The Financial Impact of Using JBOD as an Archival Platform
In 2008, an oft-viewed blog
on the DCIG website examined the usage of JBOD as an archival system and gave a
handful of reasons as to why JBOD often fails to deliver on enterprise
requirements. So I decided to delve a little deeper into the financial and cost
savings impact of using an enterprise archive system as opposed to JBOD since many
of the enterprise users that I meet with to discuss their archival strategies
often fail to put sufficient thought into the storage platform that their
archival data will reside on.
It is common for users to tell me they are just going to add some SATA disk trays to their existing primary storage while others have said they are going to just purchase the cheapest possible JBOD system that they can. There are a couple of concerns I have with either of these two approaches. In these examples, they are way too focused on the short-term cost savings that JBOD offers and they fail to fully consider the protection and preservation of their archived data over the long-term. If enterprises really did not need the archived data, then they are better off directing their IT staff to just completely remove the data from their environment anyway.
Most enterprise organizations have a need to archive data in some shape or fashion. That may include complying with regulations or corporate internal governances, or the simple fact that data in a given application needs to be retained for future use and inspection. Typically their archived data is retained for an extremely long period of time (1 year up to potentially 50 years). Yet when you think about the lifespan of a JBOD system, you are typically looking at a 3-5 year life span before a refresh is needed. Going beyond that time brings up concerns of system availability and even questions of support as some manufacturers will not continue to support the system or charge increasingly high fees to support it if the need arises.
That said, here are a few reasons that companies should choose a true enterprise archive system like the Permabit Enterprise Archive instead of JBOD as a means to address these financial concerns:
IT requirements continue to be affected by the high growth of information storage and retention needs driven by regulations and corporate governance. Effective archiving in today's business environment requires data protection that can scale and meet the growth needs as well as data protection needs. Enterprises are responding to growing requirements to reduce the costs of their primary storage by starting to archive aging data to lower cost storage systems. In these circumstances, JBOD may appear as a viable option but, as these points illustrate, enterprises have to look beyond the cost of the disk drive.
It is these factors that enterprise archiving systems like the Permabit Enterprise Archive take into account as they do more than just drive down storage system costs but also include features like availability, compliance, reliability and WORM that are critical to the storage, preservation and protection of enterprise archive data. One must consider the differences between JBOD and the real requirements of information archiving in today's business environment. From a business perspective, archiving will protect information assets, reduce risk, minimize exposure for legal action and enable effective response when it does occur and finally effectively integrate archiving into the IT infrastructure.This improves costs, streamlines backupand protects long-term information retention through a comprehensive and purpose built archiving solution.
It is common for users to tell me they are just going to add some SATA disk trays to their existing primary storage while others have said they are going to just purchase the cheapest possible JBOD system that they can. There are a couple of concerns I have with either of these two approaches. In these examples, they are way too focused on the short-term cost savings that JBOD offers and they fail to fully consider the protection and preservation of their archived data over the long-term. If enterprises really did not need the archived data, then they are better off directing their IT staff to just completely remove the data from their environment anyway.
Most enterprise organizations have a need to archive data in some shape or fashion. That may include complying with regulations or corporate internal governances, or the simple fact that data in a given application needs to be retained for future use and inspection. Typically their archived data is retained for an extremely long period of time (1 year up to potentially 50 years). Yet when you think about the lifespan of a JBOD system, you are typically looking at a 3-5 year life span before a refresh is needed. Going beyond that time brings up concerns of system availability and even questions of support as some manufacturers will not continue to support the system or charge increasingly high fees to support it if the need arises.
That said, here are a few reasons that companies should choose a true enterprise archive system like the Permabit Enterprise Archive instead of JBOD as a means to address these financial concerns:
- Reduce primary storage size and costs. JBOD systems are fairly un-intelligent and provide no real integration solution to meet your organization's archival needs of today or tomorrow. By moving your primary data that is past its point of usefulness but still needs to be retained to a Permabit Archive, you can decrease your spend on future primary storage plus, by archiving the data, it immediately frees up critical cycles on your primary storage infrastructure that can be used for what they are intended for - primary critical data storage and retrieval. A typical enterprise customer scenario can pay anywhere from $40/GB into the $100s/GB for primary storage and the infrastructure to support it. In a Permabit Archival environment you are looking at a few dollars per GB to store your archived data with a storage system that offers the same or higher availability, reliability and resiliency characteristics as found on primary storage. So once the investment is made it's very easy to see how quickly an ROI can be obtained.
- Backup and recovery savings. JBOD systems typically have no replication or data protection features other than basic RAID so enterprises are still advised to copy this data to tape or a disk backup platform. Due to the fact that there is almost always a retention policy tied to that archival data, it must be protected in a manner better than just RAID. Having to perform these backups adds new costs into your environment such as more tapes, more disks and more backup jobs hogging the network. Systems such as the Permabit Enterprise Archive relieve this pressure by providing a robust and thin replication technique inside of its archival platform. It also offers an unlimited number of snapshots for quick recovery and data protection.
- Space Savings. Few, if any, JBOD systems provide deduplication or compression features so duplicate data is stored multiple times which drives up the overall space consumed by your JBOD system.This in turn drives the need to buy more and more storage. Permabit offers deduplication and compression as part of the product itself so you store data more efficiently and use less capacity.
- Save staff time and hardware costs.Electing to use a JBOD system as an archive repository has costs that are not reflected in the initial purchase. For example, assume you purchase one JBOD system and over time it reaches full capacity. In order to maintain your growth, you will need to purchase another one. This means another system to manage (probably with a separate management interface), the potential need to migrate data depending on how the space was allocated. As your environment continues to grow, you end up with islands of JBOD arrays that are managed separately and require more people manage them. Minimally, valuable time is taken away from staff resources that would probably be better served elsewhere. Using an enterprise archive system, they gain access to a massively scalable system (PBs of data) that reside in a single logical system with one management interface without the need for data migrations.
IT requirements continue to be affected by the high growth of information storage and retention needs driven by regulations and corporate governance. Effective archiving in today's business environment requires data protection that can scale and meet the growth needs as well as data protection needs. Enterprises are responding to growing requirements to reduce the costs of their primary storage by starting to archive aging data to lower cost storage systems. In these circumstances, JBOD may appear as a viable option but, as these points illustrate, enterprises have to look beyond the cost of the disk drive.
It is these factors that enterprise archiving systems like the Permabit Enterprise Archive take into account as they do more than just drive down storage system costs but also include features like availability, compliance, reliability and WORM that are critical to the storage, preservation and protection of enterprise archive data. One must consider the differences between JBOD and the real requirements of information archiving in today's business environment. From a business perspective, archiving will protect information assets, reduce risk, minimize exposure for legal action and enable effective response when it does occur and finally effectively integrate archiving into the IT infrastructure.This improves costs, streamlines backupand protects long-term information retention through a comprehensive and purpose built archiving solution.
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