Archiving's Active Alliances

5:50 PM -- Will anybody ever be able to make archiving simple? Seems the most one can hope for these days is that a major vendor will take charge of organizing what's needed.

Case in point: Hitachi Data Systems is bringing out its archiving system -- Content Archive Platform, unveiled in February -- in phases, putting together pieces that it hopes will seriously challenge EMC's success with its Centera content addressed storage (CAS) system. (See Hitachi Intros Archive and Hitachi Picks Archiving Partner.)

Based on software OEM'd from Archivas, HDS's software is available on HDS TagmaStore Workgroup Modular Storage (WSM) 100 systems. The archiving software is available through an early access program to some customers, with general ability expected in the fall. Eventually, the software will run on all HDS storage systems, says Derek Gascon, Hitachi's director of marketing for archive systems.

Hitachi also unveiled today the first group of partners for its Content Archive Platform ISV program. These are vendors who will write to HDS's API for the Content Archive Platform. The list includes email archiving vendors CA, Mimosa Systems, and Symantec; file archiving vendors Arkivio, Enigma Data Solutions, Kazeon, Signiant, and StoredIQ; database archiving vendor Princeon Softech; as well as backup vendors CommVault (along with CA and Symantec); and jack-of-all-trade archiver Scentric. (See Scentric Gets Classified.)

Partnerships are key to any archiving platform because of the various types of data users deal with. So it's good that vendors see this and try to offer software to handle as many types as possible under one umbrella. For instance, last week CA said it will OEM Arkivio's Auto-Stor as CA File System Manager, which will be a companion to the email archiving software CA acquired with iLumin last October. (See CA Resells Arkivio and CA Buys Archiver.)But no matter how many partnerships and how much integration vendors do, customers will still have to cobble multiple pieces of software to do their archiving.

"It's hard to be all things to all people," says Dave Sadowsky, SAN manager at chip manufacturer Actel Corporation. "Each type of archiving has to deal with different issues, and they have to deal with all platforms. Then there's the issue of how you manage data, how you make it highly available, how you synch it up with some colocation site where you can dump it."

Sadowsky runs EMC Clariion SAN, Celerra NAS, and Centera, but he found Auto-Stor worked better on EMC hardware than EMC's DiskXtender software. He doesn't expect to find a simple solution if he finds the need down the road for email or database archiving.

In other words, there's no Easy button for archiving, regardless of how wide a net a vendor casts. The benefit, of course, is that large vendors like HDS are trying to make the Byzantine machinery of archiving available under one roof. More than that, we can't hope for yet.

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: