Archiving Defined - Professional Archive Solutions Provide Efficient Storage Management

Industry analysts have reported for many years that approximately 80% of tier-1 corporate storage infrastructures consist of fixed content data that is rarely accessed, if ever. This data meets the definition of “Archive Data”, in that it is fixed content and not changing over time, which can be managed against defined data retention policies.

Over time, the amount of archived data residing on Tier-1 storage will only dramatically increase. By implementing an intelligent data archiving strategy, significant cost reductions can be achieved by:

• Automatically placing data on the right storage tier based on its life-cycle stage.
• Better utilizing storage assets appropriately, with active data residing on Tier-1 storage while archive data is placed on a more appropriate archive storage tier.
• Reducing the operational overhead associated with Tier-1 storage including storage management, backup, and replication costs.
• Implementing an efficient data management policy which includes an archive storage strategy provides an efficient, cost effective storage management solution.

According to Gartner’s Carolyn DiCenzo, IT executives should strive to separate fixed content data to an active archive, following a 3-2-1 strategy (3 copies of the data, on 2 different types of media, with 1 being removable and off-site).