Gartner has published their “Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA)” – October 2010 (login required) as a direct replacement for their Email Active Archiving MQ which they have been publishing since 2002.
As stated in their report “…e-mail archiving is only one component of vendor’s overall solutions”. The report goes on to say that they are seeing significant interest through their enquiries towards archiving of multiple content types. Storage and e-discovery efficiency (single search across all content from one interface) are just a few of the benefits that customers are seeking from their archiving strategy. Rather than just e-mails and documents, other types of data such as instant messages, SMS and structured (database) data are starting to warrant compliant retention and on demand access. In a separate Gartner report titled “Enterprise Information Archiving Transforms the Strategy and Approach for Archiving” – June 2010 (login required), Gartner forecasts that EIA will become a key infrastructure component and will hold both structured data and unstructured content by 2013.
3 reasons (and there are many more) vendors should care about EIA (Beyond vendor MQ vanity):
1. Microsoft has officially entered the e-mail archiving market with Exchange 2010’s native support for archiving. As Gartner points out this puts Microsoft in competition with vendors that it had previously considered close partners.
2. Structured data archiving is the fastest growing archiving market (CAGR 27%) and an add-on offering from e-mail and document archiving vendors can provide an immediate up-sell new revenue opportunity from their existing customer base.
3. Significant compliance and retention pressures are forcing the issue with structured data archiving. Much in the same way e-mail archiving vendors differentiated themselves with granular retention/expiry rules and features, that level of expertise and features offered can be a big differentiator for structured data archiving.
Interestingly a glance at the EIA MQ reveals that many of the significant players (Iron Mountain, Symantec, Autonomy, CommVault, EMC, Open Text to name a few) do not offer structured data archiving capabilities, a fairly critical gap if they are to evolve towards full EIA. The complexity, granularity and unique accessibility characteristics (via Structured Query Language, Business Intelligence reporting tools and Application Package Interfaces) of structured data stored in RDBMS’ and data warehouses may be precluding these vendors from addressing this market.
3 reasons (and there are many more) why structured data archiving is more challenging than your father’s e-mail and document archiving:
1. The source of structured data can come from a variety of sources such as different flavors of RDBMS records (e.g. Oracle, MySQL, Legacy Mainframe, Sybase), data warehouses, simple structured (logs, CDRs) and semi-structured (Instant Messaging, SMS) data types. All with their own unique flavors of SQL data access.
2. Compliant storage including encapsulation (i.e. maintaining not only the data, but the original schema or data model form of the data) cannot even be achieved even within the current repositories. For example, when an application upgrades to a new release and adds new tables and fields to the RDBMS’, the prior structure is completely lost and can only be viewed if restored from backup together with the old version of the application.
3. Data sizes and volumes can be extreme with limited compressibility through your grandfather’s block and file level zip and de-duplication.
All of this and with Cloud support looming on the horizon makes adding structured data archiving quite a challenge. A far cry from the days of old (circa 2002), EIA may well represent the desired future state for organizations and whichever vendor can add structured data archiving to form all the pieces of the puzzle into a single ubiquitous platform will reap major rewards.
Originally published at http://www.rainstor.com/news-blog/blog/enterprise-information-archiving-its-not-your-fathers-archiving-platform