Exponential data growth is arguably the number-one problem affecting IT departments today. Data growth makes it harder to back up data, harder to recover, harder to test backup, and also introduces a number of other key challenges.
Data growth can have a crippling effect on server performance, as older, inactive or unnecessary data continues to eat up valuable system resources. And although the easy answer would simply be to delete unnecessary data, this isn’t always a practical thing to do.
This is an area where cloud archiving can be of great assistance.
Storagepipe’s TSM online backup service will back up company data on a regular basis, copying only block level incremental changes for maximum efficiency. Once this data is in the cloud, an archive is created from these backups on a monthly basis.
Once this data has been archived, it will be preserved for the long-term. And it can easily be retrieved in case it is needed.
Now, companies no longer need to manage separate processes for archiving and backup. Instead, both are streamlined into a single efficient process.
Data archives are an ideal way to keep older or inactive files on a second, less expensive, storage tier so that this data can be deleted from expensive primary production hardware. This helps maximize performance of primary systems, while offering complete data protection for critical files.
In case this deleted data needs to be recovered, retrieving it from archival storage is fast and simple.
Email archiving is especially helpful when it comes to optimizing the performance of Microsoft Exchange servers, since most emails will never change once sent or received. And since emails are most likely to be subject to electronic discovery requests, cloud based email archiving solutions make search and retrieval of historical emails extremely easy and efficient.
For years, tape has always been the traditional format for archival storage. But tape has a number of challenges that make it less than idea.
- Over time, tape will physically degrade, leading to potential risk for data loss.
- Recovering data is difficult, because you have to sort through a large collection of tapes to find what you’re looking for.
- Tape archives require expensive hardware and software. Tape archives are labour-intensive.
- The cloud eliminates all of the problems associated with conventional tape-based archives, and it does so in a way that’s fast, convenient and inexpensive.
To learn more about the advantages of cloud archiving, and how cloud archiving can help optimize the performance of your systems, have a look at this short video on data archiving.