Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

BYTE AND SWITCH INSIDER PEERS INTO ARCHIVING PLANS

Regulatory concerns and exploding data growth have led to a renaissance of sorts in archiving practices, but those same issues have also complicated the solutions and IT decisions surrounding this important market, according to a new report from the research service Byte and Switch Insider.

The report -- Archiving: A Plan of Attack -- deconstructs this fast-growing space with in-depth analyses of numerous products and services. It also explores the tradeoffs of the various archiving approaches and provides a cost analysis of enterprise deployments.

"Archiving used to be simple: Copy files to tape and toss them in a warehouse," says the report's author, Byte and Switch Insider senior analyst Brett Mendel. "The current crop of archiving systems present a complexity entirely absent from their predecessors.

"In particular, assessing the overall cost of archiving requires a broad view of the systems needed to implement the solution and several other areas that could be affected by it."

Among the report's conclusions:

• Archiving, with a focus on email and database-driven applications, is increasingly critical to data and storage management.

• Besides the archiving product itself, buyers must consider the storage hardware and software that will support it, the likelihood of integration and customization, and the initial and ongoing operational costs.

• Data retrieval, a major archiving function, adds administrative overhead and cost to storage management.

• Storage professionals must carefully consider the type of application and data that requires archiving, as the nature of the archiving product could affect the implementation approach and resulting financial costs.

• Several archiving services have emerged to ease the overhead of deploying and managing archiving solutions; however, they assume control over data that enterprises must be willing to give.

Products and/or services from the following public vendors are discussed in this report: AT&T Corp, BT Group, Iron Mountain Inc, EMC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Open Text Corp, Storage Technology Corp, and Veritas Software Corp.

Products and/or services from the following private vendors are discussed in this report: AmeriVault Corp, Applimation Inc, Arkivio Inc, Atempo Inc, AXS-One Inc, C2C Systems, CommVault Systems Inc, EVault Inc, iLumin Software Services Inc, Intradyn Inc, IPR International LLC, OuterBay Technologies Inc, Princeton Softech Inc, Sherpa Software Group LP, Sector Inc, Sentinare Messaging Solutions, Zantaz Inc, and ZipLip Inc.