Originating Author: Peter Burris
Until recently, the business context for archiving applications has remained remarkably consistent: move old data from costly "online" media (usually disk) to less costly "offline" media (usually tape). Variations on this basic archiving theme have emerged (e.g., "nearline" automated tape libraries and optical jukeboxes), but the basic economics of archiving have been consistent for nearly 40 years, largely because the basic business requirements for archiving haven't changed.
However, the emergence of new regulatory and compliance regimes such as e-discovery are forcing business to revamp requirements for old data, which is fundamentally altering the scope of archiving applications. Archives now must be accessible by applications other than the toolset performing the archive and the initial application that created the data being archived. "Active archives," featuring shared access to archived data from multiple applications, are becoming an integral part of an organization's dynamic data infrastructure. However, archives must retain critical business attributes, such as data fidelity, auditability, and financial flexibility. Consequently, a new class of IT activities is emerging around active information archives. The need to support archive sharing in active archive infrastructures is compelling IT to experiment with a management framework that recalls the three-schema approach to database management: records management to handle "conceptual" access to active archives, archive administration to handle "physical" access to archives, with "logical," tool-orientated access being worked out on a case-by-case basis.
Action Item: Storage administrators must update their perspective on what constitutes archiving competence to accommodate rapidly emerging business requirements for active archives. Increasingly, "records management" activities, which share more with application development than hardware administration, will drive archive management decision making.
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