Metadata has everything to do with beer.
Prost! to the Metadata
Looking for that one PDF file from a virtual machine backup from a long, long time ago? Or how about “anything” the CFO ever created? Or anything that Employee “X” ever modified?
Good luck. If you don’t have intelligent Metadata to help you, you might be having that beer next weekend instead of tonight. It can be that bad, or worse.
Consider the idea of retrieving all the PDF files on the file server from Department “A” via traditional, legacy backup. You go to your “restore window” filesystem or snapshot view, click through, and eventually begin digging them up, one user after another, one directory after another, one sub-directory after another, and so on. Borrrrrring.
But if you have intelligent metadata managing your multiple backups, you can just insert a search term, based on, yes, Metadata.
When it comes to next generation data protection, Metadata separates the mice from the men. You ain’t got it in your architecture already, you’ll have to integrate, and that’s never pretty.
For backup, file versioning and archive, Metadata provides an enormous value for short and long term strategies. Short term, searches are ultra fast, users can utilize backups like archives, because retrieving a file is like a directory file search, plus, a file system view.
Long term, the sky is blue. Metadata tagging, end-to-end data management, combined with intelligent data protection and storage management becomes Information Management. Either way, drink up, for Metadata is the nectar of the Information Gods.