What used to be considered a data management problem for tomorrow is quickly becoming a data management issue for today, namely the quick and efficient retrieval of corporate records. The courts and regulatory agencies have shown their hand. They will hand out stiff penalties to companies unable to produce corporate records in a timely manner in response to lawsuits or compliance monitoring.

Data backup is a key component of any enterprise data management strategy and critical for recovery. But file system archiving is the only way to truly lower the costs of managing legacy data.

While compliance may be driving the need for digital archiving of legacy data, the explosion in file share storage requirements, duplicate data, managing disparate data stores, back-up management issues such as growing backup windows for file servers, growing recovery times for file servers and very difficult file recovery processes add fuel to the need for an enterprise archive solution.

In a study on digital archiving conducted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, the main reasons that companies want to archive their file-based storage are to perform search and retrieval of data, get better access to intellectual property, meet compliance regulations, reduce storage capacity of primary storage, improve workflow process, increase the performance of backup, reduce the cost of backup, and improve server performance.

Companies that opt to do nothing about archiving can expect to overspend on storage capacity, become increasingly inefficient managing data stores, and find themselves unable to plan for business growth. In short, these organizations will get burned financially by spending their time putting out fires.

IDC expects storage purchases to experience a compound annual growth rate of 55 percent between 2006 and 2010, or an increase in PB per annum of external disk purchases from 500 PB in 2006 to 3100 PB in 2010.

Making It Happen
Not all companies are complacent. A major Wall Street investment firm with annual revenue in excess of $10 billion and 25,000 employees took the lead in archiving when it developed a solution for responding to requests for archived e-mail from its legal department, which in turn must comply with requests from auditors, regulators, and the courts. The company turned to Symantec's Enterprise Vault, an archiving solution for the long-term retention and management of unstructured content, most notably from e-mail and file systems.

This global investment management and advisory services firm provides financial services to corporations, governments, and municipalities, institutional clients, and individuals worldwide. The company operates in the heavily regulated financial services industry. As a result, the principal driver to deploy Enterprise Vault was high labor costs and the time it took to process requests from the legal/compliance department for discovery of stored e-mail.

In fact, according to a case study on this firm by Forrester Research, a typical legal request required multiple server restores, each of which takes between six hours and three days to complete. A single request could take months to complete, which left the corporate messaging group working 24/7.

At a cost of approximately $1.2 million for hardware and software and about $1.3 million for labor costs for migrating data to the new e-mail archive, the company achieved an ROI of 32 percent with a payback period of 24 months by deploying Symantec's Enterprise Vault software. In addition to purchasing Enterprise Vault, the investment firm also contracted for 25 days of consulting services from Symantec for design, installation, and training.

More specifically, the benefits achieved by the Wall Street firm were:

• Reduced labor costs for restores and e-mail discovery
• Faster time-to-court, quantified in terms of value of time saved for the customer's internal legal staff
• Reduced risk of fines for incomplete or faulty discovery requests
• Repurposed servers previously dedicated to restores and saved searches

After installing Enterprise Vault, e-mail discovery requests were processed within 24 hours rather than weeks or months. Perhaps, more importantly, time retrieval of records for e-discovery or compliance will likely result in the avoidance of court fines that can swell into millions of dollars.

Thinking Ahead About Yesterday
The explosive growth in e-mail and other unstructured data is straining storage and management. Recent studies suggest that e-mail storage alone contains as much as 75 percent of a company's intellectual property. This strain will drive more companies to seek archive solutions.

Products such as Enterprise Vault facilitate the lifetime management of information. Until recently, product customers depended on Enterprise Vault to manage all e-mail and content going forward. To help customers ensure that legacy content is also stored and searchable in the same repository, Symantec's partner RenewData helps customers gather historical data off back-up tapes and legacy e-mail archives.

The Wall Street investment firm invested time and money to load all historical data from 12,000 backup tapes to Enterprise Vault.

The truth of the matter is that back-up tapes and PST files weren't designed for fast and efficient search and retrieval. The time has come for companies to take a proactive approach to file system archiving and be ready for e-discovery or compliance monitoring requests.