White Paper: Taking An Intelligent Data Management Approach To Archiving Data

By Kay Benaroch and Joe Colucci

Growing data volumes are making data management increasingly costly and labor intensive for IT departments. One primary culprit is e-mail. As employees become increasingly mobile and e-mail becomes the preferred method of enterprise communication, e-mail volume is expanding exponentially. And organizations are keeping their e-mails around for a long time. According to the Forrester Q1 2010 Global Message Archiving Online Survey, for example, 57 percent of survey respondents with currently deployed message archiving solutions retained e-mail for an average period of 5–10 years.

However, for many organizations, only a small portion of the data on primary storage is active at any given time. A lack of uniformity in applying existing data management policies can further compound the data growth problem. The result: all too often, a company's primary storage is overflowing with aged, duplicate, or nearly worthless data.

Dell Data Management Consulting Services provide analysis to help determine when to implement archiving and other IDM technologies; Dell consulting experts can also help design and implement archiving solutions. Data Management Assessment Services help organizations define their challenges and requirements through a workshop designed to highlight data management issues that could be compounding the challenges. A Dell team performs an assessment to capture the current state and requirements, then designs an archiving services catalog to guide the solution configuration and implement Dell best practices for archiving.