What is Archiving

What is archiving?
Data archiving is the process of identifying and moving inactive data out of current production systems and databases and into long-term storage systems. Archived data tends to be information that is required to be kept for regulatory compliance, for historical reference or because it can provide analytical value over time.

What is archiving vs. backup?
Data backup is the task of copying current data to another storage location, either on-site or off-site, where it can be accessed or recovered from backup systems if the original data is lost, corrupted or otherwise unavailable. Archiving is about moving data that is no longer active but must be retained to another storage system in order to free up primary storage and improve system performance.

What is archiving intended to achieve?
Archiving is designed to protect inactive or historical data from being lost or destroyed, to retain it in compliance with regulations or corporate retention policies, and to make it easily available to users who need to access it.

What is archiving’s greatest benefit?
The benefits of archiving include:

• Improved performance of applications and systems by reducing the size of databases, file-systems and primary storage sites.
• Reduced cost of storage by moving inactive data from costly, high-performing primary storage to more affordable, low-performance secondary storage.
• Less time required for backing up data from primary storage, as well as the cost of WAN bandwidth required for data transfer.
• Easier compliance with regulatory frameworks.
• Fewer costs for disaster recovery.
• Easier management of applications and systems.

What is archiving’s biggest challenge?
The challenges of archiving include:

• Growing data volumes. With the volume of data growing exponentially, more and more data must be moved to secondary storage, significantly increasing the complexity of archiving.
• The cost of storage. While archive storage is less costly than primary storage, the rapid growth of data means that the cost of archiving storage can quickly spiral out of control.
• Access needs. Even though archived data is considered inactive, users will frequently need to access archives for legal, compliance, research, analytical or historical reasons. Archive solutions that enable self-service can help to minimize the burden on IT teams for managing archive access.
• Evolving compliance requirements. Regulatory frameworks like GDPR and PCI DSS require tight governance over the way the data is used and stored, making archiving more difficult to manage.

What is archiving to the cloud?
Cloud archiving is the process of moving data to secondary storage in the cloud. Potential benefits of cloud archiving include lower costs and easier access. While potential drawbacks include less control and more complex compliance management.

As a global leader in data protection and enterprise backup solutions, Dell EMC provides a best-of-breed archiving solution in Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Archive. This software solution enables organizations to efficiently capture, index, store, manage, retrieve and dispose both structured and unstructured data to meet enterprise needs. With Dell EMC archiving technology, IT teams can more easily lower costs by reclaiming valuable primary data storage space, optimize server and application performance by reducing the amount of inactive content, and more easily meet compliance regulations, eDiscovery and litigation needs.

Providing seamless access to archived content from email, files and Microsoft SharePoint, Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Archive includes:

• Dell EMC SourceOne Email Management for Microsoft Exchange
• Dell EMC SourceOne Email Management for IBM Lotus Notes Domino
• Dell EMC SourceOne for File Systems
• Dell EMC SourceOne for Microsoft SharePoint

Additional components include:

• Dell EMC SourceOne Discovery Manager – an optional tool that enables a more efficient eDiscovery process by providing access from desktop applications and web interfaces to quickly locate messages and information
• Dell EMC SourceOne Email Supervisor - an optional tool for monitoring email archives that can help ensure compliance with National Association of Securities Dealers regulations and corporate policies

Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Archive as an ideal solution for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Domino (Lotus), and Microsoft SharePoint file systems. 

Dell EMC archiving solutions enable IT teams to:

• Improve server and application performance by effectively archiving inactive content.
• Reduce the cost of storage by moving inactive data to less costly storage media and optimizing storage tiers to maximize performance.
• Simplify management with a single platform for archiving data to on-premises servers, virtualized environments and public, private and hybrid clouds.
• Seamlessly integrate archiving with a broad range of applications.
• Minimize the cost of search and eDiscovery with tools that let users manage their own access to archived data.
• Minimize backup and archiving windows to reduce the amount and cost of bandwidth required to transfer data and to minimize the impact on application and system performance.
• Effortlessly and automatically enforce data archiving and retention policies to simplify and improve compliance.