IT's Not-So-Sinister Dirty Little Secret

The October 2007 issue of InfoStor magazine ran an article entitled "IT's New Dirty Little Secret" which includes an estimate from the Enterprise Strategy Group where they believe that 60 - 80% of data on primary storage today is static or persistent data. Static or persistent data is not accessed at all for 90 days or more after its initial creation which then consumes valuable storage capacity and data center power. This is "IT's new dirty little secret," says analyst Heidi Biggar.

While I do agree that IT may hide this information from business managers (or minimally does not draw their attention to it), this cover-up is probably not as sinister as it sounds. The deeper problem is that IT has no practical, economical and easy-to-implement-and-manage solutions for this problem. Archiving, virtualization and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) software are just some of the possible ways to tackle and address this issue that has been around for years. But even the InfoStor article brings out that only a limited number of companies have implemented this software and most have taken no action at all on the problem.

So why aren't more companies taking action? The answer is two-fold. First, taking action is not simple. All of the aforementioned tools usually require corporate buy-in, lengthy purchasing cycles and time to implement the software. Meanwhile the cost of disk continues to drop so they know, to a certain degree, buying more disk is always an option. Second, who will manage the software and new hardware once they acquire it? Buying cheaper disk storage systems or storing more data to tape saves money now but instead of managing just one or two expensive storage devices, they now have more hardware to manage. This introduces other risks and complexity into an organization and partially defeats the purpose for better managing the data in the first place.

AmeriVault, known for remote online data backup services, also delivers online file archiving for lifecycle management of this static data. This is a natural fit for a common problem that many businesses face - backup windows. AmeriVault uses backup software that takes block-level changes and compresses data sets with traditional algorithms and deduplication. Combine that with their new archiving software that archives static, less critical data and all-night backup may now take less than a few hours so the backup window issue disappears.

Managed archiving solves the hardware burden as well by eliminating the corporate need to manage the storage devices on which the static data resides. Instead this task falls to the MSP who maintain the backend hardware. Administrators set policies that establish what data is archived and end users access the data as usual with the file name doubling as a stub pointer to the offsite archive.

IT is just like everyone else, who wants to talk about and publicize problems when they have no answer for them? The combination of online backup and archiving offered by AmeriVault as part of its AmeriVault-DV data archiving service gives SMBs a new option to consider which they may find more palatable than many of the other solutions currently on the market.