Archiving stakes its claim to lower TCO

Computer Technology Review, Nov, 2004 by Thomas M. Coughlin, Farid Neema

As the amount of stored data in applications such as e-mail and document management explodes, many organizations are turning to solutions that combine the vast capacity of traditional archiving approaches with direct access to secondary disk storage, delivering recovery, or access times--which range from seconds to minutes. E-mails are archived by over half of the respondents and an additional 14% are planning to archive them in the next 12 months. Last year's survey showed only 15% archiving e-mails

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Archiving in Midrange Open-System Environments

The notion of archiving, so familiar to the mainframe world, has gone a long way in penetrating the open systems environment, where archiving was often mistaken for backup. Backup and archiving are quite different although IT managers of small and medium businesses were slow to realize this. The past two years show a significant improvement in the understanding of the characteristics of archiving, as witnessed by the result of the survey illustrated in Figure 1. Archiving is treated as a separate application from backup by 58% (as compared to 50% in 2003, and 30% in 2001) of the population, with another 20% planning to set it up as a separate application within the next two years.

Archiving concerns mostly large IT installations. Midrange sites tend to spend fewer resources on archiving, but the survey shows that midrange IT sites are where growth potential is the highest. The volume of data archived in open systems is low compared to proprietary mainframe environments, but this is looked upon as an opportunity for newer archiving technologies and the use of magnetic disk drive-based solutions. Overall, the volume of data archived nearline has significantly increased since last year, and is expected to grow again in 2005. Tape is by far the most popular media for archiving data, though optical disk is used for archiving by 40% (versus 30% in 2003) of the surveyed population and magnetic disk by 60% of the population, compared to 50% last year (Figure 2).

Drivers for Archiving

The primary driving force behind IT managers' adoption of archiving has traditionally been to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). The primary benefits for end users are a reduction in primary disk space and performance improvements, as expressed in faster response times. But, recent regulations have put pressure on businesses to store historical information, and corporate policy as well as government regulation dictates that data must remain accessible for years after it is collected. Over one third of the population said their data retention practices are driven by legal or regulatory requirements.

Though cost is often thought to be the most important factor, it ranks third after data retrieval performance and scalability in the selection criteria for an archiving solution. Data is mostly archived by files, but content addressed archiving is used by half of the respondents and will grow 70% in the next two years (Figure 3). Half the population claims to achieve file retrieval in minutes or even seconds.

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Information on the Survey

The analysis is based on a survey of North American IT managers that was conducted from May through July of 2004 (2004 Backup and Archive--A User Perspective). Out of a population of 5,000 IT managers, over 600 qualified managers answered 30 screening questions. From this population of 600, a selected group of 110 responded to the full survey of over 200 questions. Participants met the criteria of having backup and/or archiving responsibilities for IT operations that store a minimum of 500GB of raw disk storage.

Ten industries were primarily targeted in the survey: finance/banking, health, manufacturing, retail distribution, government, education, consulting, transportation, media/entertainment, and telecommunications. Sixty operations out the 1,300 report over 2 petabytes of SCSI/FC disk capacity, mostly in the transportation, entertainment, and telecommunication industries. The majority of the respondents in education and consulting use less than 5TB in each of SCSI and ATA disk storage. Nearline archive capacity per site is highest for media/entertainment, finance/banking, and retail/distribution companies.

For Additional Information

The full Backup and Archive report contains 171 figures summarizing site, industry, and revenue characteristics of the surveyed population as well as information on disk and tape backup and archive installed base, trends and perceptions. The report can be ordered from www.tomcoughlin.com (under Technical Papers). A companion report based on the survey is also available covering Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery.

Figure 1. Is archiving treated separately from backup?

Yes, today             58%
Plan within next year  20%
No Plan                18%
Don't Know              4%

665 Respondents

Note: Table made from pie chart.

Thomas M. Coughlin is president of Coughlin Associates (Atascadero, CA), and Farid J. Neema is president and founder of Peripheral Concepts, Inc. (Santa Barbara, CA)