Tiered Storage

Map Service Levels to Underlying Storage Devices to Improve Archive Performance

Corporations are under growing pressure to cost effectively meet the business service level requirements of internal stakeholders—including legal, information security, regulatory supervision, and end-user. Business service level requirements for archiving include end-user search times, time for recall, and presentation of electronically stored information as part of an eDiscovery process, time periods for retention of content, and legal holds. With archived file and email data projected to grow 55% CAGR and 73% CAGR respectively from 2007 to 2012 (Figure 1), both storage costs and the operational burdens to manage this growth will be significant.

Figure 1

Electronic discovery (eDiscovery) and information search of the corporate archive are necessitating faster access in order to meet litigation requests and business objectives surrounding information retention and availability. Companies also need to provide appropriate back-up and availability services for archived content which has been identified as a business record. In the past, hierarchical storage management could not meet these requirements because storage policies were not application or content aware, and lacked the ability to tie back to business service objectives. Leaving organizations with the:

• Inability to dynamically match older or infrequently accessed content to cost- and performance-appropriate devices; instead, corporations must bear the labor costs of manual data migration, or the expense of leaving content on higher-tier storage
• High cost of conducting eDiscovery and supervision via slow devices, such as WORM/CAS devices
• Increased user frustration and lost productivity resulting from slow access to content, as infrequently accessed content is typically stored on the same disk as frequently accessed content

NearPoint Tiered Storage Option: Provision Storage Devices with Different Costs, Response Times, Throughput, and Availability

The Mimosa NearPoint™ Tiered Storage Option (TSO) provides corporations with the ability to provision storage devices with different costs, response times, throughput, and availability. In large capacity, long-term archives, the movement of data from one tier of storage to another can be managed automatically based on content, metadata tags, or user ownership. To address the need to write certain data to WORM (write once, read many) devices in order to comply with industry regulations, Mimosa NearPoint TSO can be configured to write to a WORM device such as those offered by NetApp, Hitachi and EMC. In addition, based on a business service level objective, NearPoint TSO can be configured to write selected content to a high-speed read cache to improve the recall time for the end-user while maintaining a separate, immutable copy on the compliance device.

Mimosa NearPoint Strengthens the Next-Generation Archiving Platform

With NearPoint TSO, Mimosa augments its next-generation archiving platform to give customers even more granular control over IT costs and archive performance. The solution supports retention and on-demand access to large volumes of information with unmatched performance and radically lowers costs. Customers enjoy savings across hardware, software, and IT operations, in addition to the satisfaction and peace of mind that comes from knowing their service level objectives are being met to reduce exposure and minimize risk.

NearPoint Tied Storage Option:

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