Blogs

Earlier this month, I was at the NAB show in Las Vegas listening to all the stories of how the folks store their content. I was at the show both as a representative of Quantum and as a member of the Active Archive Alliance, and both roles help me stay current with how companies are addressing their archive storage needs, including some surprising tidbits.

I like your Active Archive – Can I have one?

You know you’ve started a good technology trend when every department in your company wants to hop on board. Over the past two years, active archiving has become an essential concept for the fast-paced enterprises of today. For example, a major government organization recently deployed an active archive solution in its central data center. Three months later, they’re deploying the same solution across datacenters in the U.S. Why? Because accessible, protected archives are in high-demand for today’s rapidly growing data volumes. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at system performance metrics to keep in mind when evaluating active archives, because once you’ve deployed an active archive solution, you’ll find it may be used in more ways and by more people than you had originally planned.

Is your data set exploding and your budget holding pretty steady or even worse, decreasing? What is your plan for the next five years if this continues? Have you looked into what an active archive can do to turn your problem into a big win for you and your organization?

Total worldwide tape storage media capacity shipped reached record levels in the fourth quarter of 2012. A key driver for why more data is being stored on tape than ever before is its powerful blend of cost-effective, scalable, dependable, fast, removable and easy to use storage. Tape storage continues to deliver a powerful solution to the challenges of exponential data growth across a wide set of storage goals and vertical markets.  

The evolving role of tape

In today’s complex storage environments, getting a solid ROI on primary, secondary, and tertiary tiers of storage can be extremely challenging. Ever present data growth has companies chasing their tails when it comes to storage capacity planning and allocation. With an industry average of 30 percent data growth on primary storage, most organizations cannot justify keeping all data on high speed primary spinning disk. So, if the data is not being kept on primary SAN or NAS, how is this data stored? The answer: An active archive.

It’s 2013. Petabytes have become the new terabyte and exabytes surely aren’t far behind. To cope with the rapid proliferation of digital data, companies have been savvy to adopt rigorous archiving solutions. And, with the need to have rapid access to archival data, the concept of active archiving by intelligent storage design has become a must in the fast-paced, high-performance data centers of today. Here are five questions you should be asking yourself when it comes to data storage in 2013 and beyond.

1)      How much are you really paying for your archive?

It is sometimes hard to fathom the sheer magnitude of the explosion of data being created by mankind in the short time since computing first began. According to some analysts, in 2013 we are generating the same amount of data every two days that was created by all of human history up until 10 years ago, which was roughly 5 billion gigabytes.  More surprising, it is estimated that by next year, we will generate that much data every 10 minutes.

Our digital universe, as it is called, is estimated to grow to 40,000 exabytes by 2020, which is roughly 40,000 billion gigabytes. 

Members of the Active Archive Alliance recently shared their predictions for data storage as it relates to active archives in 2013. Here's a look at what’s to come according to some of the industry’s top storage experts:

·       Continued Growth of Unstructured Data

Data will continue to grow at an exponentially rapid rate even as IT budgets continue to diminish. To meet this challenge, data tape technology will play an increasing role as organizations seek innovative storage solutions such as active archiving, which leverages tape's many benefits including high capacity, reliability, low-cost, speed and ease of use.

What another great Storage Visions event this year! Attendance was up, interest was high, and the Active Archive Alliance was well represented with member companies including Spectra Logic, Cleversafe, Crossroads and QStar represented in the booth. Storage Visions has the unique position of butting up against the Consumer Electronics Show, (CES), which draws a great crowd and strong interest from the Media and Entertainment market. And, while Storage Visions has not traditionally been a conference that draws a lot of end users (or “leads”), it is evolving into a show that attracts very notable vendors and corporate supporters.

The recently announced availability of innovative LTO-6 Ultrium drives and media comes just in time, not only for the holiday wish lists of IT managers everywhere, but for the New Year when we can expect the continuing relentless growth of data in need of protection and preservation. While estimates of data growth among organizations vary from 30% to more than 50% annually, the fact that it is growing while IT budgets are not, makes for a timely introduction of this new generation of LTO.