Solution designed to help manage data growth supports IBM’s new Smart Archive strategy.

At its Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit today, IBM unveiled plans for a new Smart Business System called IBM Information Archive, a universal archiving repository for all types of content that addresses the complete information retention needs of midsize and enterprise clients faced with managing an increasing volume of information.

With key contributions from IBM Research, System Storage and Tivoli, IBM Information Archive leverages IBM’s expertise in designing systems to address clients’ needs by combining fast accessible disk with low-cost tape within a single archive pool to enable businesses to deploy an archive strategy that minimizes total cost of ownership over the life of the archived information. It also incorporates deduplication and compression techniques to optimize storage capacity and improve productivity.

Its architecture brings together IBM’s General Parallel File System technology, Tivoli Storage Manager and patent-pending Enhanced Tamper Protection to offer a high performance, high scalability, and secure platform that can be accessed in a private Cloud computing environment, even if the data is stored on tape media.

The need for archiving information is on the rise, driven by data growth, regulatory compliance, legal discovery and data protection. With ever-increasing requirements surrounding the long-term retention of information, organizations are looking for advanced archiving technologies to manage information throughout its lifecycle.

Broad Range of Records

The IBM Information Archive is designed for archiving a broad range of electronic based records, including e-mail, digital images, databases, applications, instant messages, account records, contracts or insurance claim documents, and other types of storage records. Information Archive will also be supported by a number of IBM software applications for email, content, data and report archiving including IBM Optim Data Growth Solution, IBM Content Collector and other Enterprise Content Management offerings.

Information Archive is also the first data retention solution to offer a choice of data protection levels to meet multiple archiving requirements. Three customizable archive collections can be created within a single system and each collection can be configured with different retention policies and protection levels to meet specific retention needs, including business, legal, or regulatory. In addition, multiple access methods using industry-standard protocols provide quick and easy deployment of the solution.

“In today’s dynamically changing environment, businesses are faced with managing a data juggernaut, and archiving that information and doing it cost effectively is a challenge,” says Al Zollar, general manager, IBM Tivoli Software. “The IBM Information Archive leverages IBM’s strengths in software, disk and tape to deliver a solution that will help clients manage their information infrastructure needs.”

IBM Information Archive is the first offering announced as part of IBM’s unified archiving strategy, IBM Smart Archive. This comprehensive approach combines IBM software, systems and service capabilities and is designed to help clients to extract value and gain new intelligence from the vast amounts of information by collecting, organizing, analyzing, trusting and leveraging that information. Beginning with IBM Information Archive, IBM's Smart Archive offerings will deliver a comprehensive set of archiving solutions in a unified and integrated strategy that maximizes customer value.

For more information, visit www.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/archive/