Should I Archive Today? Tick…tick…tick…

Should I Archive Today? Tick…tick….tick…

Data – do I need to save it? For how long do I need to save it? Do I need to save it in an immutable format? Do I have to comply with an existing regulatory requirement? Will the new Obama administration create new regulations with which I’ll have to comply? Will my company be around next year or will we be acquired by someone else? How could the new company’s corporate policies change my retention policies?

These are the types of questions we constantly hear organizations struggle with. These ultimately lead to archiving decisions being delayed for months or years. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking towards that inevitable lawsuit (think of the implications of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures).  It’s not a matter of if, but when.  If you don’t come up with a strategy on how to tackle current or future policies and procedures, it will cost you more than what the damaging evidence potentially could.  Of course I’m talking about archiving for compliance purposes in this case.

Is your decision to implement an archive solution being dragged down by compliance efforts? What are you doing to solve the other ticking time bomb in your IT infrastructure?  Is your primary storage at or near full capacity?  Why are you not implementing archiving for storage management purposes today?

This is the struggle many IT organizations face and this is where Permabit is uniquely positioned to solve both problems today, even if you don’t have all the answers.

Let me explain….

Permabit Enterprise Archive is a very flexible, easy-to-deploy, and easy to manage multi-purpose disk-based archive.  Once the grid based storage system is installed, all storage is presented as a virtual pool.  There is no complicated and time consuming LUN provisioning needed.  Simply create a volume and away you go.  Now here’s the beauty of it, when you create a volume you can determine if it’s a Read/Write volume or a Write Once Read Many (WORM) volume.  You can have either or both of these intermixed within one storage grid.  Now here’s where it gets even better.  Do you need WORM?  Don’t know?  Who cares?  Just create the volume as Read/Write.  You can always come back later and perform a Convert to WORM action.  Or, if it’s for a litigation event, simply take a WORM snapshot of the volume and set the retention time to meet your needs. No new hardware needed and no additional software needed.  It’s all built right in.

Now, imagine you can have this capability today at a price/performance that far exceeds that of removable media.  With the built-in Scalable Data Reduction (SDR), you get the benefits of in-line, sub-file deduplication and compression within the storage volumes; therefore, allowing you to archive data from your most expensive tiers of storage (SAN and NAS) to Permabit, the most effective and reliable archive storage available.  So, go ahead, what are you waiting for?  Start saving your storage dollars today!

One last note, Permabit Enterprise Archive was awarded the Silver Medal award in the SearchStorage.com and Storage Magazine 2008 Storage Product of the Year.  The ironic thing was that an Archive product was a winner in the Backup hardware category.  Maybe everyone is starting to realize that to solve the backup problem, implementing an archiving solution should be the first step!