The Active Archive Alliance is a collaborative industry alliance formed to educate end user organizations on the evolving new technologies that enable reliable, online and efficient access to their archived data.
Active Archive Alliance
An active archive file system gives you the ability to effortlessly store and access all of your data
By applying new file system to expand over disk and tape library technologies, organizations can now build a persistent view of the data in their archives, making it easier to access again if it ever becomes needed. The diagram below illustrates how you can easily implement an Active Archive deployment alongside a data protection strategy.
Having difficulty managing and accessing your data?
As the result of a variety of requirements to store increasing amounts of data, organizations have found a variety of challenges that make it more difficult to efficiently store and access all of the data that they create. Driven by data growth and an increased need for access, we've been forced to adopt a configuration of storage strategies and mediums that have only made it more cumbersome to access all of our data.
You can store it, but can't manage it!
Traditionally, organizations have leveraged the storage hierarchy approach to identify and manage where data should rest. This strategy, however, has not sufficiently addressed how data should be moved and accessed within the structure.
How we're addressing the problem
While we have clearly identified where data should exist on storage, we have not clearly established the best way to mange it between the various levels of the storage hierarchy. The resulting approach has been to misappropriate storage resource utilization because internal SLA's require access to more and more data.
The chosen course of action has been to increase the level of storage media that is optimized for performance rather than economy, which unnecessarily consumes valuable budgetary resources. When economy media is chosen as the destination of choice, data accessibility is further distanced by proprietary software file formats. To regain access, these formats usually need to be reconstituted to the original, native file formats and transferred back to non-economy media.
The implications of these decisions are a number of headaches that include application incompatibility, allocation confusion, data misallocation, piecemeal accumulation, and quite an intolerance for data transfer latency. This approach makes it painful to gain access to ALL of your data.
