Archive Storage Decisions - Cloud or On-Premise?

When selecting an archive there are a few major decisions that impact the rest of the design. The first one that will guide the other decisions comes down to, Hosted vs. On-Premise. This is not an easy decision and we don't expect that to change anytime soon. This decision used to be black & white, however this is changing, the decision was either outsource everything or keep everything on-premise. If choosing on-premise, the next decision was to select the archive storage platform, NetApp SnapLock, EMC Centera, HDS HCAP and recently Data Domain plus others.

There is somewhere north of 30,000 on-premise enterprise deployments of archiving solutions today. As the data growth of these archives continues to sky-rocket, many of these customers are debating on shifting their archive to the cloud. While many companies are doing just this and migrating to cloud archive vendors like LiveOffice, there are many others that are hesitant to throw away their investment in their on-premise archive solution.

Imagine if these customers would have the ability to keep their most accessed data (newest) stored in the on-premise archive storage solution (NetApp, Centera, HCAP, DDUP, etc) while being able to migrate all of the least accessed (oldest) data in the cloud in an automated fashion.

The ability to scale the archive would be endless and the capital expenses would be minimized while having a virtual unlimited storage pool in the cloud to work with. All while ensuring that the end users access their data in the same way they do today. Such as, searching working the same way, shortcuts still working and the users have no idea their data is in the cloud.

Imagine...

Archiving, No Longer a Want

In the current economy many people are scaling back on all forms of spending. Our world's spending habits have changed from wants and desires to focusing only on needs. This is clear across not only personal spending habits but corporate purchases as well. Large "non-essential" purchases have been delayed if not cancelled all together.

Keeping this in mind, we're seeing a really interesting trend in archive deployments and archive spending. Our first quarter of 2009 saw an increase of opportunities of over 300% over the same quarter a year ago and 250% over the 4th quarter of 2009. Already only 15 days into Q2 we've already seen more inquiries this quarter than we did in the same quarter of 2008, which puts us on pace to a 200% increase over Q1 2009.

These statistics and trends that we are seeing along with what our partners are seeing, is that archiving has moved beyond a want in corporate data centers. Clearly the benefits of archiving and storage efficiencies that come with it are being defined as a need across all verticals.

Another trend that shows that migrations are a large part of this is we had many application vendors reach out to us in the first quarter of this year to add support for their applications to PAMM. Look for some of these announcements throughout the rest of this quarter as our solutions become integrated.

Archiving is now critical to almost every organization, ensure you perform proper due diligence in selecting your new archive for the solution that best fits your needs and look to PAMM to help you get there.

Migrating Shortcuts - Why Bother?

Bob Spurzem over at Ferris Research this morning discussed some key issues and points to consider when performing archive migrations. As the leader in the archive migration market, our team has focused a lot of effort into dealing with shortcuts. (http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/03/email-archive-migration-plan-for-stubbing/)

One can argue "You should not use shortcuts anyway"

Sure, but go tell that to your user community that has 1000's if not 10,000's of shortcuts in their Exchange mailbox and tell them that they are going to go away because it is not good practice to have them. That should go over very well. Some of the user archives that we have migrated had over 60,000 shortcuts in a single mailbox. Not exactly the easiest thing to transition users from using.

So this brings up a key point in selecting an archive migration application. Simply being able to move the archived content from one platform to another is not enough. The absolute must is to ensure that all data is migrated and that end users are not impacted. Users typically resist change, even if they are told it will be good change. Making sure how they get access to their data stays consistent is an absolute.

So why bother migrating shortcuts? Well, if you don't, just be ready for the user revolt...

Back to School - Making Progress

As my daughter is back in school it has made me think about how the progress of learning and technology map to one another. In the world of school, each year our kids head back in September to the place of learning. Each September they "graduate" to the next grade level in school and start to learn more new things and more complex items regarding subjects they have already learned a base knowledge of. What would happen if each year our kids headed back to school and simply repeated the same year over and over again for 12 years. One thing is for sure is that they'd be able to get done with their Math Facts in about 4 seconds and they could add 4+5 amazingly well. But what about algebra, geometry, chemistry, world history, etc. Our kids would never get a chance to learn more and grow.

So why is it that once we deploy a technology we think we're set for life? Why is it that we're not looking foward to advancing the technology we just deployed. Shouldn't we be "heading back to school in September" looking at new classes to take to better our existing technology? In the world of Archiving, products change constantly and most companies new/updated releases close to once a year. Just because you picked "the best" platform 3 years ago, doesn't mean it's the best platform today.

In today's world, our kid's can't repeat the same grade over and over again thanks to our politicians and the whole "no child left behind act", so don't be that one kid left behind in your business leaving your archive technology behind.