools, planning, policies, and procedures for restoring IT operations to normal in the wake of a disaster.
- Automation: From simple scripts to DevOps, automation covers all tools and techniques related to automating data storage management processes.
