Your closet gets full of so many clothes, shoes, belts, shoes and what-nots that the shelves start to sag and you can’t fit another item in the bloated mess. This is analogous to your companies over stuffed storage pool of data, and take note, the avalanche of data is predicted to grow at about 60% a year, yikes! In this BlogBytes article we will explore this phenomenon and what you can do to ‘dig out of this’ with help from LTO technology. Let’s go!
DATA CLOSET IS JAMMED FULL!
IDC research shows that data volume is doubling about every 30 months. It’s been predicted that worldwide data is expected to reach 175 zettabytes in just a few years — What is a zettabyte? It’s one thousand exabytes or one trillion bytes, it’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros. Yep, data closets are going to get really full! Oftentimes you need to dig through the closet and find that needed garment, ok, that past employee record, that customer inquiry, you need to examine purchase trends and perform inventory sales analysis. You need to be responsive and cost efficient to make intelligent business decisions and maintain customer satisfaction. To do this, you need to rethink your data closet architecture!
As we watch our data closets fill up we need to understand that most of the items in the closet will rarely if ever be touched. As outlined in a Horison Information Strategies white paper, “For the majority of data types, the probability of access begins to fall during the first month and typically falls below 1% after 90 to 120 days of inactivity reaching archival status.” The paper further explains that over 60% of all data is archival data and could reach 80% by 2024. Why is this important? Many organizations are not using data archive implementations to make their storage architecture more efficient and less costly. Let’s dive a little deeper into the archival notion.
PUT THOSE ITEMS IN THE GARAGE
The Horison paper points out that “Some data becomes archival upon creation and can wait years for any reference or analysis adding to the archival pile-up. The biggest archival challenges are managing the sheer amount of raw data and discovering its unknown value.” As the data ages and becomes less active it should be moved to the garage, ok, to a storage pool that has long life, low cost, high integrity and strong data protection. In addition, moving infrequently accessed data out of backup storage pools and into an archive tier frees up backup space and makes the use of analytical tools more efficient and effective. Horison explains that, “LTO tape is the most cost-effective archive solution available given it has the lowest $/TB price and TCO of any storage option.
With a media life of 30 years or more, LTO is best suited to address archive requirements among today’s storage choices.” LTO technology can provide strong data protection due to its high data integrity, its support of data encryption, and air-gapped offline features to thwart cyberattacks.
CHECK OUT THE ARCHIVE VIDEO
