Business issues
The Hong Kong Jockey Club faced the challenge of managing about 120 terabytes of disk storage and 90 terabytes of tape storage, a data growth rate of over 30 percent per year and increasing pressure to reduce IT expenses. With these issues in mind, the Jockey Club decided to review its storage allocation strategy to see how it could improve the cost-efficiency of its infrastructure. The Jockey Club commissioned StorageTek’s Professional Services team to conduct a thorough assessment of its storage environment. The goal was to refine the organization’s information lifecycle management strategy (ILM) to align storage costs with business priorities in terms of managing data growth, enhancing data protection and optimizing information value as it changes over time.

Solutions
StorageTek’s Professional Services team assessed the storage requirements for the Jockey Club’s six mission-critical applications, examining the infrastructure and classifying the data. StorageTek then recommended an ILM strategy based on data classification and quality-of-service goals. It also offered an implementation roadmap and an appraisal of the Jockey Club’s storage utilization, including its backup effectiveness, data duplication and throughput.

Business benefits
The Professional Services team helped The Hong Kong Jockey Club refine its ILM framework by assigning specific attributes required by different storage tiers. The data classification enabled the Jockey Club to implement its ILM strategy more effectively. The StorageTek team recommended that the Jockey Club reallocate over seven terabytes of data from tier 1 to lower tier storage. Other strategies will be adopted when new applications come online and are integrated into the new ILM framework. This enables the Jockey Club to optimize its storage infrastructure and achieve a higher return on its investment.

Technology benefits
StorageTek’s assessment enabled Jockey Club to get ready for a more comprehensive tiered storage model, by recommending that it move from a two-tiered storage to a four-tiered storage model, where data is re-evaluated and allocated to different tiers according to its value. This four-tier infrastructure is composed of three different tiers of storage on storage area networks and direct-attached storage device, each representing a different level of storage requirements. This solution not only enables higher levels of information access, but also provides good return on IT investment for the Jockey Club.