Managing Archival Data

It is becoming more difficult to manage an enterprise’s archived data

because it involves structured and unstructured components. Solution providers

should offer an archival platform that is an ideal combination of intelligent

storage hardware and software. This combination can be effectively used with ISO’s

Reference Model for Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS).

In today’s business environment, information and data have transformed to

become the most important corporate assets. This has given a huge impetus to the

storage solutions market. Vendors in this space have come up with many

innovative products and solutions that help organizations store and manage

corporate data.

However, with an exponential growth of data, it is becoming increasingly

difficult to store and manage archival data. It has become all the more

problematic because both structured and unstructured data have become an

integral part of today’s business.

STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED



The traditional definition of structured data is that which is organized by

the well-defined structure provided by databases. These database sizes are

growing so fast that it is impeding application performance and artificially

inflating the total cost of operations.

However, if we look at unstructured data, the growth of unstructured data has

far surpassed the growth of structured data. This is virtually due to the

inherent nature of unstructured data.

Unstructured data typically comprises of documents, spreadsheets, graphics,

still and motion images and various other formats. Going further, messages and

e-mail can be classified as semi-structured data as they form a framework for

further classifying unstructured data. According to industry estimates over 50%

of data residing in data centers falls into these categories.

STUMPED BY EMAILS



Emails are now a well-established form of correspondence and its usage is

growing phenomenally. Users normally get messages such as "Mailbox size

limit exceeded". Adding to the problem are new regulations which are

forcing corporations to retain their e-mails for a specified period of time and

to be able to produce them on demand.

In such a scenario, solution providers should get their corporate customers

to adopt techniques such as data life cycle management (DLCM). This is done by

effectively by managing all the data that is considered to be a corporate asset,

by matching availability and retrieval time with the data’s value which varies

throughout the data lifecycle. In adopting DLCM techniques, organizations can

elevate the efficiency and responsiveness of the total storage environment and

utilize available capacity optimally.

While it is fundamental that partners continue to ensure capacity

requirements are met for critical enterprise applications, there is a further

demand for more effectively managing digital assets by moving them to a

different class of media based on their current value.

The idea is to take advantage of waning requirements for retrieval time and

availability by moving less valuable, less-likely to be accessed data to less

expensive storage. Doing so necessitates greater intelligence for managing

storage devices and automatically moving data within the overall storage

environment from the time it is created until its expiry.

WHY IT MAKES SENSE



Since more and more information is generated out of business activities, it

is outside the periphery of structured bounds and retrieval mechanisms. This

gives rise to the need to quickly catalogue, search and retrieve this

unstructured information into the storage environment itself.

At the same time, solutions must encompass varying classes of storage devices

and media arranged in tiers in order to balance the cost of storing any

particular data asset with its current value from the time of creation to

end-of-life.

Therefore, the archival platform solution should be an ideal combination of

intelligent storage and an open and collaborative approach to storage software.

This combination can be most effectively used with ISO’s Reference Model for

Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS). OAIS is a proven foundation for

archive systems, having served as the underpinnings of some of the largest data

archives in existence.

Conclusively, the archival storage architecture should be based on an open,

ISO-compliant architecture that implements DLCM as a complement to mainstream

storage and business continuity practices. This openness allows enterprises to

participate in an inter-operable environment where the right data is always

available at the right time, and there is no need for the special-purpose

storage management software and devices used by other solutions.

Sudhakar Rao is Director-Technical

Consultant at Hitachi Data Systems