Organizations aren't just producing more data these days; they're saving more data. For storage managers, that means increased emphasis on archiving.
But this isn't your father's archiving we're talking about. Instead, it's so-called active archiving, a kind of ILM on steroids, in which all kinds of data, including databases, semi-structured content, unstructured images, and text, is hoarded into data "bulk barns" for ready access.
Bigger and more often tapped than traditional data archives, which could stay dormant for years, active archives are scaleable repositories for data like medical images, which must be accessed frequently, but perhaps not quite as frequently as data in primary storage.
This is the kind of archive Nexsan has in mind with its new SAS-based archiving device, SASBoy, announced this week.
Nexsan is "making the argument that although SAS is a high performance drive, there is a place for it in the world of secondary storage," said Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group. Even if youre keeping things for a long period of time, certain pieces of that could need more accessibility.