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Archive planning more popular than regulatory compliance

October 10, 2006

The 2nd Annual BridgeHead Software Information Lifecycle Management Audit (SILMA) reveals that overall, approximately 58.1 percent of users think archive planning is significantly more important than regulatory compliance.

The BridgeHead Audit shows that average storage data volumes are increasing, with most of the growth at the top end of the scale.

The average primary storage volume is just over 1 TB in the U.K., and more than 2 TB in the U.S.

Compared to 2005, an additional 7 percent of respondents reported 5 TB and more volumes and 7 percent fewer reported volumes less than 5 TB.

An additional 60 percent of users reported volumes of 15 TB and more, up from 7 percent in 2005 to 11 percent in 2006.

Bridgehead CEO Tony Cotterill speculates that these increases may be behind the uprating of data growth as an archive planning driver.

Cotterill is concerned about the use of archiving tapes, particularly in the U.S. where 72 percent of respondents, up 16 percent from 2006, cite its use for archiving data.

In the U.K., archiving tape use is about one percent lower at 72 percent.

He asserts that backup, the inevitable feeder of data to tape, is the wrong choice for archiving: "While the removability and relatively long lifecycle of tape lends itself to data archiving, the use of backup software is a major mismatch."

Cotterill says "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's one of the basic functions of a good archive tool."

He added that archiving and data backup address different business problems: "the purpose of data backup is to create copies of the online environment that can be recovered rapidly in the event of failure or data loss."

Cotterill added "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 software gives the ability to retrieve data immediately for compliance and regulatory purposes.

The short answer is to use data backup for business continuity (restoring lost and deleted files) and archive software for compliance and long-term data storage. One size does NOT fit all he asserted.

Source: IT World Canada