Backup or Archive? The Answer is Yes.
Unless you’ve been doing your best Rip Van Winkle imitation for the last several years, you are no doubt familiar with the growing volume, and importance, of data to businesses of all sizes and types. Hopefully you have a robust backup and recovery scheme in place in case something should happen to this valuable data. Through tiered storage, snapshotting, backup-to-disk, and/or virtual tape libraries, backing up and recovering data has improved dramatically from the old standard process of backing up directly from primary disk to tape (and hopefully being able to locate and recover from tape back to disk when needed).
Just as the volume and importance of data for day-to-day business use continues to grow, the requirement to save data for future use has also grown dramatically. Compliance requirements, such as those under Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, have helped foster this growth. And the continuing digitization of formerly non-digital assets
*, as well as the ability to quickly and accurately retrieve legacy data for business purposes, has contributed as well.
Backup and Archiving: Different Purpose; Different Process
Paul Myerson, Senior Analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, states that backup and archiving are two distinct processes with different objectives and requirements
*. With backup, the objective is to “ensure that a recent copy of production data is available for recovery in the event of a disaster, outage, or accidental loss.” The process is to “make a copy of production system data and store it until overwritten by a new version.”
With digital archiving, the objective is to “enable the long-term retention and management of digital assets to satisfy regulatory compliance, audit, litigation support, records management, data management and new business process requirements,” says ESG. The process is to “remove records from production systems, [and to] preserve and keep [them] available for easy access and reference until [the] retention period has expired or [the] data possesses no more business value.”
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A Four Step Approach to Archiving
There are a few steps to best enable your enterprise for data archiving. Many of these steps are also best practices for managing your overall storage environment.
Step 1: Understand that all data is not created equal. Not all data is of equal importance or accessed as frequently, so you can plan a tiered storage approach. Your most active data occupies Tier 1 on the highest performance and most reliable storage and secondary data and copies of production (Tier 1) data can reside on slightly lower performance, yet still reliable storage subsystems. Data to be archived can be moved to archive-specific storage, such as another disk storage tier, content-addressable storage, or specialized WORM (write once, read many) media or tape drives.
Step 2: Evaluate the types of data to be archived , such as e-mail, database or other. Choose appropriate software and hardware systems to manage the efficient archiving of the data and also the search and retrieval of the data when needed.
Step 3: Determine how much you want or need to archive, the expected growth, and how long you plan to retain the data. This will help you choose a software and hardware solution that can meet your needs today as well as expand along with your data archive needs.
Step 4: Test, go, adjust and go again. Test your solution and establish processes and procedures to ensure that your archived data is as easy to access, search, and retrieve as planned. As with any data movement process, you should periodically test the system for functionality and performance.
You Don’t Have to Go it Alone
Dell has modular, flexible storage solutions that permit you to start with the right size archive for your needs and grow as your needs change. Dell helps design an archiving solution that can store your data efficiently and safely, while fitting your budget and operations. Dell can help you improve efficiencies by offloading data that is seldom accessed, move infrequently used data to less expensive media, and archive vital data for easy retrieval.
Because Dell understands that different organizations have different archiving needs, they offer multiple archiving architecture options, so you can stay in compliance with the regulations that affect you. Dell maintains relationships with top providers of data archiving hardware and software solutions in the industry. As a result, you receive the best solution for your needs conveniently—from one, trusted source.
Dell’s Professional Services can help you design, develop and deploy an innovative, robust and scalable data archiving solution that fits your business objectives and environment. Dell’s professional services team can help you implement data archiving, and, by combining expertise with partners’ capabilities, help ensure that you receive the support you need to keep your data archiving solution working smoothly.
