The Tipping Point for Managing Archived Data is Here

One would think that at some point organizations would reach the tipping point for storage consumption and that year-over-year storage capacity growth rates of 30%, 50%, 100% or more would come to an end, or at least slow down. If so, it hasn't occurred yet and, if anything, it shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future. Nowhere is this more evident than with the amount of data that companies need to archive and retain.

Even as the amount of production data that companies generate continues to grow, the amount of data that they need to archive and retain is growing at an even faster clip driven by new regulatory and corporate compliance requirements. As enforcement of these laws starts to occur, the question becomes, "How do companies concurrently adapt to the challenges of information growth and regulatory compliance while keeping infrastructure and management costs down and data online, available and protected?"

In previous blog entries I examined how some RAID-based systems have potential pitfalls when protecting tens and hundreds of TBs of data - especially when it comes to deduplicated, archived data. However of equal concern is how do you scale many of these RAID-based storage systems over time while controlling management costs, minimizing risk, preserving the integrity of the data (critical when data is archived!) and still taking advantage of faster, lower cost technologies as they become available? The answer is that often you can not.

In fact, something almost paradoxical is occurring in data storage management as it relates to archiving. The need to archive data is often difficult to determine while the underlying storage on which it resides continues to drop in cost. This puts companies in a precarious situation - they can't afford to summarily discard corporate data but neither can they afford to dedicate additional IT staff and resources to manage it either.

It is this void that products like Permabit's Enterprise Archive are specifically designed to fill. In upcoming blog entries, I will expand upon each of these points but here are some key business benefits that Enterprise Archive provides to answer specific corporate concerns around the management and protection of their archived data:

• Keeps Management Focused on the Business, not the Technology. Enterprise Archive uses an underlying storage grid architecture that can independently scale performance or capacity using off-the-shelf servers and storage. This enables companies to economically follow technology curves (increases in performance and storage capacity) while minimizing time spent administering the solution. Data migrations and technology refreshes that are normally distractions and expensive to the business are handled automatically and seamlessly as part of Permabit's Enterprise Archive storage grid architecture.
• Eliminates Questions about Long Term Data Protection and Growth. Permabit Enterprise Archive uses its RAIN-EC and SDR (Scalable Data Reduction) technologies that are critical to protecting corporate data, preserving its integrity and minimizing storage consumption. RAIN-EC addresses the specific data protection shortcomings of RAID-based storage system that become exposed as companies scale these systems into tens and hundreds of TBs while also ensuring that the data remains accessible into the future. SDR deduplicates like data chunks and incorporates compression to further help control data growth and reduce costs.
• Uses Standard Network Sharing Protocols. Nothing is more annoying than to buy a solution and find out it only works with one software product; or that to make it work with other software products, you need to purchase additional software licenses or make programmatic changes to the software. Permabit's Enterprise Archive appears as a network filer (CIFS, NFS or WebDAV interfaces) to your archiving applications. This simplifies setup and maintenance while facilitating the introduction of Enterprise Archive into existing corporate network infrastructures.

While there is no end to storage growth in sight, the tipping point for economically storing archived data and managing it long term is already upon increasing number of enterprises. It is these companies that need to look to new, more innovative designs such as Permabit's Enterprise Archive that confront this paradox of rapidly growing archived data stores while also keeping storage capacity and IT management costs under control head-on. In my next blog entry, I'll delve more deeply into Enterprise Archive's storage grid architecture and how it uses RAIN-EC to address these technical concerns.