18/11: Developing a Data Archiving Solution

Category: General
Posted by: bagheljas
Data Archiving is mission critical for many organizations for several reasons. First, archiving data, either for long term or short term, allow organizations to go back into archived files to retrieve a specific piece of data for customers or themselves. Second, data archives are often kept for a specific number of years for government regulations. Organizations generally have three data archiving strategies they can choose from :

  • Disk Archiving : The advantages of disk archiving are the speed of archive and restore than tape; and easier to index and search archives on disk. On other hand, long term large archives on a disk could be an expensive affair.
  • Tape Archiving : The advantages of tape archiving are for the large data sets and long term storage. On other hand, administrators wish that they never have to go through and search their tapes for information.
  • Hybrid Archiving: One could create an hybrid archiving platform built on tape and disk archiving to enjoy the best from both worlds.

An organization needs to answer and quantify the following items to develop the cost-benefit analysis for one over another and create the best-fit strategy and solution for Data Archiving.

  • Size of Data
  • Ease of retrieval
  • Period of Retention
  • Ability and Speed to Search & Find
  • Legal & Contractual Requirements

In nutshell the Data Archiving strategy that organizations choose depends on their storage requirements and legal policies. If you need to store data for a short period of time, not storing hundreds of terabytes, and don't have long-term retention requirements, Disk Archiving is the optimal choice. Or, if you are storing a large amount of data long term that you believe you don’t need to access, but need to keep around for legal and contractual obligations, Tape Archiving is the economical choice. In practice, most organizations have requirements that make them lean towards the Hybrid Archiving, and often Hybrid Archiving is the best choice.

Disclaimer

The thoughts expressed in the blog are those of the author and do not represent necessarily the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company. Assumptions made in the study are not reflective of the point of view(s) of any entity other than the author. Since we are critically thinking human beings, the point of view(s) is always subject to change, revision and rethinking at any time. While reasonable efforts have been made to obtain accurate information, the author makes no warranty, expressed or implied as to its accuracy.