August - 2009 issue > Technology

By Anil Degwekar

Introduction

These days the volume of data stored in enterprises is growing at a phenomenal rate – different estimates put the growth rate anywhere from 30-50 percent. One aspect of this increase that hasn’t received much attention is the ‘unstructured’ data (i.e. data stored in files or messages) which is growing much faster, as against data stored in databases.

Managing the growth of such unstructured data is a difficult task. There is no single control point or a single application that touches this data. It can be scattered across several machines, disks, and directories. The file sizes can enormously vary, the data may belong to different users, and the usage pattern can also vary drastically.

How does one manage such data? On the one hand, we want to keep this data accessible all the time, with an acceptable access speed. But on the other, we would like to control the cost of storing and securing this data. An archival solution attempts to provide an answer to this, which can meet both these objectives.

There are different storage media available to us for storing data, and each of them has some unique advantages. Disks are fast and allow random access to data. Tapes are cheap, and can be transported or saved in safe locations. Tapes do not consume any power when they are not being used. We also have DVDs which can be used for write-once type of storage – the storage medium guarantees that data cannot be over-written.

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