Green IT for Dummies®

Chapter 7. Laying the Foundation for Green Data Management

In This Chapter

• Understanding best practices for managing your data

• Dealing with your data's life stages

• Discovering tiered storage architecture

• Going green by using hosting data center services

Unless you're face to face with a brand new organization that's about to purchase IT solutions for the first time, you're living with decisions about purchases and configurations that may have been best practices at the time of their inception, but may not have been made with green criteria in mind. To take what you have and make it greener requires a real strategy. This chapter focuses on the issues you need to consider in creating your green strategy.

Data is the heart and soul of IT. Not all organizations have data centers — in fact, relatively few have the traditional raised floor, air-conditioned sprawls you might think of when you hear "data center." But every organization has data, plenty of it — and the amount of data is growing rapidly. Indeed, the rate of growth of data storage is accelerating as new technologies, such as document imaging and video conferencing, generate data by the gigabyte.

What to do with all that data? How do you know what to keep and what to pitch, and what to have at arm's length all the time versus tucked away for "just in case?" On top of those decisions, you need to figure out where to put it all.

Later in this part of the book, we dig deeply into specific storage solutions, but first, in this chapter, ...