Archiving

This is how we define archiving

Archiving is a combination of processes, policies and technical platforms to preserve, protect and make accessible the selected information for a determined time period. Archiving is a business decision as it focuses on the information itself and on what it can or will be used for.

We also differentiate between “archiving” and “migration”, defined thus:

Migration means moving data between tiers of storage. Migration is an IT decision as it focuses on the location in which to maintain the digital representation of the information, i.e. the data.

Why archive your information?

Not only are we seeing the ongoing rapid growth of information; we are also retaining this information for much longer periods. It is quite possible that the reason we are keeping such information is that we have no structured way of deleting it; but that said, we are also facing internal demands and demands from clients and/or government to keep it. Furthermore, external demands are becoming ever more detailed, so requiring us

• to retain information for extensive periods (from a few years to forever),
• to guarantee that the information stored is the same as the information we stored all those years ago,
• to be able to read and understand archived information
• to call up parts of this information in a very short time (based on keywords).

In addition to this, many end users (or more likely, their sysadmins) are reaching a point where they are simply unable to retain all that information on disk and backup media; they really need to start archiving information.

Reasons for archiving:

• Cost savings
• Order and structure
• Laws and directives (SOX, FDA, EU’s 8th directive)
• Code of conduct

One critical part of an archive solution is the technical platform where all the data is stored. Archiving makes specific demands of the storage environment and is certainly more than “just storage”.

This takes us into the infrastructure and design of the archiving platform. As our world is full of different applications with their own data and metadata formats, the design needs to be very specific and relate to the end users' unique environment. Unfortunately there is no "one size fits all" solution, so we usually end up with more than one component for the migration and archiving layers.

Proact represents the leading technologies in the storage industry and has many years of experience and outstanding expertise thanks to the fact that we have supplied many IT solutions for archiving.