Secondary Storage

As IT teams seek solutions for managing the cost and complexity of secondary storage, they must choose solutions that can overcome several key challenges.

Expanding data volumes

With an ever-increasing volume of data, organizations must offload vast amounts of information to secondary storage. In fact, the capacity of secondary storage systems may be an order of magnitude larger than primary storage, increasing the complexity of data stored on secondary sites.

Rising costs

Greater amounts of data mean greater expense to store it. As data volumes grow, secondary storage may easily outpace the cost of primary storage.

Stricter regulations

Regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS require tighter control over the use and retention of data, making management of secondary storage sites more complicated.

Access requirements

While data in secondary storage may be accessed less often, it still must be accessible to a wide variety of users – ideally without the help of IT teams.

Dell EMC offers industry-leading data protection and backup software and hardware that can solve the challenges of managing secondary storage. Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Archive enables IT teams to efficiently capture, index, store, manage, retrieve and dispose of both structured and unstructured data. This powerful software solution delivers the ability to reduce costs by moving data to secondary storage and reclaiming valuable primary data storage space. Dell EMC technology also enables organizations to optimize operational and server performance while complying with the demands of regulations and the needs of eDiscovery and litigation requirements.

The key components of Data Protection Suite for Archive include:

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

Optional components include:

• Dell EMC SourceOne Discovery Manager for improving the efficiency of eDiscovery processes by enabling users to quickly locate messages and information from desktop applications and web interfaces
• Dell EMC SourceOne Email Supervisor for monitoring email archives to comply with regulations and corporate policies of the National Association of Securities Dealers

Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Archive enables administrators to:

• Reduce the cost of primary storage by optimizing storage tiers to maximize performance and moving inactive data to less costly storage media.
• Minimize the cost of secondary storage through integration with Dell EMC Data Domain, an industry-leading backup appliance that delivers high deduplication ratios.
• Lower the cost of eDiscovery with self-service tools that let users manage their own access to archived data.
• Reduce the cost of WAN bandwidth required for backup and data replication by accelerating data transfer and minimizing backup windows. 
• Improve the performance of servers and systems by moving inactive data to secondary storage and accelerating backup speeds.
• Simplify compliance for secondary storage by automatically enforcing data archiving and retention policies.
• Reduce burden of managing secondary storage with centralized tools for archiving to on-premises servers, virtualized environments and hybrid and public clouds.

What is secondary storage?

Secondary storage is designed to store data that does not need to be accessed frequently. Secondary storage typically uses high-capacity, low-performing storage devices that are more affordable than high-performing primary storage devices.

What are common types of secondary storage?

For secondary storage, businesses and enterprises typically use backup to tape, or backup to disk in the form of network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) devices. Organizations may also opt to backup servers to cloud data centers as a secondary storage site.

What are the benefits of secondary storage?

Effective use of secondary storage enables organizations to:

• Reduce the cost of primary storage by moving data to less expensive, low-performance, high-capacity storage media.
• Reduce the cost of backup and the length of backup windows by minimizing the volume of data that must be regularly backed up.
• Improve performance of servers and information systems by reducing the amount of data they must process.
• Maintain compliance with a wide variety of regulatory systems.