Disaster Recovery Journal

In many cases, an active archive envi-
ronment is appropriate – a system that
combines applications, open systems,
disk and tape hardware to provide users
online or near-online access to all data,
always. Typically this uses a standard
interface, such as a file system interface,
and lets anyone (not just administrators)
access files. This data is considered online
and may reside on disk, tape or both. The
archive software pulls the data from the
fastest platform (that is, for small files,
random access from disk is the fastest if
the data is on disk). The key is that the
archive handles data transport through
user-created policies, and the user can
access the data without worrying about the
medium on which the data is stored – disk,
tape, doesn’t matter. The archive applica-
tion presents the file structure independent
of storage method. The user can retrieve
data quickly – data on tape that is stored
in a contemporary tape library typically
requires only a few minutes for retrieval –
less if the data is on disk.

Where backup processes focus on
making copies of data for security, archive
applications typically provide data acces-
sibility, categorizing, and managing
unstructured data. As data is migrated
into a managed archive through a process
termed “ingestion,” data is stored and
preserved, and, significantly, catalogued.
The catalogue itself, also referred to as
metadata, lets users search the repository
so they can quickly find and retrieve data.
Metadata is defined by the end user and
typically includes information such as
file or data creator, usage statistics, modi-
fication information, and other details
required for regulatory compliance, as
well as content tagging. In this function,
the metadata server acts as the gatekeeper
to the archive, allowing the data to be
stored across multiple storage devices and
media types.

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