This change rate also directly impacts storage management in several important ways. First storage management requires identifying exactly what changed on a daily basis. Once identified, duplicate copies of these changes must be managed into backup images including one for rapid onsite recoveries and a second offsite copy for disaster recovery.

With enterprise backup and recovery solutions, these changes comprise most of the daily backup workload. These capacity requirements are caused by the dynamic rate of changed data across all the backup clients, called the backup domain. Corporate backup domains incorporate business critical servers and their associated data, including email, home directories, shared data and databases, with each representing its own unique characteristics.

The sum of the changed data across all backup domains is what quantifies the daily backup volumes. These define the storage management capacity requirements necessary to protect the enterprise from potential data losses. Exposure to data loss by the company increases up to the point where data changes are copied into the central backup repository.

TSM Reports.com makes it easy to track average monthly data change rates, down to the individual domain and backup client level. By knowing and understanding the actual backup client data change rates, we can begin to understand how volume capacities are derived across the entire storage infrastructure. Simply put, applying the data change rate to the reported client storage utilization equates directly to the backup workload requirement. TSM Reports tracks these important storage metrics.

In summary, dynamic data change rate is a critical storage management capacity sizing component, without which you can not anticipate storage backup volumes and appropriate infrastructure requirements. It equates to the segment of the data that is active to changes or the portion that is growing. Managing this part of the enterprise storage landscape correctly often means the difference between success and failure. A successful storage management plan identifies not only the changed capacity for the managed data, but tracks from where the changes originate.

The rule with storage management is: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.