White Papers

Data Protection Best Practices

Data protection encompasses much more than backup and recovery techniques, extending to issues related to data corruption and data loss, data accessibility and availability, data confidentiality, and compliance. This SNIA technical white paper covers factors to consider when it comes to data protection at the storage level and offers detailed best practices.

October 2017

A Data Protection Taxonomy 

This paper presents a data protection taxonomy, that is, a classification of aspects relevant to data protection, that the industry is encouraged to use as a reference when asking and answering questions about data protection. This taxonomy is defined in terms of who, where, what, why, and how.

July 2010

Organizations looking to reduce operating costs and improve efficiencies in the data center, now have a roadmap for improvement and a tool to assess the alignment of their information assets with the needs of the business. This paper offers an overview of the current state of ILM and explains how to use the ILM Maturity Model developed by the ILM Initiative in collaboration with the SNIA End User Council.

September 2009

This document offers terminology that will empower communication and collaborative efforts for setting the business requirements for information assets in the datacenter. This paper provides the SNIA DMF’s description in the context of “long-term digital information retention and preservation,” along with the definitions from other reference sources for comparison.

May 2009

Terminology in the datacenter can be very confusing. At least 20 different dictionaries exist and are available on the internet. In addition, IT, records management, security, legal, compliance, and the business groups all have their own vernacular. This document explains the objectives of the full report “Building a Terminology Bridge: Guidelines for Digital Information Retention and Preservation Practices in the Datacenter."

May 2009

The database administration community has long focused on what they call the “data management” challenges associated with databases: data quality, cleansing, modeling, master data, mining, etc. Now is the time to address the “information management” challenges as well. This paper explains how the application of a management framework such as Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a viable approach to help optimize the performance and reduce the operating costs of databases and the enterprise applications that rely upon them.

May 2009

Data deduplication and other methods of reducing storage consumption play a vital role in managing today’s explosive growth of data. The DMF Data Deduplication and Space Reduction SIG (DDSR SIG) explores the significance of deduplication ratios related to specific capacity optimization techniques, within the context of information lifecycle management. Each of these techniques has a valuable role to play in improving data storage efficiency.

July 2008

This document reviews traditional methods of data protection and availability, and offers insights into an alternative data protection solution - Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Often touted for its ability to provide instant restoration and granular recovery, CDP also solves the backup window challenge by eliminating the backup window itself, enabling the creation of backup copies anytime, day or night, without affecting online operations.

July 2008

Dec 2007

This report by the SNIA Data Management Forum 100 Year Archive Task Force, captures the operating practices, requirements and issues facing organizations managing large amounts of information. "Digital information is at risk of being lost." That is the warning from the practitioners who participated in the survey.

June 2007

If you want to successfully solve the complexity and cost crisis in the datacenter, you have to change current practices and begin working together as an organization. Our contention as the SNIA Data Management Forum, in publishing this paper is to emphasize the importance of managing and operating the datacenter based on the value-of, and requirements-for information to the organization. Step one for successful information-based management, is to collaborate with all information stakeholders in order to define the requirements for information, so that it can be managed properly over its lifecycle.

January 2007

Information lifecycle management is much more than tiered storage or even hierarchical storage management. ILM is a dramatic change in information management, focusing on the value of information and delivering storage services based on management requirements. Understanding the storage and information aspects of business processes is generally outside the current repertoire of Storage Administrators and Enterprise Architects. This White Paper is intended to discuss the issues and benefits arising from an information lifecycle management (ILM) effort.

October 2006

The complexities involved in managing records and information today touch various aspects of the organization. As a result, many disparate operating groups now own a piece of the information management puzzle – whether they realize it or not. And therein may well lay the biggest challenge. Collaboration is the solution to the puzzle. It offers a way to regain control and put new value creation back on an equal footing with managing risk. Organizations must do both to survive. This paper is Co-authored by ARMA International and the SNIA Data Management Forum.

July 2006