All the anguish brought on by this kind of situation brings us back
to the old issue of sites lacking guidance in the area of data
architecture, as should be promulgated by an IT department. What we
are collectively seeing in all these companies is departments buying
the new, large (160 GB+) hard drives or disk arrays now on the market
and implementing them as one, single, huge storage area, with no
thought to the realities involved in the decision. This is largely a
problem in the Windows arena, where this often derives from people
having had basic experience with a personal computer and who
simplistically extrapolate when outfitting larger systems. This is in
contrast to the Unix environment, where there is pre-existing
conditioning to sanely subdivide disk space by functional
categorization and keep file systems manageable.
Do whatever you can to stem this poor practice... Feed back to the
responsible department; bring it up at meetings; raise awareness in
company publications. Carving out multiple volumes allows for
categorization and easier administration by their owner, and
certainly facilitates backup in terms of time schedule and
parallelization opportunities. If necessary, analogize the issue:
does one implement a 15-foot high filing cabinet, or three 5-foot
high cabinets? It's about practicalities. We TSM administrators need
to make ourselves conspicuous in decision making, not be willing
victims of uninformed decisions. We safeguard our organizations'
data, and can do that only if sane data architectures prevail.
Richard Sims
