Archiving Poised for Growth for Long Term Data Protection

The Active Archive Alliance collaborated with Enterprise Strategy Group Research on a report covering Backup and Archiving Convergence Trends, which explores the motivations and usage scenarios for how companies are currently addressing backup and archiving.

Key findings from the ESG report include:

• 99% of respondents have seen the benefits of the archival side of convergence for improved backup and primary storage performance and increased access to information.
• 72% of respondents are being motivated to move data off of primary storage to improve performance and reduce consumption of primary storage capacity used by non-active data.
• 62% of respondents retrieve archived data on a daily or weekly basis.
• 50% of respondents use storage tiering across their entire storage environment to optimize their storage footprint.

Also according to the report, end-user enablement and DR were selected by more respondents than litigation support as a top reason for implementing data retention solutions. Improvements to primary storage (capacity/manageability) and improved backups are often seen as the most tangible benefits. This underscores the expectations on today’s archival systems to retrieve data in minutes tos, as opposed to the hours or more that might occur during a more procedural event like e-discovery.

“Active archives help companies abandon the status quo by offering a cost-effective solution for managing and accessing long-term data. As the ESG report illustrates, organizations are seeking frequent and efficient access to data and at the same time, are looking for ways to move that data from expensive primary storage to more affordable storage tiers,” said Peter Faulhaber, board member, Active Archive Alliance, and president, Fujifilm Recording Media USA, Inc. “We’ve seen tremendous growth and interest in the use of active archives and expect this growth to continue well into the future.“

“Active archiving has never been more important for organizations of all sizes,” said Jason Buffington, senior analyst, ESG, and co-author of the study. “Primary data and secondary backup copies are both growing at rates far greater than IT budgets, so scaling one’s infrastructure linearly just won’t work. But to reduce one’s storage footprint while still assuring the levels of data preservation that are necessary in today’s business climate, IT has to look for smarter ways to store data while maintaining its QoS.”

The report concludes that backup and archive convergence is more likely to take place through the combined feature sets of backup software with archival features or data protection storage solutions that are designed with both rapid recovery and extended retention features in the same box.

The report was sponsored by the following members of the Active Archive Alliance: Fujifilm Recording Media USA, SGI, and Spectra Logic.