Archiving Grows in Complexity, Consequence

Ah, archiving. Talk about changing times.

In the good old days, archiving data meant consigning tapes to dust-bunny duty in a far-off warehouse (the real, tin-roofed kind). Now, as we all know, the rules for retaining data have changed. A new word, "compliance" connoting everything that must be done to digitally abide by new government regulations – has entered the storage IT argot.

At the same time, the staggering growth of data has continued to wreak havoc on enterprise applications – and storage budgets – by adding strain to primary storage. To top it all off, auditors and users alike often demand quick, disk-based access to data that has been sent off to secondary storage.

Now here's the kicker: As the problem of archiving has gotten more complex, so have the solutions. Sure, there are plenty of products (and services) that intelligently offload aging data from primary storage – and bring it back at the snap of a corporate lawyer's manicured fingers. But getting the right setup for a particular organization calls for a detailed plan of action.

In this month's Byte and Switch Insider, Archiving: A Plan of Attack, we tackle the intricacies of the various archiving options – and wrestle the problem to earth.With the latest iteration of archiving products, for instance, you're not just buying software and throwing it on an off-the-shelf server. Instead, buyers need to consider a slew of potential points of impact on the IT environment.

First to ponder is the kind of archiving best suited to a particular company's requirements. What will run optimally in your IT environment? Are you focused primarily on email, database apps, video images, or a combination of data types? Who is available to maintain the solution? Where will end users retrieve needed data?

Also needed: a plan for the hardware and software that comprise the second (and sometimes third) tier of storage that archiving involves. Each tier, of course, comes with associated costs and benefits. What medium will be used? Who will manage it? Where will it be housed, and how will it be linked back to the rest of IT?

All this and more point to a hefty capex and opex outlay for any archiving product. Then there are services, which purport to take capital costs, much of the process, and ongoing maintenance off your hands – for a fee, of course.

Is it all worth it? Ask the North Bronx Healthcare Network, operator of two public hospitals in Bronx, N.Y. Roughly 200,000 emergency room visits and 42,000 admissions each year at the hospitals generate at least 100 Tbytes of radiology images. North Bronx then saves the images for at least a year, in case doctors need them for comparative studies. On top of that, regulations force the hospital to save other types of data for anywhere from seven to 24 years."We were seeing geometric growth in our storage needs," says Dan Morreale, CIO of the hospital. "We manage it all with one and a half people, and it started to exceed their breaking point."

Morreale brought in a consultant, who helped to develop a new storage architecture with an emphasis on archiving. To date, North Bronx has archived upwards of 120 Tbytes of radiology, email, and other data. While no cheap ticket to success, the new system has helped avoid numerous other costs that would have quickly exceeded the current investment. All told, the hospital staved off two new IT hires, additional servers and storage, and backup systems and media for the additional systems.

And that's just the storage side of the equation; savings can also come from improved and automated mechanisms for retrieving data, an expensive and time-consuming endeavor if there ever was one. Boeing, for example, reportedly figures a cost of $1 million for every 15 emails that must be retrieved in response to any sort of inquiry. Boeing averages two discovery requests per day from its legal staff, say people familiar with the company. Extreme as this scenario might be, discovery costs could realistically reach tens of thousands of dollars per year in more average environments.

When all is said and done, you might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement an archiving solution. But when the lawyers come calling, at least you'll be ready. And there's another point worth pondering in any archiving plan: What would it cost you not to be ready?

— Brett Mendel, Senior Analyst, Byte and Switch InsiderArchiving: A Plan of Attack is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900.

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