A while ago I did a webcast with an analyst firm on storage in the context of archiving. One of the topics of that webcast was the changing standards and technology for storage changing over time.
If you frequently take photos with a digital camera you have no doubt thought about this topic. Think about it, you have probably either filled hard drives or burned CDs or DVDs to store the hundreds of photos that you are taking that you want to preserve forever. How do you know that the storage mechanism you use for those photos will be around for your lifetime?
In my lifetime I can remember several different types of storage mechanisms. When I was much younger my father had a mainframe computer in the basement of our house. I would spend a lot of time watching the reel to reel tapes spin to load data to and from the machine. When we were old enough to use the TRS-80 that he had we would load programs into memory from a cassette tape (you had to listen for breaks in the noise on the tape to find the programs). The 8 inch floppy disks we moved to next made it much easier and faster. I also remember our first 20MB hard drive. Wow, 20MB, how could we ever fill that?
I think you see my point. I can’t go down to the local best buy and get a reel to reel reader for a computer tape. With the changes in interfaces I am not even sure that old 20MB hard drive can be attached to a modern PC let alone the OS reading the cluster size on the drive. As we store more and more data on removable media this issue is something that needs to be kept in mind.
That brings me to archiving. How can you be sure that the storage mechanism you use today will be in use 5 to 10 years from now? I noticed that an archiving vendor announced that it now has support for blue-ray DVD storage this week. How do we even know that blue-ray disks will last 10 years? I know that they must perform some type of accelerated aging on the media to test its longevity but the technology has only been around a couple of years for real world tests.
I believe that one answer to this problem will be “cloud storage” (I was hoping to use this buzz word soon!). Storing data in “the cloud” will make keeping up with evolving technology the problem of the company providing the storage. If companies providing “cloud storage” want to compete for archiving storage they will need to address this problem and state it in their messaging. “Store data with us because we will ensure it can be accessed when you need it regardless of the changes to technology over the years.” Archiving vendors will also need to plan to partner or integrate with these solutions.
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Storage, Cloud Storage, Email Archiving, Compliance, eDiscovery
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