Is IBM's Archiving Strategy on Solid Ground?

By David Roe (@druadh20) Nov 6, 2009

Early last month IBM (news, site) began the process of articulating its Smart Archive Strategy. Began, we say, because at the time of the announcement the company released IBM Information Archive, a disk-and-tape information infrastructure solution that offered a "unified storage” approach to archiving company information.

But they weren’t finished with that and only recently unveiled a number of other solutions that are designed to provide analytics and data discovery to companies looking to determine what information they should keep and what information they should bin.

All solutions provide a number of options for specific enterprise needs either individually, or combined, that should deal with the ever growing problem of information retention.

IBM’s Smart Archive Strategy

But before we look at what capabilities these solutions offer, or consider whether their strategy is a good or a bad thing — although anything that deals with the growing volume of data can only be good — let’s have a look at what exactly IBM means when it talks about its Smart Archive strategy.

As good a place as any to look is the IBM Blog, where Tony Pearson, a senior Storage Consultant and Master Inventor for the IBM System Storage product line, outlined what he believed the strategy to be.

The new "IBM Smart Archive" strategy, he said, integrates software, storage, servers and services into solutions that help meet the challenges of data retention at the moment, and into the future.

IBM, it seems, has been spending the past few years working across its various divisions and acquisitions to ensure that its clients have complete end-to-end solutions.

Thankfully, he clarifies this, as one of the biggest problems to date has been inflexible, monolithic archiving systems that are difficult to adapt and difficult to implement.

What Does IBM Propose?

But that’s not what IBM is proposing, Pearson says. In fact he is quite adamant that this is not what IBM is trying to develop either. What the Smart Archive Strategy envisages is a viable, flexible archive strategy rather than just mindlessly buying more disk and tape for a "Keep Everything Forever" policy.

Indeed, he argues that keeping all that information in your system can be a liability in that the data stored can, through eDiscovery, be used against you in a court of law, or could be if you could find what you are looking for as the documents and files pile up in your repositories.

The problem with most archive storage solutions is that they are inflexible, treating all data the same under a common set of rules. And it is this that IBM’s Smart Archiving aims to deal with.

Why Smart Archive Solutions?

The recently released batch of solutions offer analytics capabilities that will be able to access what information you have stored, what you need to store and what you can safely get rid of.

And let’s face it, this is the oversized elephant cheerfully stamping around your document management closet (and repository).

In Forrester’s Q3 2009 survey of companies, 60 percent of records management stakeholders rated synchronizing eDiscovery, records management and archiving during the eDiscovery process as “challenging” or “very challenging.”

Add into the pot current budgetary restraints combined with the cost of storing data and you get a very potent mix that could see you before the courts before you can say “I wish I had managed my archives better”.

Keeping Everything Is Not Possible

Keeping everything is just not possible. Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management said of Smart Archive at the launch: