Archiving
Deduplication Storage for a Wide Range of Long Term Retention Requirements
Challenges
- Traditional Media Not Keeping Pace with Demand: Archiving is no longer just about keeping data for long periods of time. Optical and tape-based archiving methods cannot meet the performance and capacity demands of today’s business environment as organizations must not only store archive data, they also have to be able to easily read, write and search it faster and retain more of it for longer than ever before.
- Changing Regulations: Compliance is a moving target, with constantly changing requirements for offsite data protection and retention periods. Customers have attempted to meet this challenge with a ‘save everything’ strategy which quickly becomes unmanageable and cost prohibitive. In response, you need flexible and scalable archiving solutions to meet your current and future regulatory and business requirements.
- Managing Versioned and Reference Data: Many archiving projects are driven by the need to track changes to departmental project work or engineering development or to keep a document for future reference but on lower cost storage assets. These projects become increasingly burdensome over time as the equipment used to archive the data becomes obsolete thereby rendering the archived media useless. A storage platform that can store more data, at less cost and that will not require a media migration strategy is needed.
Solution
The common threads among the challenges presented by archiving are the volume of data, the length of time it must be retained and the speed at which it must be stored and read when necessary.
These challenges can be addressed with high speed, inline deduplication storage. Data Domain nearline storage proves that deduplication is a storage fundamental by applying it to workloads beyond disk backup and network based recovery. This approach delivers benefits in a number of areas that have typically caused unbound storage growth in organizations: development versioning, project archives, regulatory support and traditional archiving applications among others.
Data Domain inline deduplication systems also provide the following benefits not commonly found in nearline solutions:
Unified Platform for Deduplication Storage: Data Domain systems were designed as a unified storage platform, not as a niche product that must transform itself to address changing customer requirements. The result is a highly efficient, high value system that can be reliably used in a wide range of nearline applications including:
> Archiving with an application or ‘copy and paste’
> Nearline file storage
> Long term data retention for reference, litigation support and regulatory compliance
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Deduplicated Snapshots: Data Domain snapshots can be used to provide data protection on the platform for application data. Snapshots take up no additional space initially. As changes are made to an application’s data they are automatically recorded by storing the incremental differences at a variable-segment level, resulting in the most efficient snapshot implementation available.
- Automatic, Secure WAN Vaulting for DR: Most archiving solutions ignore the common requirement that data must be moved to a remote site for disaster recovery or longer term retention. Organizations must then rely on using trucks to move data when what they really need is an integrated approach to archiving storage and replication. By applying Data Domain’s Global Compression™ for massive data reduction over the WAN, Data Domain greatly reduces the network bandwidth requirements for offsite replication. With up to 99% bandwidth reduction, the transfer of large amounts of data across the WAN is economically and operationally feasible. The Replicator software delivers network-based DR and long-term archive solutions for both data centers and remote offices.
- Ultimate Data Integrity: Data Domain’s Data Invulnerability Architecture provides the best defense against data integrity issues. Continuous recovery verification along with extra levels of data protection, such as dual disk parity RAID-6, continuously detects and protects against data loss, throughout the life cycle of the data.
- Flexibility and Scalability: Data Domain systems can scale from 7 TB to 28.3 PB for you to meet changing business and compliance needs. Data Domain also offers various topology options, such as one-to-one, bidirectional, and many-to-one, with the Replicator software to meet your specific DR or offsite requirements.
