The entries in this Active Archive blog are filled with good ideas about how organizations benefit from the implementation of a secure and robust long term information archive. The concepts are intuitive - and the benefits seem obvious, but it also seems clear the growth of active archiving as a generally deployed data storage practice is going to take time. The question is "How much time?".
Some people argue that standardization of tape formats is an important ingredient in helping to drive more widespread use of active archiving. Others will argue that the dramatic reduction in the costs of storage devices will be the key. And either one of these elements may play a role in growing the overall market, but let's be honest about the fact that the data format that is used to house data on tape will represent about 1% of the factors involved in the success or failure of your active archive initiative. Interestingly, I think that the single largest factor that can accelerate the growth in use of active archiving is something you might not expect. It's "people" and their willingness and ability to lead the way to success.
I'll be honest that the growth of active archiving is undoubtedly occurring. At our company, we work with clients every day who are evolving their concept of how storage can work to meet their business requirements. For these people, the "light bulb goes on" in their heads when they realize that the decision to pursue active archiving is really a decision to put a living storage infrastructure in place that they can mold and adapt over time to meet their really long term storage needs in areas that include cost optimization, retrieval performance, retention, version management, multi-platform access - and active data validation and repair to deal with the reality that some of their media will experience failures over time.
As we work with clients who are considering active archive, a key question we ask is "how long do you need to keep the data"? More often than not the answer is "forever..." - and that's a long time. Human nature teaches us that before people move forward on things that will need to be in place "forever" - they typically want to be sure that they are making that right decision and getting aligned with the right people. It just makes sense.
We recently were partnered with an integrator and customer who expressed their desire for having a 'single throat to choke' in terms of support for their solution which was going to leverage active archive software to manage both tape and disk-based storage in a high-availability and high-capacity solution. While they used the term 'one throat to choke', it was clear that they really wanted a strong 'hand to help' as they designed, implemented and optimized their solution for the long haul. With active archiving, it's just as important to have the system working well on "Day 10,000" after deployment as it was to have it working well on "Day 1".
In the case mentioned here, we stepped up to offer our commitment to be the 'one stop shop' for ongoing support on the overall solution - but in other cases it's been the integrator who desires to be the long term partner and advisor in support of the system. The point is not really about 'who' took on the advisor and support role - but rather that it was a required piece of the puzzle for this customer to move forward.
The growth of active archiving overall relies on our ability as leading vendors and integrators to simply be "leaders". We need to be ready to step up and risk being the "one throat to choke" in order to seize the significant rewards that will come from helping thousands and thousands of organizations transform the way they achieve secure long term storage of their critical electronic data.
Great products and data formats alone won’t be enough – it will all come down to the people.