George Crump on Archives
George Crump has a nice new article up on the differences between the backup and archive use cases, appropriately titled Backup vs. Archive. He succinctly makes the point that backup infrastructures are not appropriate for new archive storage initiatives because the characteristics of backups and archives are very different.
A few months ago, in Two Types of Archives, I commented on a similar article, Archive Layer Cake by Chris Mellor over at Blocks & Files (now part of The Register). George expands on this further, identifying a half-dozen ways in which the new storage use cases are significantly different. An archive system isn’t going to replace your backup infrastructure, but will augment it with storage that provides higher reliability, better data verification, easier access, and easier data management, among other benefits. Go take a look at the article for more.
Budgets are shrinking, but data archive requirements are not. An archive storage solution can relieve pressure on both primary storage and backup environments, leading to immediate, and significant, cost savings.