This is a growing concern in the industry today because we've seen
data growth at 50-60% on a yearly basis. The file servers are
getting huge. Mail servers are becoming just impossible to manage
or to restore. And a lot of that [difficulty] is caused by a fear
of making an actual decision with respect to the data because of
all these compliance issues -- we're afraid to delete data now
because that may get us in trouble, so we've seen these servers
grow to become enormous.
@24732 Yet, sometimes we can't
restore them. I've seen instances where a
file server took 72 or more hours to be restored. In some cases,
that's completely unacceptable from a recovery time objective
(RTO) perspective. The first thing that comes to mind is: "We'll
have to replicate all that data and have a standby file server
ready to come up should something happen." Well if that's what
you can afford, and what you need, that's fine.
But, if you can't afford to spend that kind of money, yet need
access to your data, today there's a number of solutions out there
that allow you to make your mail servers and your file servers a
lot leaner from a data perspective. I'm talking about
archiving products here. Enterprise Vault
from Symantec is a fine example. You can actually take some
attachments or some email messages or some files on a file
server and move them to another type of storage -- lower cost
storage or potentially storage that you will not restore
immediately should something happen.
What we're looking at here is an opportunity to reduce the size
of your mail server (e.g., Exchange) to a size that is easy to
backup, easy to restore and that contains
what you need to access on a daily basis.
The beauty of a lot of these solutions is they're a little like
HSM -- they move the bulk of the data to
another location, but leave a little pointer in your email
program or on your file server. So, from a user perspective,
everything is still there [on the server]. They look at it; they
see it; if they click on it, it may take a little longer to come
up, but the file is still there. You're not hiding that data
really, you're just putting it somewhere else, and you're
leaving a bit of a shortcut. That allows your servers to be much
leaner, and it really enhances the recoverability. You can back
them up in a nightly cycle, and you can restore these servers
within a reasonable timeframe.
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