Aperio and Archive

Why is Archive important for Test?

Test systems generate lots of data, data that needs to be saved, data that rarely changes. How many times has your IT group asked if all this data is necessary? Isn't there something that can be deleted? Test data represents thousands of dollars of investment in product, test facilties and product development. Traditionally, the only cost effective way companies had to preserve this data was by writing it to magnetic tape or optical media (DVDs). The trouble with this approach is that now the data is unavailable and practically useless.

Disk-based archive systems are attractive because the data can still be accessed while it is protected in the archive. These archive systems have become very favorable because of the increasing capacities and decreasing cost of commodity disk drives. These archive systems use redundancy in order to guarantee that the data is preserved. IT and Test departments need to pay attention to this new capability. Now you can keep all that data and actually use it too!

Why should I care?

  • There's value in the data, often it is one of a kind -- priceless
  • The cost of storage is high, you should be storing this data efficiently
  • The data may need to be kept for legal reasons. Not just affecting email anymore, changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure extends legal discovery to all forms of electronic information, including your test data.
  • The data is required to be available for 5, 10, 50 years

How does Aperio help?

Organizing information is exactly what Aperio was built to do. Moving data to archive is a natural extension of its capabilities. Archive storage is just another repository for data. Aperio doesn't care; Aperio makes it seamless to query and access the data no matter where it is.

There are specialized Aperio tasks to execute data archive functions. The replicator task copies specific files to the archive, now Aperio knows about both copies. The cleaner task deletes the original copy once the file has been successfully archived. A typical scenario would be to set up Aperio to replicate new test files to the archive as soon as they are discovered and configure the cleaner task to delete the original copies of archived files after a couple of weeks.

What archive technologies does Aperio work with?

  • Aperio and Caringo CAStor provides high performance, scalable, and reliable clustered storage that is easy to manage and administer. Whether storing active content for online access or for long-term archives, CAStor delivers content storage software to store, distribute, and preserve your digital content at an incredible price.
  • Aperio and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
  • Look for additional Aperio support for other systems in the future -- like EMC Centera and the SNIA XAM data archive standard.