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ARCHIVING
Challenges
• Your company has to keep all data accessible during 5+ years because of legal or third-party requirements.
• You keep all that data on your servers just to make sure that you can answer your internal audit departement requests.
• Your backups fail because of ever-increasing data volumes ?
• You feel that you’re backing up lots of data that never changes ?
• You see your exchange server growing by 50+ % each year because your people do not want to lose a single mail ?
• You see your storage growing by 30+ % while 50% of the data is nearly never accessed.
• You have pst files all over the place , on people laptops , on the fileservers , on CDs , …
If the answer is "yes" to one of these questions , you should have a look at an archiving solution.
What is Archiving
Archiving is part of ILM (Information Lifecycle management), a set of strategies to administer storage in a cost-effective way. Archiving is basicly an intelligent process of moving infrequently accessed or inactive data from primary storage to other tiers of storage.
Note that archiving is not the same as backup, they are in fact complementary solutions:
• Your archive is your primary copy of information (<-> backup second copy) and should always be available for retrieval. (backup is used for recovery purposes)
• Backup is typically short term (days / weeks) , archiving is typically long-term (months / years)
• Your archive is useful for compliance (<-> backup data will be deleted or overwritten after a certain period)
Moving infrequently used data to another tier of storage has several advantages:
• Faster backup & restore
• Less primary (=expensive) storage needed
• Transparent access to all data
• Meeting compliancy demands
• Lower overall storage costs
Comparex can help you with the architecture of your archiving solution:
• Which kind of archiving solution will we implement (File based / mail based (Exchange / Lotus Notes) / databases (Oracle / Microsoft sql Server) …
• Which software solution is best for me ?
• Which hardware will we need for that ? NAS / SAN / lowcost SATA storage / dedicated archiving solutions like EMC Centera or IBM DR550
• How do we certify the availability of our archive (replication / backup / …)
• What’s the performance impact ?
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