UDO: why professional optical storage makes sense in a low-cost disk world - Disaster Recovery

Computer Technology Review,  Nov, 2003  by Dave Dupont,  Steve Tongish

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Let's face it. We are living in a world in which we increasingly have to keep everything we produce, at least everything that could be called professional "information" or "knowledge." Financial transactions, claims information, product designs, e-mail, medical images, audio recordings, survey data, blueprints, pre-press images, photographs, video recordings and legal documents are all examples of "knowledge assets" that organizations need to safeguard for the future.

Why is this? And why now? Part of the answer is because we can. Offices may not be paperless, but the bulk of new knowledge assets (99.97% by some estimates) are in digital form. Combined with a steady decrease in the cost of all storage technologies, we suddenly have the means to store a huge proportion of all the knowledge and information we create.

Major trends in the business and government landscape exacerbate the situation. These trends include increased pressure for regulatory compliance, the growing threat of litigation, and the increased use of long-term knowledge assets to drive better performance. Increased regulatory compliance is the most visible new development, and certainly the most talked about. Look on the website of any storage company and you will find references to regulations such as SEC 17-4a, HIPAA, or the Sarbanes-Oxley act. Litigation is starting to get more attention, as the greater scope (all organizations, large and small, public and private, across industries), and financial risk (often orders of magnitude beyond regulatory fines), become clear. The positive use of archival data is only beginning to grab attention, as more organizations discover ways to extract value from knowledge assets. Some are using them to make better decisions, as is done today with archived scanned images in the medical field or seismic data in the oil industry. Other organizations are reusing knowledge assets to cut design costs or speed development. We see this phenomenon of "not reinventing the wheel" in applications as diverse as engineering design, pre-press projects and even animated films.

These trends will continue to accelerate. Keeping knowledge assets safe but accessible, at a reasonable cost, has thus become one of the major challenges facing IT managers today. The challenge becomes even more difficult as the volume of knowledge assets grows exponentially and as the financial pressures affecting IT organizations continue to mount.

What We Need: The Modern Data Archive

In the past, important works of knowledge were kept in physical vaults and libraries. Today's organizations need the digital equivalent. The key requirements of these modern digital archives include:

* Maximum authenticity and trustworthiness: Whether mandated by regulation, required by the courts or simply because the application itself demands it, archival solutions need to ensure that archived data remains unaltered.

* Long archival retention periods: The amount of time knowledge assets must be retained is already seven to ten years in many industries, and the effect of recent regulations and market trends lengthen that period.

* High capacity and scalability: Rapidly growing archive data volumes demand solutions with high initial capacity, and flexibility to scale over time.

* Timely access to archived data: Knowledge assets are useless if they cannot be accessed when needed.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

* Low long-term Total Cost of Ownership: Cost pressures, especially in the current economic environment, are not going away. Any viable archival solution has to have low acquisition, maintenance and operating costs.

Archival Storage Alternatives

The market for what the Enterprise Storage Group calls reference information (which translates ultimately into archival data) dwarfs that of the overall storage market. At 92%, its growth rate is half again as high. This has not gone unnoticed by storage vendors, resulting in myriad "archival solutions" (see Figure 1).

The storage technologies underlying these solutions include hard disk drive-based systems, magnetic tape and optical storage. Each of these technologies has its strengths and weaknesses, and each, when mapped by expected data longevity, is strongest in only part of the storage spectrum.

In Figure 2, at the far left of the curve, the demands for active data dictate on-line storage solutions with uninterrupted availability, high access speed and high throughput. The overall volume of knowledge assets retained, the frequency of access, and economic realities result in a different set of priorities for data further down the curve. In long-term data retention, raw access time becomes less important and data authenticity and trust-worthiness, timely access to data and low Total Cost of Ownership come to the forefront. It may seem convenient to use a storage single product across the entire data lifecycle, but this is seldom practical since no one technology captures all the required characteristics.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]