Business continuity and disaster recovery driving archiving activities
To the question 'Which factors are driving the need for archiving in your organisation?', 58 percent of respondents cite 'regulatory compliance', compared to 62 percent for data growth and 70 percent for disaster recovery/business continuity. Average primary storage data volumes have continued to grow, with 7 percent more respondents reporting volume of more than five terabytes (TB), and a corresponding fall in respondents reporting volumes less than 5TB. At the top end, almost 60 percent more respondents than in 2005 report primary storage data volumes of more than 15TB - up from 7 percent to 11 percent of all respondents. It seems likely that the need to deal with such increases explains why 'data growth' has been a greater driver for archiving than compliance. Such results from 2006 bear out predictions from the 2005 research. Then, respondents gave the strong impression that archiving was on their agenda and the benefits in terms of compliance and other regulations were being recognised: 49 percent agreed they would be looking at e-mail archiving over the coming twelve months and 43 percent at file archiving. In 2006, these figures have risen to 57 percent (up 8 percent) and 55 percent (up 12 percent) respectively. The choice of archiving media highlights some interesting statistics. In the UK, tape as an archive medium is used by 72 percent of respondents (down 1 percent from 2005). In the US, however, tape shows a new lease of life with 77 percent of 2006 respondents citing its use, up 16 percent from 2005. Disk remains unchanged at 48 percent and optical rises 4 percent from 22 percent to 26 percent. An almost universally held opinion is that archive data volumes will continue to rise, with almost no one predicting a fall. Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software, said: "One area of potential concern is that the high response for 'archiving' with tape might actually come from IT departments continuing to use tape-based backups as their strategy for long-term data retention. While the removability and relatively long lifecycle of tape lends itself to data archiving, the use of backup software is a major mismatch. Backup simply doesn't have the granular data management functionality to address compliant data-level retention, destruction, access control, or authentication needs over long periods. Most users would agree that simply finding and restoring data after a few months is onerous and often unfeasible with backup software and that is one of the basic functions of a good archive tool. "On the other hand," Cotterill added, "archiving products capable of automatically maintaining access-ready copies of data repositories at the disaster recovery site can allow a major portion of data to be available after a disaster without the need for routine and large-scale backup and replication. Maybe the market is now starting to understand this concept." Archiving and backup address different business problems. The purpose of backup is to create copies of the online environment that can be recovered rapidly in the event of failure or data loss. Backup is oriented towards storing and moving large amounts of data and it does not purport to make data in backup savesets immediately available. The purpose of archiving is to provide an alternate, secure place for data that must be kept for long periods of time. Archiving provides a granular level of management over data that backup does not. Not only can each data entity put in the archive be retained, migrated, and stored according to its own rules, but the archive ensures that the data can be quickly located and restored.
•Date: 11th October 2006• Region: UK/US •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity |
