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Database Archiving Heats Up: Page 3 of 5

At the moment VMware appears to be the likeliest candidate. "It takes a snapshot of everything down to the OS and the [database software] drivers," says Harif. "All you have to do is ensure that you have a similar class of hardware [to archive it on], and that's easy."

A trickier issue is the lifespan of the software. "I think that VMware-type offerings need to be able to handle about three years of backwards compatibility," says Harif, adding that this timeframe more or less fits the rest of his IT strategy. "Every server that we buy is expected to have at least four years of production use."

Get Out Your Crystal Ball

Building your database archiving strategy around your current needs is simply asking for trouble. IDC, for example, warned in a recent report that many firms are building their database archives with their own custom-built tools, running the risk of being unable to access the data a few years from now.

At least one user, Andrew Gibbons, director of operations at photo sharing site SmugMug, agreed that custom-built tools can be problematic. "What we're doing at the moment is a very manual process," he says, adding that his firm has built software to take weekly copies of database data and archive it.