Where Does All the Data Go? The Archiving Opportunity

Despite the economic slowdown across the globe, the storage market continues to be in fairly good health, and one of the simple reasons for this is that organisations have no choice but to find ways to store an incredible amount of data. This growth in storage requirements can be directly linked to the simple fact that businesses have a natural, organic growth in their data – for example, every day employees receive hundreds of emails to which they need access. However, there are a number of other drivers – legislative and industry-specific – which are helping to create the ‘perfect storm’ for channel companies able to deliver archiving solutions.

Data Protection

In the UK, two pieces of legislation are providing much of the momentum behind the move to implement archiving – The Data Protection Act and The Freedom of Information Act. Both of these have been in place for some time now but as they have grown in scope and profile (following a number of major lawsuits) their connotations from a storage perspective have become even more far-reaching. One of the key components of the Data Protection Act is that it provides a mechanism for disclosure of information through what is called a Subject Access Request (SAR).

Effectively, an organisation can be asked to disclose any information it might have within 40 days. If it cannot comply with an SAR then it effectively breaks the law and can find its ability to defend against legal proceedings severely compromised.

On top of this, the effect of Sarbanes Oxley and the fallout from scandals like Enron in the US has been felt keenly by UK businesses. At first it was only UK businesses with US listings which were required to conform, but the global nature of business has meant that there has rapidly been a move towards a more Sarbanes Oxley-style regime in companies not necessarily covered by it. The post-Enron years have also seen the emergence of similar legislation in Europe, such as Basel II.  In essence, the greater accountability this type of compliance and reporting calls for makes it necessary for businesses to be able to produce evidence and records to defend itself against any type of financial mismanagement. Again this manifests itself as yet another compelling reason for organisations to look closely at how they archive electronic records and data.

So companies are faced by a combination of pressures – the need to retain a greater proportion of their data over a longer period of time coupled with the fact that they simply have far more data to manage.  Across vertical sectors, files are not getting any smaller – the switchover to digital formats in the Media and Entertainment sector, the increasingly complex techniques and instruments used in scientific research – businesses must think carefully about how they will most effectively store this data.

Persistent Data

Depending on which of the various studies you read, upwards of 75 percent of data is categorised as Persistent Data – fixed, infrequently accessed data. This is the data which needs to be retained but in some cases may never actually be accessed. Working with customers to first of all identify this Persistent Data, classify it and then to archive it in a suitable manner is an area where the channel has a massive opportunity. With the rapid growth in data being experienced by organisations across the globe, those IT departments that haven’t yet implemented some form of archiving almost certainly should.

Once the Persistent Data has been identified, it’s up to the channel partner to find the right technologies to give the best mixture of performance and cost effectiveness. In many cases larger customers will benefit from a three-tiered D2D2T storage architecture – SAS disk for the most highly-used transactional data / applications, lower-cost SATA disk for less accessed data and then tape as a low-cost, high-density archiving platform. Powering constantly spinning disks is a significant cost and does not make sense when data is not being accessed. In fact, according to research from The Clipper Group, Disk costs 25 times more to power and cool than tape systems.

Consolidation within the datacentre has been a very hot topic recently, particularly with the boom in virtualisation and server consolidation. Virtualisation has been a huge driver behind sales of networked storage but in general, IT departments have taken a fairly haphazard approach to architecting their implementations on the storage side. The vast majority of customers that have implemented virtualisation to date are currently in a position where they have a massive amount of Persistent Data sitting on expensive disk-based storage. This is a situation that, somewhat ironically, has come about from customers attempting to cut costs. Given the cost per GB of disk storage, channel partners can show customers a significant return on investment by moving this data to tape.

Data growth is not a phenomenon that is going to go away, and as the drivers for properly archiving data mount up, the opportunity for the channel will only get bigger. IT departments will want to know their data is properly retained— but in a cost-effective manner which fits within an overall storage architecture. Channel partners that are able to offer clear guidance and the right mix of disk and tape technologies on which to build such a strategy are going to be well set to capitalise.