Proact story on ArchivingWhy archive your information?We are not only seeing the continued rapid growth of information, we are keeping this information for longer and longer. The reason for keeping it longer could simply be that we have no structured way of deleting information, but we are also facing internal, customer and/or government demands that force us to keep it.

We are also seeing that the external demands are getting increasingly

detailed which require us

• to keep the information for extensive time periods (from a few years to

forever)

• to guarantee that the information is the same we stored those years

ago

• to be able to read and understand the archived information

• to produce parts of this information in a very short time (based on key

words)

In addition to this are many end users (or probably their sysadmins)

reaching a point where they can’t just keep all information on disk and do

backups; they need to start archiving information.

Here are examples from different industry segments:

Public sector and hospitals

• Laws and regulations, cultural preservation,

• cost savings, research

Industry

• Quality and cost, documentation, hw/sw development,

• crash tests, financial systems

Bank and finance

• Laws and regulations, security, transations, invoices,

• financial advice, phone, email, letters

Trade

• Cost and efficiency, transactions, invoices. orders

International organizations

• Different laws and regulations for same information in

• different countries. Relevant for banks,

• manufacturing‐ transportation industry

Healthcare

• Laws and regulations, quality control

Telco operators

• Fix and mobile phone CDR archive

Proact Story

What is “Archiving”?

Archiving of digital information needs a definition, depending on who you ask you will

get different answers anywhere from the archivist structured approach to the storage

specialists technical view – none of them are wrong they are just different views into the

same problem.

This is our definition of archiving:

Archiving is a combination of processes, policies and technical platform to preserve, protect and make accessible the selected information for a determined time period.

– Archiving is a business decision since it focuses on the information and what it can/shall be used for.

We also differ between “archiving” and “migration”, which we define as:

Migration is to move data between tiers of storage

– Migration is an IT decision since it focuses on where to maintain the digital representa-tion of the information, i.e. the data.

Design of the archiving platform

These are important criteria for an archiving solution and needs to be on the checklist:

• Scalability, performance, availability, recoverability

• Access to information, who can, who can’t

• Indexing/Search ability

• Efficiency – cost, data reduction, sorting

• Reporting/traceability

• Open solution /standards

• Support all relevant applications, data formats, metadata formats

• Encryption

• Secure delete

• Migration to next platform

• Migration to new media

• Migration to new data formats

Archiving is a combi-nation of processes, policies and technical platform to preserve, protect and make accessible the selected information for a deter-mined time period.

– Archiving is a business decision since it focuses on the information and what it can/shall be used for.

One critical part of an archive solution is the technical platform where all the data is stored.

Archiving puts specific demands on the storage environment and it is certainly more than

”just storage”.

This moves us into the infrastructure and the design of the archiving platform. Since we

have a world full of different applications with their own data and metadata formats the de-

sign needs to be very specific depending on the end users unique environment. Unfortuna-

tely there isn’t one solution that fits all end everyone so we usually end up with more than

one component for the migration and arching layers. Below you see the overall structure

Proact is using when we designing the archiving platform.

Proact’s view on archiving

Here are some guidelines we use in the design:

Reduce Cost & Complexity

As always use common sense, the more complicated a solutions the more likely it is

to have functional problems and high operating cost. We also focus on using industry

standards and standard components where it is possible. Archiving is a complex task and a

solid implementation plan combined by a step by step approach has proven successful.

Collaborate & Classify Information

To find out what should be archived, for how long it should be kept, how we can find the

information and if it should be deleted when it is no longer needed are key questions. If we

can find an answer to these questions we have a good foundation for our archive project.

Don’t expect to get these answers easily; it can be quite hard to find out internal and exter-

nal demands. It is also a risk thatthe answers increase complexity and makes it hard to do

the technical design. The best way to address these issues is to create a project group that

covers both IT and business interests in the archive.

Store online

A good design principle is to store the data online on disk. So far most archives have been

stored on tape. Although tape is low cost per GB it has proved to be costly over time. A

huge hidden cost for archiving to tape has been the migration between generations of tape

formats. It is a time consuming and costly process where we often see that all the data is

not readable.

”Create a project group that covers both IT and business interests in the arvchive”

”As always use com-mon sense, the more complicated a solu-tions the more likely it is to have functional problems and high operating cost”

This is the real draw‐back with tapes: – you don’t know of the data is there until you try to read the tape. It also very

hard to delete a specific piece of information from a tape and keep the rest of the tape intact. We are seeing more

external demands that need us to guarantee that the information is deleted – with tape you might have to destroy

the physical tape and migrate the information that is to be kept to another tape. New demands also require fast

access to the information – having it offline is not good enough any more. New disk technologies, like deduplication,

are giving us a TCO that can challenge tape – especially if you consider the cost of migration over time. Try to avoid

point solution archive per application, business area etc; it will be very costly over time. Try and build a common

archive repository and share it as a common resource.

Do not use Backup

Backup is quite often seen as cheap archive. This can be a risky approach since backup is not designed to preserve

information over a long time with high security demands. We have set the policies to support our backup schedule

and not our archive. Very often older backups are stored offline on tape that will create long access times and

manual work. In backup solutions we tend to look for data without its business perspective – in archiving we need

to find the data with its related metadata – the information.

Invest in automating migration

In the design put effort into the task of migrating information over time. First is the challenge of our hardware that

needs replacement every few years. Build a solution where migration hardware is a process that IT do on a regular

basis (as part of IT operations) when the system is up and running – instead of having a huge and costly migration

project every few years.

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