Retain Data, Reduce Costs: The IBM Information Archive

Optimized data retention is a balancing act

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Today, more than ever, organizations must get the maximum business value from their assets, and among the most important assets for any organization is its data. The more effectively data is managed throughout its lifecycle, the better the business bottom line is likely to be.

Many factors make data management a complex matter. One such is its business priority. The most important data should also be the most available data. High availability, however, implies higher-cost storage solutions and strategies. Meanwhile, if data becomes less important and less frequently utilized, and yet at the same time cannot yet be destroyed, it should be migrated to less expensive storage to reduce costs.

This last class of data—what might be referred to as "just in case" data—represents a key point in the data lifecycle, because, for most organizations, more and more data is classified in this fashion, translating into a higher and higher business need for optimized solutions designed to address it. Partly this is because of the ever-growing number of government regulations that govern the disposition of data along with how it should be monitored and managed; in many cases, these lengthen the time organizations must retain data, and/or specify how it must be secured from unauthorized access. Also pertinent in this context are the escalating data volumes faced by most organizations, much of which data may not be directly pertinent to daily operations, yet still represents sufficient potential for business value that it should be preserved.

The challenge, then, is for organizations to retain and manage the complete range of archivable data, of all types, in a way that minimizes costs, reduces risks, enables regulation compliance and simplifies management.

Powerful, straightforward and cost-efficient data retention: The IBM Information Archive

The IBM Information Archive delivers on every point. This easy-to-use, complete solution integrates the full range of hardware and software needed to ensure that data can be retained and managed in a cost-optimized, centralized manner that corresponds to both internal goals and policies and external regulations.

Thanks to leading security features, it allows organizations to preserve any data they require, for as long as they require, without increasing the odds of a security breach. And because it is policy-driven, it supports the intelligent migration of data across different storage platforms to reduce storage and management costs over time.

How do these policies work? Essentially, they allow administrators to specify that data beyond a certain age should automatically be shifted from point A to point B in the storage infrastructure, where point B involves lower costs.

For instance, imagine a word processing document containing a press release. This data is most likely to be needed immediately after the press release is issued, subsequently less often, and beyond a certain chronological point, it may be only occasionally needed. But it nevertheless cannot be deleted—it may still be required for events such as a government audit.

Through the tiered-storage policies the IBM Information Archive supports, such data can automatically be migrated from more expensive media (such as disk) to less-expensive media (such as tape or optical), where it will continue to be accessible and yet generate lower costs to the organization.

Because the Information Archive supports data retrieval directly from any media, including tape and optical—without requiring it to be first re-migrated to an alternate logical location—overall performance and ease of use are best-in-class. And still more control over data retention comes via the solution's deletion-hold management feature, which protects any logical group of data from normal deletion policies if is deemed potentially significant for an audit, legal purposes, or any other reason. In this way, data is stored in a manner that reflects its business priority, substantially reducing total storage and management costs, and yet even the lowest-priority data, such as "just in case" data, is continually and easily accessible.

Enhanced security and added business resilience

Data security represents another major strength of the Information Archive. In order to comply with both internal security policies and external government regulations, it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to retain data and yet not increase the odds of a security breach. The Information Archive addresses this growing need in a number of different ways.

First, it supports data encryption via both the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard and the 56-bit Digital Encryption Standard, ensuring that no sensitive data need be stored in-the-clear. Second, administrators can control how encryption keys are managed; either the Information Archive can manage them for greater centralization, or the external application can manage them if desired. Third, the Information Archive is also seamlessly interoperable with the IBM TS1120 and LTO-4 tape drives, two leading low-cost data repositories which also handle encryption functions directly on the drive. Fourth, the Information Archive can, on demand, shred data through repeated overwrite functions, dramatically decreasing the odds that it will be recoverable even if control of the physical storage media should fall into the wrong hands. And fifth, the Information Archive's patent-pending Enhanced Tamper Protection option eliminates the possibility of unauthorized administrative access, which could conceivably represent a security attack vector, replacing them with restricted accounts that preclude the intentional (or accidental) deletion of data.

A third compelling benefit of the IBM Information Archive: it can be used to increase overall business resilience through its disaster recovery features.

Organizations that depend heavily on particular data such as production databases will want to shield that data from any possible threat through intelligent off-site duplication, from which point it can quickly and easily be retrieved if the original data is lost or damaged in some way.

The Information Archive supports Enhanced Remote Mirroring, a feature through which just this kind of intelligent off-site duplication can be achieved by copying data on a policy-driven basis either to another Information Archive or to tape libraries (LTO-3 or LTO-4 WORM) in another location. Additional business resilience is available from the Enhanced Tamper Protection feature, which if enabled substantially reduces the odds that critical data can be inadvertently deleted.

Get the most from your investment

While the Information Archive ships as a complete, preconfigured solution, managed through a single interface and requiring little administration, its business value can be increased even more by upgrading its connectivity and storage capacity. It can manage up to 304 (raw) terabytes of physical disk storage capacity per system, a tremendous repository and of course supports optical and tape systems for an even larger total archive.

And organizations looking to leverage the Information Archive for the highest possible business value, as part of an increasingly dynamic infrastructure designed to reduce total costs, increase service levels and proactively mitigate business risks may wish to consult with IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Global Business Services. In this way, they can capitalize on the many strengths of the Information Archive for the best return on investment at every point, from initial planning through deployment and integration possibilities to support and maintenance assistance, should that be needed.