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Protecting and preserving data is a significant challenge for all enterprises because of the unprecedented and unrelenting growth of unstructured data. This explosive growth is making it harder to meet backup SLAs and greatly increases the importance of having an effective strategy to move static data out of the backup stream and on to cost-effective archive storage.
Traditional storage solutions can present backup challenges such as the compounding effect of backups, required management overhead, technology refresh cycles, and data migration.
Traditionally, many enterprises keep full backup copies weekly, monthly, and yearly, which can exponentially compound data growth. For example, if the most recent weekly backups are kept for 8 weeks, monthly backups for 10 months (covering the remainder of the year), and yearly backups for 7 years, one file would have 25 copies just using the backup algorithm. Using this example, only 40 TB of new data would need 1 PB of storage. Mechanisms such as compression, deduplication, and snapshots can reduce some of the common data, but portions of the data will be unique or not easily reduced.
This compounding growth also increases the need for tape because many of these data-reduction mechanisms are not available, and only tape supports native tape-drive compression. In addition, organizations need to consider many often-overlooked issues when using tape. These issues include:
Individually monitoring performance and free space on traditional RAID-based volumes or LUNs can become a huge burden. The constant juggling and adding of new volumes or LUNs when capacity or hardware limits are reached consumes more and more time. Each storage change often requires the application’s configuration to be updated as well.
The inevitable, and often overlooked, hardware refresh every 3 to 5 years with traditional RAID-based storage systems frequently consumes many nights and weekends, many data center resources, and significant budget. A technology refresh requires extensive planning and a complete reevaluation of the performance and capacity requirements for 3 or more years.