All businesses have at least one thing in common: they create data. In fact, most corporations double the amount of data created each year. This level of data growth presents the challenge of protecting that data from disasters and human error, efficiently managing it during its lifecycle and storing for compliance with regulatory requirements.
For most organizations, the operational, legal and compliance challenges of email necessitate going beyond simple backups. Increases in data leads to increases in costs – especially regarding time and personnel.
The real danger beyond costs then comes when a company treats backup as a single solution for both data protection and data retention, resulting in highly ineffective and inefficient data management. This is where the fundamental difference between data backups and data archives comes to light, which is simple: Speed.
Data backup stores information that can be rapidly accessed, whereas data archiving is used to store important data that’s not used on a regular basis but still needs to be retained and managed for business purposes (think, emails for compliance). Data backups are intended for disaster recovery, for high-speed copy and restore to minimize the impact of failures, human error or disaster.
Data archiving is for discovery, to effectively manage data for retention and long-term access and retrieval. With archiving, the ability to search for information by keywords and metadata trumps recovery speeds.
Mixing data backups up with archiving will negatively impact recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Same is true for using backups as archives. Imagine how long it would take to sort through 2 years of emails just to find an email from several customer orders.
To combat this issue, the two capabilities can be applied together in a unified platform to optimize the cost and improve the overall effectiveness of data management. Data backup is more efficient in environments that have an effective archiving solution, and archives leverage the data backup for its own data protection needs.
Several vendors offer solutions that do a fantastic job of handling data backup and archiving, such as EMC’s Data Domain and EMC’s VNX unified platforms. These data management solutions will make a data administrator’s life easier by streamlining both processes, decreasing recovery time, increasing data protection and optimizing recovery points.
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