Archiving Data for the Long Term

May 6th, 2012 1:00PM – 4:30PM

Organizations large and small are facing growing requirements, both legal and business, to retain data for 10-30 years or even longer. Many organizations try to address these requirements by leaving their old data on the production systems where it was created while others rely on the boxes of old backup tapes they've sent to Iron Mountain to meet their retention requirements.

Unfortunately neither leaving data in place nor using backup tapes as an archive is a satisfactory solution. Data on production systems is exposed to users who could delete or modify it for their own nefarious reason not to mention the high costs of maintaining data on production systems that are designed for performance.

While backup tapes are cheap, retrieving data from old backup tapes can be a nightmare. Just retrieving emails between Mr. Smith and Miss Jones over a 6 month period could take hundreds of man hours.

A proper archive can store data for decades automatically migrate data from obsolete storage hardware to new and is self protecting so it doesn't need to be backed up every night.

This workshop will explore how an organization should go about choosing and implementing an archiving strategy. We'll look at how you can use software to collect data for the archive from your primary storage systems and at how to build a self protecting storage system for your archival data.

Who Should Attend:

Information technology professionals and managers facing increased retention requirements without corresponding increases in budget. This session should be of special interest to those in the health care and financial services industries along with those currently spending large amounts of time and money responding to eDiscovery requests.

Part 1: Designing an Archive

The first half of this workshop will concentrate on the structure of a proper archive and how to load data from your primary systems into the archive.

What you'll learn:

• How primary storage, archives and backup data are different
• Setting archiving goals
  • Archiving data from common sources
  • Email
  • IM, Social media and the like
  • File systems
  • Sharepoint
  • Databases
• How to sell an Archive project to management

Part 2: The Storage Backend

While archiving software can organize your data to make it easier to retrieve it still needs to be stored someplace. Since a typical disk array has a 3-7 year useful life in your data center it may not be the best place for your archival data. In second half of the workshop we'll look at the pros and cons of various storage technologies in the long term archive.

What you'll learn:

• What to look for in an archival storage system
  • Capacity
  • Scaleability
  • Low cost
  • Power
• Choosing Storage Technologies for Archiving
  • NAS and disk arrays
  • Deduplicating appliances
  • Tape - It's not dead you know
  • Object stores and RAIN systems
• Using cloud storage in the archive
• Protecting archival data
• Mitigating migration costs