Archiving made easier

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The problem of old was the time and effort it took to get images from the tape archives - a task only IT could do. But last summer, Bob Mason, director of publishing systems, moved the paper's filmstrips and digital pictures to a new disk-based archival system that gives editors speedy access to stored data.

The Dallas Morning News is struggling to get a handle on the value of its business data, then to craft a tiered-storage strategy around that understanding. As it has for Mason, archiving is bubbling up as an increasingly important part of that storage decision.

"We don't want to build a two-to-three-year solution but one that will last for 20 years," Mason says.

Adopting a tiered storage and archival process means determining how retrievable and available data needs to be, says Jim Geis, director of storage solutions for Forsythe Solutions Group, an IT consultancy. "Just because some information is old, static or considered reference information, it still could be mission-critical," he says. "You may not need to access the data very quickly, you may not have to have it constantly available, but you still need to have it available .... [with] high integrity."

Business-critical applications such as ERP or Oracle database applications typically need the most highly available, fastest Fibre Channel storage, while imaging applications tend to require less quickly accessible, less expensive storage such as Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) or Ultra Density Optical (UDO ). Tape is hardly an option for data that needs to be accessed even occasionally.

For The Dallas Morning News, Mason investigated a variety of archival media - magneto-optical, SATA and even EMC's near-line, ATA-based Centera system for content-addressable storage - before settling on a disk-based system. That system, Plasmon's G638 optical library with a 19T-byte capacity, supports 30G-byte, write-once UDO media cartridges.

UDO products, which have been available for about two years, have a 5.25-inch form factor, making them suitable for use in tape libraries. Besides Plasmon, which helped define the specification, IBM and HP have adopted UDO technology.

Over the next three years, UDO capacity is expected to double to 60G bytes, and then again to 120G bytes.

"We have to have a media that can grow with the increasing resolution of digital cameras," Mason says. Scalability is a huge issue when you're storing some 2 million photographs a year, he adds.

The lasting nature of data stored on UDO media factored in to Mason's choice, too. "For our digital archives, we have to have permanence and authenticity - we want to make sure we write data once and never have a risk of losing that data," he says.

Wolfgang Schlichting, an IDC research manager, agrees that UDO is a great tape replacement. "Due to its compelling cost per gigabyte and write-once support, [we] believe UDO will quickly replace magneto-optical in storage solutions," he says.