Risk and Rewards Make Archiving an Imperative, but is IT Ready?

Their rationale is that they are gaining operation efficiency and reducing risk by leveraging their current investment and architecture and keeping the environment stable. When presented with a new problem, they commonly try to ignore the unique requirements the problem presents and assume that their currently implemented solutions can address these new requirements, as well as the old. After all, the more existing infrastructure can be utilized for multiple purposes the better; the more leverage from their initial investment.

This approach seems logical and pragmatic because it avoids point solutions designed to address unique requirements. The challenge is to realize when new business requirements have truly emerged and the IT industry has responded with integrated solutions that can resolve these new problems and provide business advantage and actually reduce risk. In these cases, not adjusting your IT strategy and architecture injects incremental costs and risks. Competitors who have implemented new solutions gain a competitive advantage.

Furthermore, the typical reaction of the large IT Technology vendors is to avoid acknowledging these changes. Traditional storage vendors take a long time to bring new solutions to market as they buy time to react to fundamental market changes. Therefore, IT executives are not educated on the new opportunities for competitive advantage by their traditional vendors. The end result is IT executives often fail to inform their business executives of the risks and rewards that can be gained with new technologies and strategies.

SEC regulations, HIPPA, SOX, and over 20,000 global regulations have driven a new set of requirements about retaining records, images and digital assets for long periods of time and insuring their authenticity. Furthermore, the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), passed in Dec 2006, impact any business that can be implicated in a civil lawsuit, not just highly regulated industries, and imposes new e-discovery requirements on these companies. Required archival strategies must include processes to verify record retention and disposition, prove authenticity, and enable rapid discovery.

Isn’t this covered with my backup and disaster recovery strategy?

IT data storage architectures have been designed to assure high availability for mission critical applications. Data is maintained on high performance, highly redundant RAID devices to provide continuous availability and high performance access. Data is replicated to other sites for disaster recovery (DR). Backups and snapshots are taken on a frequent basis. Often there is a second tier of data storage for less mission critical and lower performance data access, again stored on RAID storage and backed up to other disk and/or tape. In either tier, the purpose of the backups is to restore the primary disk array in the event of multi-disk failure, site disasters, or to restore to a different point in time, perhaps before a corruption of the data had occurred. Backups are for a contingency, an eventual restore. To access the data you must restore. Many IT executives consider these backups corporate archives as well. Why not use the software and storage mechanisms already in place?

Archives have different requirements

The traditional requirements for high availability data solutions are not the same as archive requirements. Archive data will be retained for longer periods of time than current transactional data or active files. Industry regulations or corporate governance may determine that retention periods are for many years, decades or even permanently. Furthermore, the data will need to be kept in an unchanged state for this extended period. These extended retention periods are well beyond the useful life of magnetic storage devices such as disk and tape. A common fallacy is that you have these records on some backup, you retain your backups for an extended period of time and therefore you have an archive solution. However, archives must support an e-discovery process. Finding all the backup tapes and locations where a digital image or file is maintained would be a difficult, if not impossible task. Even if located through metadata, the digital file would have to be restored to access the content and prove authenticity. Is there a different version of this file on one of the other backup tapes? Has this magnetic alterable media been damaged, faded, or tampered with? All magnetic WORM technology is only protected through software; the medium can be altered, by nature, accidentally or intentionally. Archives must support random access for e-discovery and absolute certainty and authenticity of the original file. Risk exists for companies that are SOX and HIPPA regulated, but also for lack of compliance with new e-Discovery requirements of the previously mentioned FRCP legislation that applies to all companies.

You can manage risk, meet compliance, and save on IT costs

Most data exists as unstructured files, data that is not managed by a database or email system. In fact, studies show that more than 70% of the data stored in an enterprise is unstructured. These files are in file-systems that are scanned on a regularly basis, perhaps nightly or weekly, during your backup window. Due to the enormous growth of this data, it is usually impossible to scan all your file-systems on a nightly basis. Studies further reveal that the majority of this unchanging data will either be seldom accessed or never accessed again. However, it is included in backups, night after night, sitting on storage designed for high availability access with its associated high costs. There is a better way.

Perhaps your disk vendors are just telling your IT team to migrate the unchanging data to less expensive disk arrays as an archive. Of course the cheaper the disk, the more likely its failure, so data must still be subject to backup to other low cost disk or tape. The end result is ever growing primary and secondary disk storage and backup windows that are longer than the hours in the day to complete them. Furthermore, disk technology will require new archive storage acquisitions every 3-5 years, perhaps as many as 10 times over the life of an archive. Another common fallacy is only to consider the initial acquisition costs of the archive platform. Future acquisition costs, numbers of migrations over the life of the archived data, cost of operations and ownership in terms of maintenance, power, cooling and expandability should all be considered in the archive storage solution.

