What is Tribal Knowledge and How to Overcome It with StorageMAP

As almost anyone with IT experience knows, managing an unstructured data environment can be challenging in so many ways. There are numerous factors that must be considered, including but not limited to: the number of storage devices, size of your dataset, number of files in your dataset, and maybe the worst of all – the uniqueness of your environment. This is because one-size-fits-all solutions are oftentimes not a great fit, and instead, an ad hoc management style is adopted leading to a potential future hurdle referred to as “tribal knowledge.”

More specifically, storage admins have a lot on their plates –

• Creating shares and exports.
• Designing their filesystem layout.
• Choose which device is best for each app or dataset.
• Hunting down unused data
• Organizing and tracking which workflow is using which dataset.

All of these countless day-to-day activities produce important nuggets of knowledge that are unfortunately often not recorded anywhere. This is tribal knowledge.

Why is Tribal Knowledge Such a Problem?

How does that contribute to headaches for IT professionals?  Because, once the person with that knowledge leaves it is largely lost forever to the company, and in its place are countless questions such as:

• Are you hosting 20 TB of dead application data on your NAS?
• Is it 20 TB of data the storage administrator was going to get around to deleting someday?
• Are you going to pay to keep that data on tier 1 disks?
• Do you have old employee files that were archived to another storage devices? But never deleted?

Could you be in one of these scenarios or one of nearly an infinite number of others? The worst problem is that you probably don’t even know if you are in one of these situations.

Datadobi has purpose-built our unstructured data management solution with exactly these situations in mind. The tribal knowledge problem was well known to Datadobi when we built StorageMAP.

StorageMAP allows you to intelligently scan your entire environment. It doesn’t matter how many storage devices you have. It doesn’t matter how many data centers you have. It doesn’t even matter how many countries your data centers are spread across.

StorageMAP can intelligently scan your data no matter where it lives or how many locations it lives in. It will then take that data and use our Unstructured Data Mobility Engine (uDME) to perform big data analytics on it. Next, StorageMAP will take that intelligence and present it to you in an easily digestible format. StorageMAP will shine a spotlight on all forgotten data sets. You will be able to easily cull through all your data and recover your lost tribal knowledge. You will never again be beholden to any employee departures or forgetting knowledge.

In addition to providing, you with a holistic and comprehensive view of your unstructured data environment, StorageMAP can enable you to make intelligent decisions and take action on your data. For example, StorageMap can structure migrations to move your data with world-class speed and reliability. Or, it can delete data with the same unmatched parallelism.

Want to learn more? Take a deeper dive into all that StorageMAP offers.