In his column, “What Killed Archive”, my colleague George Crump discussed the complexity of trying to identify inactive or cold data, and move it from the primary storage tier to a less expensive tier. Before we go there though, let us take a step back and look at what is an archive anyway.
Organizations today are struggling to keep up with the explosive growth of unstructured data, as well as fixed file content, which they need or want to store for lengthy or indefinite periods. Additionally this data needs to be readily available and accessible to all users. Among an organization’s biggest challenges are properly storing, managing, protecting and preserving that data in a secure, cost effective manner while also ensuring compliance.
Where to Put All That Data?
To meet the storage explosion many organizations purchase additional storage systems to meet various performance and capacity requirements. The primary storage tier usually consists of flash and high-speed disk while the secondary and lower tiers consist of less expensive high-density NAS devices. But even with increasing disk density and dropping prices, this becomes an expensive strategy when additional costs for power, cooling, floor space and management are factored in.
There is also the issue of aging data. Various studies have shown that up to 80% of an enterprise’s data is cold data. Storage Switzerland has actually found that percentage to be even higher, with 95% of data being inactive. A solution that can identify this cold data and manually or automatically move it to more economical storage tiers can result in significant savings. One such solution is archive.
What is Archive?
In IT, an archive is a collection of data files no longer in active use that have been grouped together and moved to a separate less expensive storage device for long-term retention because it may be needed for future reference or needs to be retained for regulatory compliance. Additionally, an archive must be able to maintain data durability and it must be able to migrate data between generations.
Archive Target Selection
To address these storage challenges, some organizations are migrating their data to cloud storage providers, leveraging cloud storage capacity, infrastructure and expertise to relieve the organization of some of this burden while reducing their expenses, initially. But long term storage costs can add up.
The alternative to the cloud has been around since before there was “the cloud”; tape. Tape, for long-term storage, is relatively inexpensive compared to other storage media. But tape has a bad reputation because of mechanical or read failures on tapes that are old or have been heavily used. But companies like FujiFilm and their Dternity solution are changing that because they are combining a powerful, easy to use archive application with new robust tape technology like LTO 6 / 7, which has significantly improved the quality and performance of tape media that now has an archival life of over 30 years.
Despite the potential savings an aggressive archiving strategy is often avoided because of fear of complexity as well as user complaints when trying to find data that has been archived. Today though, archiving is becoming less complex thanks to solutions that converge the identification of archive worthy data and the targets to which the data will be sent. These solutions also make the restoration of archived data more seamless to the user. In short, now is the time to get on the archive bandwagon.
This article on “What is Archive Anyway?” is one of an ongoing series of articles in the Storage Switzerland “What Is” series. These articles provide a refresher on key fundamentals of various storage technologies, for those who are new to, or considering entering the IT field, and those who simply wish to “brush up” on the basics.
Joseph is a Lead Analyst with DSMCS, Inc. and an IT veteran with over 35 years of experience in the high tech industries. He has held senior technical positions with several major OEMs, VARs, and System Integrators, providing them with technical pre and post- sales support for a wide variety of data protection solutions. He also provided numerous technical analyst articles for Storage Switzerland as well as acting as their chief editor for all technical content up to the time Storage Switzerland closed upon their acquisition by StorONE. In the past, he also designed, implemented and supported backup, recovery and encryption solutions in addition to providing Disaster Recovery planning, testing and data loss risk assessments in distributed computing environments on UNIX and Windows platforms for various OEM's, VARs and System Integrators.
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