Archiving and Compliance
Deduplication Storage for a Wide Range of Long Term Retention Requirements
Challenges
- Traditional Media Not Keeping Pace with Demand: Archiving is no longer just about keeping data for long periods of time. Optical and tape-based archiving methods cannot meet the performance and capacity demands of today’s business environment as organizations must not only store archive data, they also have to be able to easily read, write and search it faster and retain more of it for longer than ever before.
- Changing Regulations: Compliance is a moving target, with constantly changing requirements for offsite data protection and retention periods. Customers have attempted to meet this challenge with a ‘save everything’ strategy which quickly becomes unmanageable and cost prohibitive. In response, you need flexible and scalable archiving solutions to meet your current and future regulatory and business requirements.
- Managing Versioned and Reference Data: Many archiving projects are driven by the need to track changes to departmental project work or engineering development or to keep a document for future reference but on lower cost storage assets. These projects become increasingly burdensome over time as the equipment used to archive the data becomes obsolete thereby rendering the archived media useless. A storage platform that can store more data, at less cost and that will not require a media migration strategy is needed.
Solution
The common threads among the challenges presented by archiving and compliance are the volume of data, the length of time it must be retained and the speed at which it must be stored and read when necessary.
These challenges can be addressed with high speed, inline deduplication storage. Data Domain systems apply the benefits of deduplication to workloads beyond disk backup and recovery, providing nearline storage for organizations that require development versioning, project archives, regulatory support and traditional archiving applications among others.
Data Domain deduplication storage systems also provide the following benefits not commonly found in nearline solutions:
Unified Platform for Deduplication Storage: Data Domain systems were designed as a unified storage platform in order to be a highly efficient, high value system that can be reliably used in a wide range of nearline applications including:
> Archiving with an application or ‘copy and paste’
> Nearline file storage
> Long term data retention for reference, litigation support and regulatory compliance
Key Features
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Retention Lock Software: Data Domain Retention Lock software allows customers to gain the benefits offered by efficient, deduplicated, nearline storage along with built-in, industry-leading data retention and data protection capabilities. Data Domain storage systems with Retention Lock software deliver data management features to implement critical data retention and protection policies, while offering the operational flexibility required to efficiently run the enterprise on a day-to-day basis, all at the right cost.
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Deduplicated Snapshots: Data Domain snapshots provide highly efficient data protection for application data. Snapshots take up no additional space initially, and only the incremental changes in data — at a variable-length segment level— are automatically recorded, resulting in the most efficient snapshot implementation available.
- Network-Efficient Replication for DR: Most archiving solutions ignore the common requirement that data must be moved to a remote site for disaster recovery or longer term retention. Data Domain deduplication storage systems reduce the network bandwidth requirements for offsite replication by up to 99%, making the transfer of backup and archive data across the WAN economically and operationally feasible.
- Ultimate Data Integrity: Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture provides the best defense against data integrity issues. Continuous recovery verification along with extra levels of data protection, such as dual disk parity RAID-6, continuously detects and protects against data loss, throughout the lifecycle of the data.
- Flexibility and Scalability: Data Domain systems can scale from 7 TB to 28.3 PB for you to meet changing business and compliance needs. Data Domain also offers various topology options, such as one-to-one, bidirectional, and many-to-one replication, with Data Domain Replicator software to meet your specific DR or offsite requirements.
