Meeting the Great Demands of Email Archiving:
One Client's Success Story
When the IBM team developed the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450 (and now the Generation II version the IBM TotalStorage DR550), they believed that the competitive edge for the offering would be in the flexibility and choice it gives to customers in being able to fit into their environment rather than having to ‘rip-and-replace’ to put in an advanced data retention technology. They also believed that the ultra low, long term Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), that was achieved by incorporating a tiered storage architecture, delivering one of the industry’s only non-erasable, non-rewriteable data retention and protection implementations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) would provide customers a very clear-cut reason to choose the IBM technology over the competition. Little did they know how prescient their strategy was.
One of the first Data Retention 450 clients is a major Wall Street firm. Most of their disk storage is EMC based attaching to Sun servers. Yet they chose the IBM Data Retention 450 over the competition because their data retention requirements were to keep e-mail 10 years (later dropped to 7 years). This is a very typical customer requirement. However, what the customer realized is that they only needed the e-mail available for immediate access for two months. The number of accesses to the e-mail after two months would be very small, or in most cases, not at all. Yet it had to be kept and protected just in case someone would ask for it. It became JIC ("Just In Case") data after two months. The customer realized that to keep the e-mail on disk for many more years would be a considerable and unnecessary cost. So the Data Retention 450’s tiered storage architecture and policy-based management allows them to set a policy which moves the e-mail to WORM tape after two months.
1 Further, the fact that the IBM Data Retention offering can be accessed from a Sun Solaris server allowed them to utilize this IBM technology in their non-IBM hardware environment.
2
While the Data Retention 450 provided the storage subsystem to protect the e-mail during its retention period, storage is NEVER the complete solution to a data retention or regulatory compliance business need. To meet the customer requirements for creating a searchable repository of e-mail, the customer is using IBM CommonStore for Lotus Domino and IBM DB2 Content Manager. Every e-mail is journaled prior to being delivered into a separate Lotus database which is indexed by Content Manager and sent to its repository, the Data Retention 450. This provides the search capability required by the customer.
ILM is a very important consideration for companies today. Data protection and retention is also an important requirement. The IBM TotalStorage DR550 is IBM’s offering that can satisfy both of these customer requirements.
Footnotes:
1 While this was the customer’s original plan, they will defer the implementation of this feature until the system has been in production for a number of months so they can better tune and plan their specific tiered storage needs
2The Data Retention 450 and the DR550 IP connects to many different server platforms. Some of these are Sun Solaris, HP/UX, a number of different Linux distributions, Windows, AIX, iSeries, zSeries, Novell, etc.
Datatrend's TrendSetter eNewsletter
January 15, 2005
