The shift involves the facilitating role that metadata will play in abstracting the specifics about data and where it's stored from the applications, end users, and operating systems requiring access to it.
When vendors discuss metadata-driven storage, the phrase "storage virtualisation" invariably comes up. Vendors will tell you that, depending on what the goals of a particular metadata application are, the benefits of storage virtualisation can range from improvements in retrieval performance to searchability to ease of management to better allowance for heterogeneity at the hardware level (but usually not all of the above).
Return on investment theoretically comes in the form of increased productivity to both end users and those tasked with planning and managing enterprise storage. Storage virtualisation can result in capacity optimisations that bring hardware savings.
Generally speaking, the application of metadata to a technology implies that a richer set of descriptive attributes is replacing something more rudimentary. For example, we hear a lot about metadata in discussions about identity management. In that context, metadata often refers to other attributes that are associated with someone's identity besides their username and password. One such attribute could be a code that describes their purchasing authority.
In the context of storing information, metadata layers promise to turn static, monolithic repositories that house data on the operating system's or application's terms into malleable storage clouds that are more accommodating of the way end users prefer to organise information for retrieval and that have the flexibility IT managers need as their physical hardware needs evolve.
Where have we been hearing about metadata and storage recently? Perhaps the trend most worth watching out for is the consolidation wave that EMC may have kicked off upon announcing it would be acquiring content management solution provider Documentum. If there ever was a category of enterprise applications that delivers the benefits of virtualised storage, it's the document and content management category in which companies like Documentum, Veritas, OpenText, and FileNet have traditionally played. Metadata is one of the key enablers to the way in which document and content managers virtualise storage. From a data management perspective, the benefits of application-derived storage virtualisation are closely aligned with the benefits of the other storage technologies offered by companies like EMC.
Even prior to the Documentum acquisition, EMC was already in the metadata-driven storage management business. In an interview earlier this year, EMC CTO Mark Lewis described to me the main idea behind the company's Centera family of network attached storage."[Another] way we store information is as objects--objects you can think of as unstructured data. Databases consist of structured data, which means relational records that are usually fairly dynamic and that have highly relational characteristics. Unstructured data is a photograph. That's unstructured data, where you're storing a big object with a little bit of information around the object. It's usually what we call fixed content. It's a medical image or an e-mail record or a document that's been scanned in. It's not relational, but you still want it to be a record. We have Content Addressable Storage (CAS), which fits into that market place for storing those records." That little bit of information stored with the big object is---you guessed it---metadata.
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