ProStor InfiniVault 30
Forged by economic turmoil and intense pressure on profitability, today's business environment dictates organizations go beyond traditional standards of accountability in justifying executive decisions. Just when CIOs are under intense pressure to alleviate anything that fuels greater IT complexity and higher labor costs, the lion’s share of the regulatory burdens to maintain and manage the critical information needed to avoid litigation is falling on the IT department. As a result, the new business environment is challenging many of IT’s fundamental notions of backup and recovery processes.
Among the changes is a sharpening of the distinction between data archiving and data backup: A distinction that IT has successfully blurred to simplify operations. Now the confluence of regulatory forces and internal demands for operational efficiency are driving a reexamination of data archiving and bringing data preservation systems that are capable of automating regulatory compliance, such as the ProStor InfiniVault, into the limelight.
With the rapid growth in the amount of corporate data that must be stored, administered, and protected by IT comes an equally rapid rise in the costs to manage it. Worse yet, current IT practices, such as the use of disk-to-disk (D2D) backup, compound the problems of storage resource utilization. D2D backups can increase online storage requirements by a factor of 25X if not countered by the introduction of other technologies, such as data compression and data deduplication.
This has IT asking the question: “How often are files and records that have not changed being backed up?” The answer to that question has profound implications for IT operations. This is especially true in a virtual operating environment, where the proliferation of virtual servers adds more sources of duplicate and static data.
At the forefront of the answer, are the well known sets of data that external regulatory bodies require corporations to freeze, preserve, and track for significantly long periods. As a result, most sites focus entirely on compliance data when looking to acquire an archiving solution. Compliance data, however, is only a fraction of the problem. The answer to our backup question also unveils growing sets of stable corporate data that encompass such sources as dimensions of data cubes used in business intelligence applications and business process templates used to support quality control techniques. What unifies both of these classes of data is that they both need to be archived rather than backed up.
Archive and backup systems have two distinct and complementary functions. Archiving focuses on managing the long-term retention of data in a way that guarantees the state of the data, while keeping the data continuously available for quick ad hoc access. On the other hand, backup systems focus on providing a recent copy of data that can be used to roll back the impact of human or machine failures or errors. Most importantly, the synergies between data archiving and data backup can be leveraged in concert to maximize the effectiveness and minimize the cost of any storage infrastructure.
To provide for both the rapid deployment and the rapid leveraging of data archiving, the ProStor InfiniVault is delivered as an integrated system, which includes hierarchical storage and retention management software. In particular, the InfiniVault multi-tier storage system provides the access and performance benefits of online NAS storage with the economic benefits of offline storage via removable cartridges that utilize high-end laptop disk drives. What’s more, the InfiniVault software presents its multi-tier storage hardware as a unified system, while it simplifies the retention and disposition of data for any length of time and to any legal or compliance requirement.
