Thank you for visiting Archive Management.org (AMO)

Below you will find a statement of our mission:  why we think that a community like AMO is needed.  If you are a consumer of archive technology, we want to enlist your support to make this site the best that it can be, through an active contribution of your experience and opinions.  If you are a vendor of archive products or services, we welcome your participation as well.  Let us hear the details about the products or services you offer, point us to architectural white papers, and share your case studies with us.  That way, we all learn.

Archive De-Mystified

This site is mostly about de-mystifying the process of archive.  In our view, archiving is an ancient practice involving the thoughtful selection, storage and maintenance of collected objects.  Implementing an archive of digital data objects (as opposed to analog objects) is made additionally complex by the technology platform that must itself be managed concurrently with the archived data. 

Information must be stored to magnetic or optical components that are themselves subject to changes in signaling and media standards and formats, and vulnerable to exposure to magnetic and thermal variables (in the case of magnetic media), exposure to various ranges of light (in the case of optical media), and component wear and tear.

Archive is often conceived and implemented as a project.  However, it must evolve into an operational process to cope with

• Platform technology changes
• Media life constraints
• Changes in data "containers" (data object formats that change over time:  data must be transformed or adapted to new container formats to remain machine readable)
• Changes in the milieu (the business, the regulatory environment, etc.) that determines the value of data objects themselves, their appropriateness for inclusion in an archive, their retention timeframes and their protection requirements.

Archiving isn't a one-time effort to sort through the proverbial storage "junk drawer."  It is an on-going process of system and data management with practical benefits in the form of regulatory compliance, operational cost savings, and business process improvement.  Companies may elect to undertake archiving themselves, or outsource the archive to a third party service provider that adheres to industry best practices.

In general, the more granular the archive schema -- the amount and quality of information about the data objects being stored (their metadata) -- the greater the utility of the archive itself.  Archives that treat objects as "anonymous" data elements have less utility than are those that contain sufficient metadata to enable intelligent and probative searching.

Archives can be enormous contributors to "greener operations" within corporate IT services.  Data stored in an archive rarely presents the same access requirements as data stored in active repositories and can therefore be hosted on less expensive and less power consumptive platforms than those used for production operations.  If you want to "green" (reduce the utility power demands) of your IT operations, archiving is a good first step.

Intelligent archiving can help defer new hardware purchases in production IT shops.  It can also alleviate strain on protective services such as data mirrors and tape backup processes.

All in all, archiving is a worthwhile endeavor with a strong business value case to offer.

A Schizophrenic Industry

Despite the advantages of archive and the relatively straightforward products and services available to aid in the implementation of an archive strategy, the consumer often confronts a schizophrenic industry proffering what are often vastly conflicting views of what archive is and how to implement one. 

One explanation is that the storage industry, in general, is in the business of selling storage products -- arrays, fabrics, and other components -- rather than archival storage products.  You get the sense, after immersing yourself in the marketing literature from various providers of "primary" storage (costly disk arrays with proprietary controller technology), that the objective of the array vendor is not necessarily aligned with the needs of the consumer -- especially when it comes to archiving.  

As AMO sees it, the proper response that vendors should be making when confronting the storage environment that exists in most companies -- perhaps best described as an "unsorted junk drawer" -- is NOT to sell the consumer more drawers (expensive primary storage arrays) to fill with more junk (unmanaged data). Rather, vendors should be offering tools to help sort through the junk drawer, to separate its contents into an intelligent organizational scheme, to place infrequently accessed data with value to the organization into an off-line or near line archive, and to delete the junk data that does not need to be retained. 

Unfortunately, some storage vendors seem to be torn between selling more "primary" storage (with its greater margin of profit) and selling the customer archival storage and services (potentially with lesser profit to the vendor) -- what they really need to address their data burgeon.  A few actually use misleading marketing to cajole consumers to embrace inappropriate solutions.

And its not just hardware manufacturers; there are many software houses proffering products such as backup, snapshot and hierarchical storage management software products that are not, in and of themselves, archive solutions.  Nevertheless, these products are too often being represented by their vendors as such. This adds to the confusion around archiving that AMO seeks to set straight.

Finally, some vendors are selling what we would classify as "pre-archive" or "pre-ingestion" tools that might improve and augment an archive process but are not "archive solutions" themselves.  In such cases, we want to clear the confusion and identify the value of these technologies and how they compliment (or differ from) our concept of archiving.

Welcome to Archive Management.Org 

Archive Management.org, like all initiatives of the Data Management Institute, are consumer focused.  The objective of this site is to provide clear-headed guidance to business and IT decision makers about the value of archiving and best practices -- as well as pointers to qualified resources -- for getting an archive strategy underway.

Those who register on this site can participate by providing feedback on editorial and commentary presented here, as well as share their own experiences with specific strategies, products and solution providers.  We hope to create a "community of interest" around data archiving that will facilitate consumers with actionable information and archiving vendors and service providers  with a site where they can articulate their value proposition.

The Management