As data growth and storage requirements continue to accelerate, industry experts state that unstructured fixed content data, the largest contributor to this growth, represents more than 75% of all data to be archived, and that 80% of this data has not been accessed in the last 90 days, and that 60% will never be accessed again.
Regardless of the infrequent access requirements for these growing volumes of data, most organizations still continue to store static data on expensive, proprietary primary storage devices, causing unmanageable backup issues, and leaving critical data vulnerable to hard disk and other system-related failures.
Tiered Storage Software applications allow a system administrator to define sets of rules for data migration and retention that control the movement of data files from expensive primary storage devices to less-expensive storage devices such as an Optical library, where it is still accessible to the file system, and to applications requiring access to the data.
Tiered Storage Software provides the ability to migrate files to less-expensive devices based on criteria such as file age, file size, file type, and file ownership.
For example, an administrator may want to move all files with .TIF and .PDF extensions that have not been accessed in 90 days to an Optical library. Another example may be to move files with a .WAV extension that are greater than 300k in size, regardless of its creation date or last access date.
In addition, many tiered storage applications provide automatic data migration based on a watermark, such as when a hard drive reaches a certain percentage of its total storage capacity, ensuring that "out of disk space" situations are eliminated.
For example, certain data types may require write-once properties to meet regulatory compliance and other data types may not. For those files that require a write-once media type, an Optical library would be the most appropriate secondary storage device, whereas for files that do not need to be stored for regulatory purposes, a tape library may be a suitable device.
In this instance, data groups that have been classified for "optical" can be migrated to an Optical library, and data groups that have been classified for "tape" can be migrated to a Tape library, whereby the migration of these files is done regardless of the source device and operating system on which they were originally created.
Lastly, as a means to reduce CPU and network bandwidth requirements during data migration, most tiered storage applications allow the administrator to schedule file migration operations during non-production times. |
