IBM Simplifies and Accelerates Data Archiving

Data volumes are going through the roof

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. As the data tsunami continues to hit organizations of all sizes, in all industries, new solutions are obviously needed—and IBM keeps delivering them.

How much data are we talking about? One report from Forrester Research suggests that every year, the total data volume for most organizations escalates by 20 to 30 percent every year—and on average, will total more than 100 terabytes by 2012.

That's a truly daunting prediction for IT managers, and implies a whole host of challenges for them to solve. The more automatically, cost-effectively and comprehensively they can archive organizational data, the better—both for internal purposes such as business resilience and daily operations, and external purposes such as regulation compliance.

Powerful data archiving for organizations of all sizes

"The more automatically, cost-effectively and comprehensively they can archive organizational data, the better—both for internal purposes such as business resilience and daily operations, and external purposes such as regulation compliance." IBM, of course, can help, as a proven leader in the field of data management with a wide array of leading storage, backup and archiving solutions. One solution of particular note is the recent IBM Information Archive—an appliance designed to assist storage administrators in a number of innovative ways.

The IBM Information Archive is a robust, policy-driven disk-based retention system which stores, manages and protects information archived to it. Although it is a cost-effective disk based system, it provides automated data management and migration of retained data to a lower cost storage tier such as tape. In this way, less mission-critical forms of data—what might be called “just in case” data—can automatically be shifted to lower-cost tiers such as tape or optical media. As an appliance, it is relatively easy to install, configure and maintain over time. Yet it's also powerful and secure enough to keep the organization in compliance with any necessary regulations while also minimizing the costs and complexity of that compliance.

In its latest version, 1.2, the Information Archive has been updated with an impressive suite of new features and functionality that leave it even better suited to help storage administrators solve their challenges.

Doubled storage capacity and local time zone support

To begin with, total maximum storage capacity in version 1.2 has been doubled—up from 304TB to a staggering 608 TB, a result of support for the new 2 TB SATA drives available on the market.

The ramifications for IBM clients are clear: Clients can retain and protect twice as much information within same footprint while paying 25% less per terabyte. As the organization's storage needs grow, the Information Archive can grow in parallel; administrators can simply add more disks as needed. And that in turn will translate naturally into improved operational efficiency and reduced total cost.

Another improvement likely to appeal to storage administrators: the Information Archive now supports local time zone settings. Prior to this version, a universal time was used for the appliance's system clock; this meant that information in the archive was stored accordingly, even though that might not reflect the actual time of storage. Furthermore, system logs were also written based on the universal time clock, translating into more work for administrators who needed to use those logs to track system activity or isolate problems known to have taken place at a given local time. The new support for local time zones eliminates these issues, improving ease-of-use significantly.

More flexibility in managing different data collection types

The IBM Information Archive has also been enhanced to improve granularity of control over the different ways it archives information, based on different data protection levels that map to different needs:

Basic: This level provides the standard protection for data, but the most day-to-day control over it for users. Data governed by this protection level is archived and a retention period is assigned to it, but that can be overridden; data can be deleted by users even if the retention period hasn't expired yet. Furthermore, users can increase or decrease the retention policy at will, or even shift the data to a completely different protection level.

Intermediate: This represents a more stringent form of protection. While the retention period can be adjusted, data can't be deleted from the archive before its expiration. And the protection level itself can only be adjusted upwards in protection to Maximum, not downwards to Basic.

Maximum: The most shielded protection level. Data falling under this heading can never be deleted prior to the end of the retention period and the duration of retention can only be increased, not decreased. This level is intended for more crucial data with relatively high business priority, or data which is absolutely required in order to meet the terms of government regulations.

With version 1.2 of the Information Archive, these different protection levels play new roles in the solution's policies, giving administrators more power and flexibility in deciding how data will (or will not) be handled by the system.

For instance, consider the question of automatic data deletion. In earlier versions of the Information Archive, data could only be automatically deleted from data collections set to Maximum (and handled by the System Storage Archive Manager, or SSAM). Many IBM clients, however, wanted the power to apply this feature to other collection types. And so, in version 1.2, IBM has given those clients exactly what they asked for: automatic deletion will work with Basic and Intermediate collections as well. This added option should help dynamically reduce archive sizes, freeing up much-needed storage for other purposes.

Use SnapLock in new ways

Similar new granularity applies in the case of SnapLock protocols, used by the Information Archive to store data on disk in a secure write-once, read-many-times (WORM) fashion more commonly associated with optical media.

In the previous version of the Information Archive, SnapLock could only be used with Maximum collections. In version 1.2, SnapLock now works with Basic and Intermediate collections as well. The upshot for IBM clients such as independent software vendors is that they can test in a more flexible way; they can, for instance, use Intermediate collections for testing and be confident the results will reflect what they would obtain from Maximum collections, because SnapLock works in both cases.

Finally, business resilience features have been improved as well. Prior to version 1.2, the Information Archive couldn't be used to initiate a disaster recovery function from a remote location; someone local was required.

For version 1.2, that is no longer true. Storage administrators at site A can remotely activate, suspend, or restart a disaster recovery session using an Information Archive at site B—dramatically accelerating data recovery, and minimizing any potentially negative business impact.

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