We’re Cool

Last week Gartner released a new round of Cool Vendor reports. One of them was focused on Cool Vendors in Archiving, which I am pleased to say Permabit was included in as the only hardware vendor highlighted. Click here if you would like to read the full report.

It’s nice to see that the industry, especially during these tough economic times, really is starting to see the value of archiving when it comes to saving organizations money. The early days of archiving for compliance drove many vendors and products to the forefront (especially email archiving vendors). However, it’s the enormous space saving benefits that really are starting to gain momentum in the market now. File system archiving really started to gain traction last year and the up-and-coming buzz is around database archiving and even Microsoft SharePoint archiving.

What this highlights is that even though email archiving in most cases solves two problems — capturing email for compliance purposes and reducing mailbox sizes — it really did not do much to reduce overall storage utilization in enterprises. After all, how often do you see multi-terabyte email stores? But, if you look at static data in file systems and now aged data inside of databases and SharePoint sites, you can see where the terabytes of storage are being consumed (and wasted) with stagnant (yet important) data.

It’s here where we see many customers and prospects looking closer at their existing infrastructure. People are being forced to work smarter and not just throw more money at the legacy solutions. With no approved budgets and less resources it’s funny what people can find buried in their storage silos. It just takes a little time to roll up your sleeves and do some spring cleaning. You’ll be amazed at what you can clean out this time of year, not only in your garages and attics, but also within your data centers.

So, what do you think? Is it time to do some spring cleaning in your environment?