As data growth and storage requirements continue
to accelerate, industry experts state that unstructured
fixed content data, the largest contributor to
this growth, represents more than 75% of all data
to be archived, and that 80% of this data has
not been accessed in the last 90 days, and that
60% will never be accessed again.
Regardless of the infrequent access requirements
for these growing volumes of data, most organizations
still continue to store static data on expensive,
proprietary primary storage devices, causing unmanageable
backup issues, and leaving critical data vulnerable
to hard disk and other system-related failures.
Data Migration Software applications allow a
system administrator to define sets of rules for
data migration and retention that control the
movement of data files from expensive primary
storage devices to less-expensive secondary storage
devices such as an Optical library, where it is
still accessible to the file system, and to applications
requiring access to the data.
Data migration software provides the ability
to migrate files to less-expensive devices based
on criteria such as file age, file size, file
type, and file ownership.
For example, an administrator may want to move
all files with .TIF and .PDF extensions that have
not been accessed in 90 days to an Optical library.
Another example may be to move files with a .WAV
extension that are greater than 300k in size,
to the same Optical library, regardless of its
creation date or last access date.
In addition, many data migration applications
provide automatic data migration based on a watermark,
such as when a hard drive reaches a certain percentage
of its total storage capacity, ensuring that “out
of disk space” situations are eliminated.
Data migration software applications also provide
the ability to perform “tiered storage”,
where multiple devices can be used throughout
the lifecycle of the data.
For example, certain data types may require write-once
properties to meet regulatory compliance and other
data types may not. For those files that require
a write-once media type, an Optical library would
be the most appropriate secondary storage device,
whereas for files that do not need to be stored
for regulatory purposes, a tape library may be
a suitable device.
In this instance, data groups that have been
classified for “optical” can be migrated
to an Optical library, and data groups that have
been classified for “tape” can be
migrated to a Tape library, whereby the migration
of these files is done regardless of the source
device and operating system on which they were
originally created.
Lastly, as a means to reduce CPU and network
bandwidth requirements during data migration,
most data migration applications allow the administrator
to schedule file migration operations during non-production
times.
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