Iron Mountain Digital Authority

With all these costs to consider, it’s clear that using near-line storage infrastructure to keep data that nobody accesses isn’t very cost-effective. In a lot of ways, companies are moving the problem from one floor tile to another. The next step, then, is to determine how much data is inactive.

A simple way to do that is to look at how large a full data backup is, then compare that to the change rate of data—roughly equivalent to the size of an incremental backup. Another, probably more accurate way is to go by the last modified data of your unstructured files. “If a file hasn’t been modified in a year, there’s a very good chance it’s inactive,” says Claire Lima, senior product marketing manager at Iron Mountain Digital.

In addition to creating an unnecessary burden on the storage environment, inactive data can add an inordinate amount of time required for full backups, putting the organization in danger of failing to meet its service level agreements.

Benefits of the outsourcing alternative

Iron Mountain Digital’s Virtual File Store (VFS) service provides a way to alleviate the problem by getting inactive unstructured data out of your storage environment while enabling control, high security and access. If, say, 65 percent of your unstructured data is inactive, moving it securely offsite will allow you to reclaim significant storage headroom and lower the overall storage-related total cost of ownership.

To use VFS, customers place a VFS appliance on their network, the appliance looks like a CIFS/NFS file server.

ToP challenges in s Toring inac Tive DaTa

59%

Cost to purchase additional storage space

58%

Ensuring that storage methods meet security and compliance requirements

57%

Increasing management costs

47%

Ensuring that stored files are easily accessible for electronic-discovery purposes

37%

Inadequate methods for backing up or archiving data, leading to an increased risk of data loss

29%

Creating space for new equipment

25%

Increasing power and cooling costs

15%

Pockets of downtime as servers become overburdened

SOURCE: IDG Research, 2008

That means it integrates easily with existing IT infrastructure, including storage tiering solutions, backup systems, onsite archiving and other solutions. Customers have the option of moving files to the appliance manually or automatically, following a customer-defined policy. From the appliance, the files are sent encrypted via a secure VPN connection to an Iron Mountain data center. All data is also mirrored (copied) to another Iron Mountain data center, located in a different disaster zone, providing built-in disaster recovery.

In addition to lowering TCO, VFS offers a simple way to manage storage growth. Iron Mountain provides as much or as little storage capacity as you need, providing inherent scalability—a feature cited as either very important or critical in a hosted storage solution by more than 70 percent of

IDG survey respondents. All files are available on demand, which 60 percent of survey respondents cited as very important or critical.

Offloading inactive data also helps with staffing requirements, enabling companies to redeploy storage administrators to more strategic tasks and avoid adding staff as storage requirements grow. Similarly, it frees up room on the storage and network infrastructure, thus minimizing additional expenditures.

As a hosted service, VFS requires no up-front capital outlay—an important attribute in times of economic uncertainty. Rather, customers pay a single, predictable monthly cost. Customers also get the benefit of consistent equipment upgrades from Iron Mountain.

Data growth is a fact of life in IT—you can’t stop it, but you can take steps to manage it more effectively. Many organizations will find that offloading inactive unstructured data to a secure, hosted service makes sound business sense, enabling them to effectively squeeze more life out of their existing storage infrastructure. Using a service such as Iron Mountain’s VFS can at once lower your storage TCO, leave room for growth and reduce strain on storage infrastructure and personnel.