Archiving Study Released

Regulatory concerns and exploding data growth have led to a renaissance of sorts in archiving practices, but those same issues have also complicated the solutions and IT decisions surrounding this important market, according to a new report -- Archiving: A Plan of Attack --from the subscription research service Byte and Switch Insider.

"Archiving used to be simple: Copy files to tape and toss them in a warehouse," says the report's author, Senior Analyst Brett Mendel. "The current crop of archiving systems present a complexity entirely absent from their predecessors.

"In particular, assessing the overall cost of archiving requires a broad view of the systems needed to implement the solution and several other areas that could be affected by it."
Among the report's conclusions:

• Archiving, with a focus on e-mail and database-driven applications, is increasingly critical to data and storage management
• Besides the archiving product itself, buyers must consider the storage hardware and software that will support it, the likelihood of integration and customization, and the initial and ongoing operational costs
• Data retrieval, a major archiving function, adds administrative overhead and cost to storage management
• Storage professionals must carefully consider the type of application and data that requires archiving, as the nature of the archiving product could affect the implementation approach and resulting financial costs
• Several archiving services have emerged to ease the overhead of deploying and managing archiving solutions; however, they assume control over data that enterprises must be willing to give.