So what is the solution?

By moving unstructured data to a storage tier that is optimized for archive data, you can meet all the business requirements for an archive and reduce your capital and operational costs. First, the archival storage tier must be able to retain the data on an unchangeable medium for long periods of time. Only by storing on such a permanent and verifiable medium can you confidently eliminate the overhead costs of the traditional non-permanent archival approaches on disk or tape. The overhead costs are largely related to compensating for the fact that magnetic recording will change over time and is subject to failure, including replicating copies, making backups, frequent migrations, constant auditing and checking and verifying that the copies haven’t gone bad. The industry has responded to this need with UDO media and drives. UDO technology developed by Plasmon, an archival storage company, uses high density blue laser to permanently place data on to a durable media that is true hardware WORM and cannot be changed. Plasmon, IBM, Konica-Minolta and Verbatim have brought this technology to market. It has been proven that once written and verified on this media with the blue laser, it will remain unchanged, based on accelerated life testing. The media is certified at 50+ year media life. This permanence gives you the confidence to eliminate the need for continual backup and re-verification of this unchanging data. It also assures undeniable authenticity of digital records and images for legal and regulatory evidence.

Second, the archival storage solution must support random access discovery. The UDO technology, now in its second generation, enables random seek times of 35ms to any sector on 60GB media. Even if a query requires loading a UDO drive with another piece of media within a UDO Archive Appliance, this takes less than 10 seconds, a fraction of the time of loading and restoring from backup tapes.

Third, the archival storage solution must be easily integrated into your storage infrastructure and applications. Plasmon has placed UDO drives and media in a Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance. The appliance provides an integrated set of disk RAID cache, UDO drives and media, robotics and software technologies to provide a fully integrated platform for archival storage. Just as special appliances were created for the purpose of providing file services, from companies like Network Appliances, several years ago, Plasmon has created an appliance for archival services. The filers were superior to general purpose windows and Unix servers for file management, just as the Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance is superior to generalized disk and tape solutions for archiving. Despite the archive specific functions of the Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance, its integration into the IT infrastructure is simply as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. It appears as a NFS or CIFS file-system on your network. Application integration is seamless, if your application can write to disk, your application can archive to the Archive Appliance. Archiving policies and rules and appliance management is enabled through a simple but secured web GUI interface. Ingestion performance and retrieval performance is enhanced through an integrated RAID cache, but a copy is always on the permanent UDO media.

Fourth, the archival solution must be a technology that can grow with future archive capacities and yet retain compatibility with the past archive media. New UDO drive technologies are able to read previous generations of UDO media. In the Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance, mixed media is handled across UDO generations. Your applications are virtualized from the media management through the file system interfaces. Upgrading from one generation of UDO to the next does not impact your applications, access remains through the cache and the file-system interface of the Archive Appliance. UDO has a roadmap that increases the cartridge capacity from 60GB to 120GB and then 240 GB per cartridge over the next 5 years. Currently a single Archive Appliance can handle 76TB of archive capacity on-line. Of course off-line capacity is limitless and off-line media management is an included function of the Archive Appliance software. Furthermore, pools of Archive Appliances can be managed through a single software solution provided by Plasmon that can support up to a 4PB archive.

Finally, the cost of a long term archival solution should be less than keeping it on traditional storage. As previously described, capital acquisition of an archive using Plasmon UDO is less than disk based solutions that must include the associated backup and replication costs, WORM software emulation costs for authenticity, and repeated acquisitions over the life of the archive. Furthermore, the ongoing operational costs of a disk-based archival system requires significantly more power and cooling to enable the spinning disks and power supplies and fans, than a passive UDO technology. UDO data retention requires no power except when reading or writing in a UDO drive. Most of the capacity is in passive removable cartridges in the library or appliance. The power and cooling costs of a moderately sized disk-based archive will exceed acquisition costs over a 5 year archive. Plasmon UDO Archive Appliances require only normal 110v, wall power, for even a 76TB appliance. Finally, the cost of implementing a DR strategy for archive can be as simple as a second copy of the removable UDO media stored in another site.

Conclusion

As a business manager you should discuss your firm’s exposure to compliance and regulatory risks. You should discuss the appropriateness of your IT strategies and architecture for addressing these concerns. Furthermore, you can ask your IT executive to provide cost savings based on implementing an archival strategy that reduces your costs of storage for standard file management. You should suggest that a good archival solution should resolve regulatory risks and provide cost savings. Suggest solutions to be investigated, such as Plasmon’s UDO Archive Appliance that can meet these two objectives.

For more information on Plasmon and the UDO Archive Appliance, visit our website at www.plasmon.com or call us at 1-800.451.6845.