York St John University has selected archiving software
to support its information lifecycle management (ILM)
strategy.
The university has chosen a data archiving sysem from BridgeHead
Software to support the introduction of an ILM strategy to drive
more efficient data management, including
meeting compliance requirements and streamlining backup
volumes.
Peter Mather, network management and development officer at the
university, said, "Our employee file data has expanded by 50% to
600GBytes in 18 months, with much of the increase being driven by
the growing popularity of multimedia files.
"We were running out of disc space, our full weekly backup was
taking up to 14 hours, and it was fast getting to the
stage where we would need to expand the backup-to-disc system
we had installed quite recently."
York St John chose the
FileStore data archiving software from BridgeHead Software to
take much of the static and seldom accessed data off the
organisation's primary store, thereby reducing the cost and
management burden.
"We are currently running a consultation exercise involving
various departments within the university to help agree the
policies that will underpin our ILM programme," said Mather.
"Part of this will be about what and how we archive. What data
can be automatically transferred to the archive if it hasn't been
modified or accessed for a certain time period? And what will need
to be kept on-line for longer?," he said.
As a result, said Mather, as much as half the data the college
currently holds on primary storage could be archived. The result
will be that the college will more easliy be able to manage its
compliance responsibilities under the Data Protection Act and
Freedom of Information Act.