Handling Large Data Archives

For a lot of years now archiving large amounts of data was handled by storing it on tape or storing it on CD or DVD. Of course this is when we considered large to be a few hundred megabytes or a small number of gigabytes. My how times have changed. Data just keeps getting larger and as a result we now see that many of our clients have stopped archiving data. The number of GB’s of data is just too huge to manage. Instead it is being stored on the server mingled in with current data.

We have a better way.

Issues in data archiving are:

• quick easy access
• restricted permissions
• redundancy

These three things are critical to good data archival practices. So let us introduce you to an appliance that is really good for data archiving.

It’s called Drobo. A simple Drobo is a four drive unit. It takes Sata drives which are pretty inexpensive these days and come in large formats. It’s a plug and play device as far as the drives go. We can put drives of any size in it, we can mix and match those sizes and we can lose up to two drives to failure and not lose any data. Recovery is as simple as sliding in a replacement drive. To access your archival data we simply map a drive to the Drobo volume.

How much? Well the 4 drive unit costs about $400, plus the drives. They make bigger units too for those of our clients with vast data archive requirements.

 

You might find us suggesting these. They’ve been around for a couple of years now and on our radar for almost that long. Ted attended a premier training event a while back in Las Vegas and came back thoroughly impressed by the technology. I think that you’re going to like these.