Scalable Grid Storage Architecture a Prerequisite for Enterprise Data Archiving

One can hardly have a conversation about storage management these days without the topic of archiving surfacing. Part of the reason that archiving is commanding more attention is because as companies create and keep ever greater amounts of referential data on their production storage systems, it is creating a host of new problems.

Some of the problems are obvious. Retaining more data drives up storage costs across the board from extra capacity needed on production storage systems to the need for more capacity in backup. Though deduplication helps to take some of the sting out of disk-based storage costs and using disk as a backup target helps shorten the backup windows, this is only a short term reprieve in coping with existing corporate data and storage management problems, not the final solution.

Most companies fail to understand the financial, technical and legal liabilities that keeping this amount of data online presents to their companies. Andrew Reichman, a Senior Analyst with Forrester Research, conducted studies over the last couple of years that illustrates some of the risks that unmanaged data presents to companies. His findings with Forrester Research included:

• Storage budgets are flat or declining
• The #1 reason companies are buying more storage capacity is because it is easier to throw more capacity at the problem than to understand and deal with the problem
• Companies find it very difficult to find good storage people
• Data is growing 60% year-over-year while storage costs are dropping only 20% year-over-year

Actual experiences and expenditures will vary by company but these findings clearly identify/illustrate that companies are approaching a point where they must pro-actively manage their data and start to separate production data from stale or infrequently accessed data. Moving this data from primary storage to secondary reduces backup windows since less data is backed up during full backups. Companies can also reduce the amount of money they pay for secondary storage since, instead of procuring high cost Fibre Channel storage systems, they can purchase lower cost, higher capacity storage systems to house this type of data.

However before anyone runs down to CompUSA to start buying hard drives and servers, companies need to put some thought into the type of storage system that they are going to use to host archived data. Companies should also weigh the wisdom of using a product from their existing storage system vendor's portfolio of storage systems as their storage system for archived data. The challenge that most companies will find in this situation is that while most storage systems using off-the-shelf SATA disk drives will cost less than FC disk drives, companies cannot forget to factor in the technical challenges, legal liabilities and financial costs associated with long term data archiving and retention.

Selecting a system that has a scalable and flexible architecture and also satisfies external legal compliance issues by retaining data for the appropriate time without keeping it too long; thereby exposing companies to new risks is a separate issue. In the next blog entry, I'll take a closer look at:

• How Permabit's Enterprise Archive delivers on these specific concerns
• What specific features it has; and
• Partnerships that Permabit has in place to address corporate concerns around implementing and managing archived data short and long term