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The Need to Archive Digital Information
The need to archive information has existed for as long as mankind has communicated. The earliest archives were cave painting recorded hunting methods or other significant events.
Historically the amount of information archived has largely been influenced by the technology available for archive. As technology advanced and language developed, cave paintings became oral stories which were eventually written down and documented, and those documents were turned into digital information to facilitate sharing of information.
Today, the vast majority of information is created digitally and is overloading storage infrastructures ability to cost effectively cope with the overwhelming quantity of digital information. Effectively archiving preserves data while providing cost effective accessibility.
Companies today are faced with an increasing number of complex problems all driven by the explosive growth of data in their enterprise - management of large volumes of data, reliable access these data in a timely manner, managing the integrity of long term data and how to afford the needed storage solutions.
Considering that 80% of data within an enterprise is likely to be persistent (write once read infrequently) today’s traditional storage solutions fail to deliver adequate solutions.
The Data Archiving Challenge
Archive of digital data was at one time regulated to tape-based systems. And while those systems have improved over time, the intrinsic limitations of off-line tape-based systems have placed such a burden against the access of information that they are reluctantly used when the only other option was deletion of the data.
What is desired is the accessibility of online disk systems with economics that allow all information to be kept until it is obvious that there is no longer a need for it. In the absence of free, self managing, disks, some other hybrid solution is required.
Some informal file system based archives are kept on lower cost disk. And while this works for some things, it doesn't cover the attributes of Archive, and suffers from "Silly Backup" which is backing up data repeatedly that hasn't changed.
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'Fifthwave suggest that the introduction of high density, low power consumption disk based recording solutions are the answer to the challenges amd risks associated with any Tape based recording solution.'
Neil Parker, CEO.
Addressing the data protection issues with solutions such as VTL (virtual tape libraries) will deliver significant cost savings and improved service levels. With faster backup and restore, VTL solutions are easy to install, offer better reliability and faster retrieval of data. Extending these practices will enable disaster recovery to be cost effective and more comprehensive.
To make archive data easily accessible, significant economic and operational gains must be offered. When archive data has to be retrieved, the value to the business can be considerable.
One of the benefits of COPAN’s MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) architecture is that only the disks that are being used are spinning, and it is only these disks that are drawing energy.
Experience shows that users are typically only spinning between 10% and 25% of their disks at any one time. This means the demands for powering the unit are up to 8 times less than a conventional disk array
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