{"id":2356,"date":"2011-08-26T07:00:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T15:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=2356"},"modified":"2011-08-26T07:00:36","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T15:00:36","slug":"data-storage-mistaking-backups-for-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/data-storage-mistaking-backups-for-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Storage: Mistaking Backups for Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Companies often make the mistake of confusing archives with backups. \u00a0That’s an observation made by Laura Guio<\/a>, IBM Vice President, Storage Sales, Systems & Technology Group, at the 2011\u00a0Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium\u00a0(IIIS)<\/a> in Sydney sponsored by ComputerWorld.<\/p>\n

Backups and Archive data serve different purposes within the business and should be treated as such, but many companies attempt to use their backups for archival. \u00a0While costs of archiving tend to be higher, Guio suggests that the use of virtualized storage could help in keeping costs down by increasing storage utilization by as much as 30 percent.<\/p>\n

At the same IIIS conference, IBRS advisor, Kevin McIsaac<\/a> emphasized again<\/a> that\u00a0\u201cBackup is not archive. \u00a0The problem of trying to use backup as archive is you get a discovery request for email and now you have to go back and dump your backup tapes to a system, get them back, load them up into Exchange, only to find that the emails you are looking for are not there. You then have to go back and do it again and again. \u00a0The process is hopeless.”<\/p>\n

Mark Nielsen,\u00a0HP StorageWorks<\/a> sales and category manager, pointed out that many users fail to fully understand the concept that not all data is of equal value to an organization and that storage management solutions should factor in those differences. \u00a0Guio said the first step in building an effective storage solution is to understand the range of data that the organization must manage and the characteristics of the different data types. \u00a0Data often quickly goes stale, for example, over a three month window most organizations access less than 30 percent of all the data which they have stored. \u00a0Other pieces of data and support information may be infrequently accessed but may be required to be produced for regulatory or business management purposes.<\/p>\n

Nielsen said when valuing data to consider what its relevance is today and how the relevance is likely to change in the future. \u00a0In this way you can build an understanding of the lifecycle for types of data and then construct a corresponding strategy for migrating the data. \u00a0Clive Gold, EMC ANZ marketing CIO, countered this point of view by pointing out that classifying data and assigning weighted values to the importance can be biased and that different weightings will be assigned by different people. \u00a0Value weightings derived by actual data-type access statistics and from data identified as being required for regulatory purposes seems to be fairly non-biased ways of assessing the relative importance of different data.<\/p>\n

Guio commented that archiving and backup processes are complementary processes. \u00a0 Effective archiving can reduce backup costs by 60 percent and reduce the time to backup by 80 percent. \u00a0She summarized three recommendations that she typically gives to her clients:<\/p>\n