StorageTek and Sun flesh out archiving strategy

The explosion of data in email systems and legal requirements to save correspondence have created an opportunity for email archiving, say Sun Microsystems and StorageTek, who will be expanding an existing partnership to cover this field.

The two companies jointly sell Sun's SAM FS archiving product as well as StorageTek's Email Xcelerator to users and the channel. "People have addressed the market piecemeal. The only way to address it is for companies to join forces," said Gary Rider, UK general manager of StorageTek.

Sun is already StorageTek's largest OEM reseller, having had a global relationship with the company since 2000. Sun sells Unix and NT archiving solutions under a Sun badge.

Enterprise data requirements have gone through the roof, said Rider. There were seven exabytes - two to the sixtieth power bytes - of data in the world in 2000, though only 1.4 were unique - the rest being duplications. There will be 99.5 exabytes in 2005, 19.9 of which will be unique, he said, citing IDC and Gartner Group figures.

The life cycle of data must be managed, said Charles Andrews of Sun, with data moving from critical to non-critical as it moves from online through inline to nearline and finally to archiving or deletion.

"We want to remove the need to delete data," said Andrews. Currently, users have to spend a lot of time clearing out their intrays, and removing large attachments from their mailbox folders. An archiving system could move older data to cheaper storage automatically, without the need for deleting it - which would also meet the legal requirement to keep correspondence.

Peter Judge writes for ZDNet UK.