The New Archiving: Big & Active

Organizations aren't just producing more data these days; they're saving more data. For storage managers, that means increased emphasis on archiving.

But this isn't your father's archiving we're talking about. Instead, it's so-called active archiving, a kind of ILM on steroids, in which all kinds of data, including databases, semi-structured content, unstructured images, and text, is hoarded into data "bulk barns" for ready access.

Bigger and more often tapped than traditional data archives, which could stay dormant for years, active archives are scaleable repositories for data like medical images, which must be accessed frequently, but perhaps not quite as frequently as data in primary storage.

This is the kind of archive Nexsan has in mind with its new SAS-based archiving device, SASBoy, announced this week.

Nexsan is "making the argument that although SAS is a high performance drive, there is a place for it in the world of secondary storage," said Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group. Even if you’re keeping things for a long period of time, certain pieces of that could need more accessibility.”Active archiving is catching on as a concept among startups as well. Check out the claims of U.K.-based Tarmin Technologies, which is also beating its drum this week. This company's solutions are aimed at saving data "forever," but in a form that can be accessed quickly at any time.

Active archiving isn't a new concept, even though it's generating new products and services as though it were. "If you can't call something HSM or ILM, call it active archiving," quips StorageIO Group's Greg Schulz. "In other words, the data is moved off of primary storage into some other pool that may be near-line or off-line -- with data that can be brought back quickly... Describing that as growing in importance would depend on whether you have been on a Rip Van Winkle nap for the past couple of years."

While active archiving may not be new, the volume of activity around it is exceeding past levels, while generating growth in a plethora of related areas. New products and services in document management, e-discovery, compliance, and email management can all be considered relevant to the issue of active archiving.

Technologies are also serving the move to active archiving. Virtualization and clustering are considered baseline techniques for creating cloud computing platforms -- from which EMC, IBM, Fortiva, and other suppliers plan to serve up SaaS-based active archives.

One thing: Despite the popularity of the term, Schulz warns that "active archiving" is usually not used outside of a marketing pitch. "It often will come down to vendor marketing... to differentiate an archiving solution from a compliance-focused one or a general-purpose solution; from a database or email archive from an unstructured data solution."But Schulz has a caveat for those whose vendors describe an active archive based on offline tape, magnetic, or optical media: "Go easy on the cookies and Kool-Aid during the sales pitch."

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