FITS OM

Define the scope for the Storage Management function. Consider whether your storage management processes and policy will cover all platforms and components within your infrastructure. Defining and documenting the scope and objectives will prevent confusion and misinterpretation.

The Storage Management function is complex and covers a wide range of potential environments and solutions. To make your school's policies and procedures easier to understand, you should document them for easy reference. You should make any storage management changes affecting the ICT infrastructure using Change Management.

Suggested items to include in your plan/policy

• Matching storage requirements to appropriate media
• Retiring or disposing of media
• Recycling media for re-use
• Verifying backups
• Controlling media lifecycle
• Supplying and controlling media for test/production environments

Identify and document the data requiring resources and the individual requirements for each set of data.

Example - data security

• How much data is to be stored?
• Where is data to be located?
• What is the projected data growth?
• What are your backup-and-restore performance requirements?
• How will you deal with archiving (off-site storage requirements)?

Identify and document the events in the infrastructure that require monitoring. For each event, develop an appropriate threshold, action and tool for delivering an alert.

Define, document and implement a process for analysing alerts and event logs on an ongoing basis to identify conditions that may indicate a hardware failure or enable you to anticipate a service outage. This proactive analysis will enable you to take remedial actions to minimise the impact on services.

In concert with the Incident Management process, define, document and implement a procedure for resolving storage incidents. A consistent approach to managing and resolving incidents will reduce the impact on end users when incidents occur.

Define, document and implement a process for gathering information about storage requirements and a detailed evaluation of the available storage components. Then select the most appropriate items for your school, based on their ability to meet your reliability, capacity and response-time requirements.

Define, document and implement a process for regularly reviewing and updating your school's storage policy. Make changes to the infrastructure to reflect the change in policy as appropriate.

In concert with your Network Monitoring process, define, document and implement a process that analyses storage use and predicts future storage requirements. This will enable you to make more proactive upgrades of the storage environment, rather than reacting to storage incidents caused by lack of capacity. It will also enable more accurate budgeting as consideration of the school's strategic plans is included in the process to anticipate changing needs.

In concert with your Change Management process, define, document and implement a process for making all changes to the storage infrastructure using Change Management. This will reduce the likelihood of change failure and therefore maintain service availability. It will also help you to keep accurate support documentation, thus decreasing incident recovery times.

Implement measures for managing the storage resources effectively. For example, use network monitoring to keep yourself fully aware of the storage capacity available and in use at all times. Implement a process for applying manufacturers' fixes and patches as soon as these become available.

Implement a process for documenting the constraints on limited-use media and keep records so that their use does not contravene the manufacturer's instructions. This will reduce the risk of media failure causing unplanned outages.

Define, document, implement and publicise a process for restoring data from backup. Make all users of the process aware of the process and of the targets for restoring data from backup.

Develop and maintain a media library. A media library contains details of all the media in use at the school, including name, location and type. Consider integrating this information with your configuration management database. A logical media library keeps documentation and configuration data for each storage resource readily available in one place.

Establish a single point of ownership and accountability for the storage management function (the storage administrator). You can charge this person with implementing the other storage-related recommendations through a programme of continuous improvement. Other technical support staff will then know whom to contact if they identify any deficiencies in the function.

Give staff access to training material and provide experienced staff to help them learn the activities. Run an improvement programme to increase function awareness.

Mount an awareness campaign to make everyone aware of the function and of their obligations regarding data storage and restore requests.

Without documentation, the function is open to interpretation and will lack a consistent approach. Document the activities and make this documentation available to all staff performing them. The documentation can be used in training and as a reference point.