About Us

Transforming data “ore” into information is the keystone of today's and tomorrow's successful organization. Just as the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota served for much of the 20th century as the world's key source of high-quality iron, so the Mesabi Group aims to deliver high-quality insights on long-term strategies for mining mission- and business-critical data for cost-effective, low-risk competitive advantage.

The Mesabi Group particularly focuses on two “revolutions” that are dramatically changing the ability of storage and information managers to zero in on key data in near-real-time:

• Storage Networking - the separation of storage as an equal partner with processing & networking in delivering business value
• Storage Management - the use of software intelligence to manage data and storage, including Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), the proactive, global management of data from arrival to archiving and including data protection initiatives, such as continuous data protection (CDP) and disk-based backup.

The Role of the Mesabi Group

The role of the Mesabi Group is to help organizations make sense of the two storage revolutions and take advantage of them to ensure the best and most efficient use of information for business value. The Mesabi Group will also be working closely with Infostructure Associates to help organizations wishing to mesh their data management solutions into this storage-driven information strategy.

In the 20th century materials technology enabled the industrial revolution to reach its zenith. In an industrial revolution, the essential materials technology ingredient is iron; that iron is mined from the ground in the form of an ore, transported to a steel mill, and transformed from raw iron into a workable product steel that serves as the sinews of civilization. Although materials technology (including nanotechnology) will continue to play a key role, information technology and biotechnology must be added in to make up the three overarching technologies that will continue to transform the 21st century. As noted above, transforming data “ore” into information will therefore be the keystone of a post-industrial world.

And, as the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota served for much of the 20th century as the source of iron, so does the Mesabi Group focus on how organizations can serve up the data “iron” of the 21st century. However, whereas the high quality iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range has long been extracted, the information “ore” that enterprises use is subject to continual growth and renewal. The data ore mines never run out.

Information the Key to Enduring Competitive Advantage

Few organizations will be the same in five years as they are today, even though to the outside world the appearances may be much the same. Embracing constant change effectively is what gives today's successful organization enduring competitive advantage. Every business decision to change products, services, organizational structure, and so on, has a corresponding IT event that encompasses both process and information.

IT has always wondered which was more important the process as embedded in an application, or the data that the application processed on the way to creating information. The answer to that question is vital in helping IT understand how it creates value for the enterprise.

In the view of the Mesabi Group, there are three answers. The first answer is expressed in the duality represented by the term “information processing.” In other words, both are inextricably linked. Although enterprises think in application-centric terms, the use of data as information wisely is the raison d'etre of information processing. And that leads to the second answer.

The second answer is management. Neither process nor data is important without proper managerial direction. Management must will the creation of each successful process, including the data capture process. Management must then have the wisdom (or proper judgment) as well as the knowledge to change data into information (data that serves a business purpose). Those organizations that are further advanced upon the curve of linking their business processes with “information processing” are likely to have a measurable competitive advantage with respect to their competitors.

The third answer relates to the data. The data that each organization originates is unique to itself (such as customer or product information). However, more and more the data that an organization uses comes not only from inside the four walls of the enterprise, but also from outside, within the ecosystem in which the enterprise finds itself in competition with other ecosystems. Increasingly, decisions on what data that an enterprise uses and controls should be shared with other members of the ecosystem. will increasingly be business-critical.

The data for each organization is unique to it. As, in today's world, management is increasingly emulated and processes copied ever more rapidly, proprietary data remains, and will remain, a key differentiator. Moreover, knowing what data is or can be made unique to a business can lead management to develop processes that will exploit the data as fully as possible to create sustaining competitive advantage and core competencies. In other words, a perspective of how to aggregate, share, and analyze data is necessary to create maximum business value from the allocation of resources to IT.

In fact, the entire IT infrastructure revolves around three activities move, process, and store data. The moving and processing functions are transient uses of data, whereas storage is where data persists. Making that data available on a timely basis and managing it over its lifecycle of changing value is critical to an enterprise. And that leads us to storage.

Storage – Viva the Revolutions

Storage is undergoing two revolutions. The first revolution is storage networking, where storage stakes out its independence from servers as part of an IT hardware triad of networks, servers, and storage. Each member of the triad can each be managed separately, but each also has to interoperate with the others through standard interfaces as part of the overall IT hardware infrastructure.

The first revolution is a topology revolution. That is storage networking changed the topology diagrams about how storage interfaces with the rest of the IT hardware infrastructure servers and networks. Storage declared its independence from individual servers to take up a partnership with both servers and networks in a triad. The role of software is to both enable this separation and to ensure the smooth interoperability among the three.

The second revolution is storage management. One of the many examples of the transformation in storage management is information lifecycle management (ILM). ILM focuses on how information should be managed as it changes value over its lifecycle. This second revolution implies that data should now be managed proactively, not as knee-jerk responses to crises.

ILM is a blend of old ideas (such as hierarchical storage management) and new (such as the use of disk for data protection). ILM requires physical implementation (data has to live somewhere), but ILM also requires software. One key issue in ILM that Mesabi Group is examining is, where does traditional storage management overlap with content management and document management and where are they distinct? A second issue is, how will ILM software evolve into the policy-driven intelligence that is necessary for enterprise-wide cross-application ILM?

Another part of the storage management revolution revolves around data protection initiatives. For example, continuous data protection (CDP) delivers high availability against logical data protection problems, such as viruses, database corruption, and human error.

The two revolutions go hand in glove. For example, an enterprise-wide cross-application ILM will not be possible without networked storage, and storage networking cannot achieve its fullest potential without enterprise-wide cross-application ILM capabilities, such as the pooling and tiering of storage. The glue that holds both together is storage management software.

Helping you make better sense of these two revolutions in order to make storage decision making easier is the mission of the Mesabi Group.

Contact Mesabi Group

Call +1.781.326.0038 or Email [email protected]